JORDAN/IRAQ: Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the group headed by Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, has claimed responsibility for Wednesday night's hotel bombings in Amman.
It may be significant or simply a coincidence that the date of the attack was November 9th or 9/11 in the European style of dating, and thus an echo of September 11th, or 9/11 in the American style.
A Jordanian who has mounted repeated operations in the kingdom, al-Zarqawi could be the mastermind behind the Amman bomb plot.
Born Ahmad Khalayleh in 1966 in the provincial town of Zarqa, he dropped out of school and took to petty crime before joining the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. After the war, he returned to Jordan and operated on the margins of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which merged with al-Qaeda in 1998, and Hizb al-Tahrir, another militant group.
In 1992, al-Zarqawi was jailed for five years for plotting to overthrow the monarchy.
On his release he went to Europe and set up a network of forgers to fake documents for militants, before returning to Afghanistan where he established the group Tawhid (Unity).
In 1999, Jordanian intelligence foiled a plot to blow up hotels in Amman as the millennium was being greeted on New Year's Eve.
In 2002, al-Zarqawi and five members of his faction were sentenced to death in abstentia by a Jordanian court for murdering Laurence Foley, a US embassy employee. After the US occupied Iraq in 2003, al-Zarqawi and a small band of foreign fighters began operations to drive the US out.
Three early targets in Baghdad were the Jordanian embassy, UN headquarters, and the Red Cross.
In April 2004, Jordanian police claimed they had pre-empted a conspiracy to release poisonous gas in central Amman.
Last August, al-Zarqawi's organisation was blamed when three rockets were fired at a US warships in the Jordanian port of Aqaba. Its close ties to the US and the 1994 peace treaty with Israel, make Jordan a prime target.
