JORDAN - The Jordanian Role Against Al Qaida.

The co-operation provided by the kingdom to the US in its fight against Al Qaida is mostly secret, apart from occasional reports of terrorists related to the group being captured. For the second time in two years, it was recently disclosed that eleven Al Qaida terrorists were arrested in June. The suspects were led by Emir Wail Al Shalabi, a Palestinian-Jordanian fighter from the Arab camps in Afghanistan.

Four of the arrested men were said to be planning attacks on the American and Israeli Embassies in Amman, and on leisure centres believed to be frequented by Americans recuperating during military exercises in the kingdom. A second six-man cell was supposedly planning to hit unnamed Israeli targets across the Jordanian border in the West Bank. Tanks have taken up positions outside the US Embassy in the normally relaxed capital, and American Peace Corps volunteers stationed in the country's interior have been cautioned against visiting the capital.

Jordan is participating in the American war against terror at considerable risk to its own stability. The risks from a strategic perspective for the kingdom can be summarised as follows: Jordan is poised between two zones of violence - the Palestinian territories and Iraq - with each zone getting caught up in the Bush administration's war, as Al Qaida elements are identified by Washington among Palestinians and as being associated with the Baathist regime in Iraq. To carry out its war against terror in these zones, the US will increasingly need Jordanian co-operation and assistance.

This will be a matter of extreme political sensitivity for the regime, because public opinion in the kingdom is very much on the side of the Palestinians on the one hand and the Iraqis (if not Saddam Hussein) on the other. Thus the King will be forced in the coming months, and perhaps years, to carry out a delicate balancing act where the rhetoric would match the trend of public opinion while the actions would match the requirements of the US. Such an act will not be easy.

Already, Friday prayers in some mosques in Jordan are accompanied by celebrations for the martyrs of the suicide bombings on Israelis, and the anti-American mood is fostered to some extent by dozens of Arab Afghans who are reported to have returned home to Jordan since Sept. 11, 2001. The Arab Afghans are said to have integrated easily into Palestinian refugee camps and the cities of Ma'an and Salt, locally known as Jordan's Tora Bora - after the cave complex in Afghanistan which was said to be the last operational stronghold of the Al Qaida leadership in that country. In the southern parts of Jordan, where Islamist sentiment is widespread, some people are refusing to remove the posters of Osama Bin Ladin that decorate their homes.

Some militant cells are fighting back as well. In February 2002, suspected militants blew up the car of a key terrorist investigator Lt. Col. Ali Burjak in central Amman, killing two foreigners. The incident followed the death sentence passed on a Jordanian-American, Raed Hijazi, for conspiring in 1999 to act against American and Israeli tourists on the eve of the millennium celebrations. The authorities said that Al Qaida had funded the millennium celebrations' disruption plot.