The New York Times reports today that before his death, top al Qaeda terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi trained about 300 foreign fighters in Iraq and sent them back to their home countries, where they awaited orders to carry out strikes.
But the paper makes no mention of Zarqawi's most ambitious foreign attack plot, which nearly succeeded two years ago: a weapons of mass destruction strike that intelligence officials estimated would have killed 20,000.
The death toll planned by Zarqawi would have far exceeded the destruction wrought by Osama bin Laden on Sept. 11.
The April 2004 attack, which was all but ignored by the Western press, was foiled at the last minute when Jordanian officials intercepted a convoy of three vehicles near the Syrian border.
It's cargo: 23,000 gallons of chemicals, poison gas and explosives. The target: The U.S. embassy in Amman along with the headquarters of Jordan's Intelligence service.
The Mideast bureau of the Associated Press reported at the time that Jordanian officials said Zarqawi's crew was planning to use to "a chemical bomb that would have killed as many as 20,000 people and caused large-scale destruction within a half-mile radius."
"The terror cell was also apparently planning to carry out simultaneous poison gas attacks against foreign diplomatic missions, including the heavily fortified U.S. Embassy in Amman, vital Jordanian public establishments like the prime minister's office and unspecified civilian targets," the wire service said.
Jordan's King Abdullah II confirmed the details of the attack, and publicly thanked his intelligence chief, Gen. Saad Kheir, saying that the arrests of Zarqawi's terrorists had "saved thousands of lives."
Had the plot gone forward, Abdullah said, Jordan would have seen "a crime that would have been unprecedented in the country in terms of the size of explosives mounted on the vehicles and the methods of carrying out the attacks or the civilian locations chosen."
In confessions later broadcast on ABC's "Nightline," one of the plotters revealed that he began training for the mission in 2001 in Afghanistan.
"After the fall of Afghanistan, I met Zarqawi again in Iraq," the al Qaeda operative said.
"In Iraq, I started training in explosives and poisons. I gave my complete obedience to Zarqawi."
