he CBC identified the Canadian victim as Linda Vatcher. The 62-year-old retired teacher from Burgeo, N.L., was visiting her son Chris Vatcher, who works in the Middle East, the CBC reported. He was shot and wounded in the attack. The embassy issued an alert on social media Sunday. “We advise against all travel to #Karak city until further notice due to security incident, be safe!” it said.
The violence began when gunmen fired on police responding to a report of a house fire. The assailants appear to have primarily targeted police, and the death toll Sunday evening included seven officers as well as two Jordanian civilians. Another 27 people were reported wounded.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attacks. As the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant made gains in neighbouring Syria and Iraq, Jordan had been seen as a relative oasis spared terrorist violence.
But the pro-Western kingdom is a major ally in the fight against ISIL, and Sunday’s attack was the fourth deadly targeting of Jordanian security and army personnel this year.
In March, a cell of Islamist militants linked with ISIL engaged in a shootout with police in the northern city of Irbid, leaving one policeman and seven gunmen dead. A gunman killed five General Intelligence Department officers in Baqaa refugee camp, a few miles north of the capital, in June. Later in June, a truck-bombing by ISIL militants killed seven Jordanian soldiers stationed near a makeshift refugee camp along the Jordanian-Syrian border.
If the perpetrators of Sunday’s attack are revealed to have been Islamist militants, it will add to what was already a deadly terror toll for Canadians overseas in 2016.
I hope it’s not a terrorist attack. That’s all I need to hear
When Buri Mohamed Hamza was murdered in Somalia by Al-Shabaab extremists in June, he became the 10th Canadian to be killed abroad by terrorists in 2016. That made it the worst year for such deaths since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, according to a terrorism database. Nine other Canadians have died this year in Burkina Faso, the Philippines and Indonesia.
The Karak castle sits atop a rocky ridge on the edge of the city, about 140 kilometres south of Amman. The knights of the First Crusade began construction of the fortress in 1142 and held it until Muslim forces conquered it in 1188.
Omar Bazrawi, operations manager for a Jordanian tour company, said the castle is a popular stop on the King’s Highway that runs south from Amman to Petra.
On Sunday, he managed to re-route his tours to avoid Karak after news of the attacks broke, he said from Amman. Bazrawi said tourism was already suffering because of the violence in Syria and Iraq, and the last thing the industry needs is a terror attack against foreign tourists.
“I hope it’s not a terrorist attack. That’s all I need to hear,” he said.
National Post with files from Associated Press and Washington Post