The War Expands

Jordan jails eight for plots to attack Westerners | International News | Reuters.com

This is NOT "winning". This is "expanding".

"AMMAN (Reuters) - Jordan jailed eight Islamist youths on Wednesday for 10 to 20 years for plotting to attack U.S. citizens who frequent luxury hotels and work in the country, judicial sources said.

A state security court said the eight were found guilty of 'conspiring to carry out terrorist acts and of illegal possession of automatic weapons,' in two separate security plots foiled last year to attack U.S. citizens in the country.

Along with tourists, they also planned to kill U.S. instructors heading to a U.S.-funded police center on the outskirts of Amman that trains Iraqi police recruits."

Q: Why do we need to kick him out?

A: He thinks militarism can solve this problem.

UPDATE: More on the expansion.

DAMASCUS - Starting with what is fact, four attackers and one security guard died in the unsuccessful attack on the US Embassy in the Rawda neighborhood of the Syrian capital Damascus on Tuesday morning. And, contrary to some reports, all of the attackers were Syrian, and not jihadis from neighboring countries.

After this, it all gets a bit murky.

Minutes after the attack, Syrian opposition leader Ali Sadr al-Din al-Baynouni of the banned Muslim Brotherhood spoke from his London exile to Doha-based Al-Jazeera TV, saying the attack was fabricated by Syrian intelligence. The reasons, he said, were to score points with the Americans and prove to Washington that Syria and the US had the same enemy in radical political Islam.

Then a senior Syrian government official accused the United States of being behind the assault on its own embassy. One unidentified Ba'ath Party official was quoted in the media as saying, "Only the Americans can succeed in carrying out an attack just 200 meters from President [Bashar al-]Assad's residence in the most heavily guarded section of Syria."

The official claimed that Washington had masterminded the attack to "prove Syria is filled with terrorists and to put us in a weak position" to extract political concessions - this despite the US praising the Syrians.

[full, strange, story]