Camp Chapman attack

On December 30, 2009, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a Jordanian doctor and jihadist website contributor, carried out a suicide bombing at a Central Intelligence Agency facility inside Forward Operating Base Chapman near Khost, Afghanistan. Al-Balawi was believed by the CIA and Jordan's General Intelligence Directorate (GID) to have been turned into an informant capable of penetrating al-Qaeda's leadership in Pakistan's tribal areas. Instead, he used this trust to gain unsearched access to the base and detonate a bomb sewn into his vest.

Al-Balawi had been detained and interrogated by Jordanian intelligence for three days in January 2009. He was later sent to Peshawar, Pakistan, and into the tribal areas, purportedly to infiltrate al-Qaeda networks. He was invited to Camp Chapman after claiming to have information on senior al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. On the day of the attack, he was driven onto the base by Arghawan, the base's Afghan chief of external security, and was waved through security checkpoints without being searched, reportedly as a sign of respect given his perceived intelligence value. Sixteen people, including CIA personnel who had baked al-Balawi a birthday cake as a gesture of goodwill, were waiting to debrief him when he detonated the explosives.

The blast killed nine people in addition to al-Balawi: seven CIA personnel (five officers, including base chief Jennifer Lynne Matthews, and two contractors, Dane Clark Paresi and Jeremy Wise), a Jordanian GID intelligence officer, Captain Sharif Ali bin Zeid, who was al-Balawi's Jordanian handler and a cousin of King Abdullah II of Jordan, and Arghawan, the Afghan driver. Six other CIA personnel were seriously wounded, including the deputy chief of Kabul station. The attack was described as the second-largest single-day loss in CIA history, after the 1983 U.S. Embassy bombing in Beirut.

Al-Qaeda and Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan both claimed responsibility, stating they assisted al-Balawi and framing the attack as revenge for the deaths of Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders killed in U.S. drone strikes, including Baitullah Mehsud. A video released by the Pakistani Taliban showed al-Balawi seated beside Tehrik-i-Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud vowing revenge; al-Balawi's father confirmed the video depicted his son. The Afghan Taliban's claim that a Taliban sympathizer within the Afghan National Army carried out the attack was determined to be false.

Following the bombing, the base was secured and roughly 150 mostly Afghan workers were detained and questioned for three days. The United States increased drone strikes against the Haqqani network in North Waziristan in the following weeks, though officials cautioned against directly linking the increased pace to the bombing. The CIA and National Counterterrorism Center separately reviewed intelligence al-Balawi had previously supplied. In March 2023, families of the American victims won a $268,553,684 judgment against Iran in a U.S. court, though the U.S. State Department noted that collection is unlikely given the absence of diplomatic relations with Iran.