Two weeks after the invasion started, Abdullah denounced

AMMAN, April 3 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – In a new turn of attitude, King Abdullah II of Jordan denounced for the first time, in a statement issued on Wednesday, the U.S.-British war against Iraq.

Abdullah said that the U.S.-led attacks on neighboring Iraq are an "invasion" and that his country had persistently refused to open its airspace to the coalition, according to Agence France Presse (AFP).

In an interview with the official Petra news agency, Abdullah also expressed his "pain and sadness" over civilian war casualties in Iraq, whom he described as "martyrs".

"Frankly speaking, we were asked to open our airspace to military aircraft but we steadfastly refused," the king told the director of Petra who was asking him to comment on reports that coalition planes used Jordan to attack Iraq.

"Jordan is not and will never be a launchpad for strikes on brethren in Iraq and if our airspace was being used for that purpose we would not have allowed civil aviation to use it and would have closed it like other countries have," he said.

The statement came a day after the monarch received a message signed by around a hundred dignitaries, in which they called upon him to declare the illegitimacy of the war, pointing out that this would be a reply to those questioning Jordan’s attitude towards the war.

The message sent by 95 Jordanians, including former heads of governments, MPs and intellectuals, and published by Arabs Today on Monday, March 31, 2003, states, “We call upon the Jordanian government to declare the illegitimacy of aggression on Iraq.”

The king also strongly denied press reports alleging that U.S. troops could deploy through Jordan to attack Iraq after Turkey denied them passage, saying: "This was never proposed to us and we would never allow it".

And he likewise dismissed as "shameful" reports suggesting that Israeli troops were deployed in Jordan as part of the war effort on Iraq.

Jordanian airspace has remained open since the start of the war on Iraq on March 20.

He also insisted that Jordan is determined on maintaining "strong historical and brotherly ties with the Iraqi people now and in the future", even after it expelled late last month three Iraqi diplomats accused of harming state security.

The expelled diplomats had conspired to poison the water supply of several hundred U.S. troops deployed in the kingdom, diplomatic sources told AFP Tuesday.

Twice in the interview Abdullah referred to his opposition to the "invasion" of Iraq by the coalition forces and to any new leadership imposed by external forces on Baghdad.

"We have used all our contacts with influential countries across the world in order to avert this day in which we see brethren Iraq facing an invasion and all the pain it carries for the innocents," the king said.

"The Iraqi people have the right to choose their leadership and because we believe in democracy ... we cannot imagine that any people will agree to a leadership imposed on them from the outside, against their will," he said.

"We strongly denounce the killing of women and children ... and as a father I feel the pain of each Iraqi family, and each Iraqi child and father," he said.

"We are one with our people who reject and condemn the invasion," he added.