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"King Abdullah may yet regret the day he called on President Bashar to leave office, helping pave the way for the Islamists at his gates"
Via
FLC
[New York Review of
Books] "... Containing the Islamist drift of Syria’s rebellion is a
difficult and perhaps impossible task. Jubhat al-Nasra has a branch just across
the border in the Syrian city of Daraa replete with its own website and a
reputation for providing welfare amid chaos. The Brotherhood, too, continues to
have great influence in the revamped Syrian opposition coalition; and for all
the Jordanian vetting, defectors from the Syrian army have quickly shed their
nationalist rhetoric for an Islamist one. Training is officially off-limits at
the Jordanian desert camp near Mafraq, where an estimated 1,100 rebel Syrian
fighters have been housed. But hundreds more Syrian army defectors, including
the air force officers I met in Irbid, have established close ties to Jordan’s increasingly confident
Islamist opposition, some of whom have Jihadi ties and are helping them stay
in the conflict.
Wary of fueling Islamist tendencies in southern Syria,
Jordan’s forces have sought to keep the most radical Jordanians from crossing
the border. In October, a Jordanian border guard was killed in a gun-battle with
Jihadi fighters on their way into Syria. Jordanian officials have also
highlighted the risks of Jihadi blowback inside the kingdom, publicizing the
arrest of eleven militants who were allegedly plotting to target the US embassy
and Amman’s shopping malls. Local pundits
warn that Syria’s Jihad may pose an even greater threat to Jordan’s stability
than the war in Iraq, which led to al-Qaeda in Iraq’s bombings of three Amman
hotels in 2005, in which sixty people were killed. “We had a 650-mile desert
buffer with Iraq, but Syria’s fighting is right on our borders,” says Oraib
Rantawi, an erstwhile royal advisor who now runs a Jordanian
think-tank......
Initially Jordan followed Lebanon, in allowing
refugees to mingle freely with the local population. But as the influx
intensified, Jordan adopted Turkey’s approach of erecting vast internment camps,
perhaps in an attempt to prevent Syria’s Sunni rebels inspiring their Jordanian
counterparts. When I visited Zaatari recently, a flat dust-blown desert outpost
surrounded by razor wire with sentries posted at its gates, thousands of Syrians
were being held there. Babies are born in the wind, sleet and rain. Rare winter
storms are sweeping their tents away. Inmates pass the day swapping photos of
the corpses of loved ones on their mobile phones, and bemoan their flight from
one purgatory to another.
Frustration frequently turns to protest. As I left the
camp at sundown, riot police banged their shields in preparation for a showdown
with camp internees protesting the lack of food. The detritus of previous
clashes—a torched fire-brigade post, a looted medicine store—litters the camp.
French soldiers stand guard apprehensively behind their field hospital
fence.
Out of a sense of solidarity and tribal loyalty, some Jordanians are
sheltering tribal kinsmen from over the border, and have sought to spirit them
out of the camps. Despite reports that 60,000 Syrians have passed through
Zaatari, UN aid workers express surprise at how empty it feels. After Jordan’s
secret police ransacked the Amman apartment where his family was living
illegally, Amin al-Masri, a Syrian who was forced to flee from Daraa, found
refuge with the Faiz tribe in their domain east of Amman, which is off-limits to Jordan’s
security forces. “I’ve given only a little so far,” he smiles. Though
his eldest son was killed fighting in Daraa, he puts his arm round another son,
a 14-year-old, and encourages him to head to the front. “Freedom is
expensive.”
Others have gone into hiding..............
As Syria’s civil
war worsens, Jordanian officials say they fear a far larger exodus to come. The
collapse of the single power station supplying 10 million Syrians in the south,
they warn, could precipitate a mass rush to the border......
For Jordan’s
indigenous East Bankers, the prospect of another wave of Palestinian refugees,
following the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who arrived in previous
decades, threatens to continue the process that over six decades has eroded
their own status and turned them into a minority in their own country.
Determined to keep out the Palestinians even after the bombardment of Daraa and
Yarmouk camps, Jordan has allowed in only 2,000 of them, refusing entry to all
the rest, including the widow’s husband, a rebel commander, who was sent back to
his death in Syria after the rest of his Syrian unit was allowed in.
The few
who sneaked in before Jordan closed its borders are penned in an abandoned
hostel for Asian migrant workers in Cybercity, a largely empty industrial
business park in northern Jordan. The graffiti on the hostel walls declares
“Revolutionaries of Daraa,” but most feel more like prisoners than freedom
fighters. Police maintain a twenty-four-hour watch at a checkpoint thirty meters
from the hostel door. Relatives need permits to visit. Because of Jordanian
pressure, the UN refuses to register them, unlike other refugees coming from
Syria, as asylum seekers. “No one wants us,” says Rabhi Yousef, a retired
Palestinian engineer who after four months of internment still wears a tie and
pin-striped trousers and carries a walking stick in a vain attempt to keep up
appearances. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has appealed to Israel to let
them cross via Jordan into his West Bank cities, to no avail.
Should Syria
fall to the Islamists, Jordan’s geopolitical situation might look much like it
did in the 1950s, when anti-colonial Arab Nationalism swept through the region,
leaving Jordan’s British-backed monarchy sandwiched between a Nasserist union of
Egypt and Syria. Abdullah’s father, “pepperpot” King Hussein, survived long
after Nasserism, ironically helped by support from the same Muslim Brotherhood
his son now decries as a secret society bent on establishing a regional
theocracy. Unlike his father or his fellow monarch, Mohammed VI of Morocco, King
Abdullah has even shied from engaging his homegrown Islamists, leaving him even
more isolated than his father was. Meanwhile, as Egypt’s new president, Mohamed
Morsi, claims leadership of the new Sunni order, the Jordanian monarch
increasingly seems to represent the old, although tensions between the two
countries have temporarily eased after Egypt resumed its much gas supplies to
Jordan. King Abdullah may yet regret the day he called on President Bashar to
leave office, helping pave the way for the Islamists at his
gates...."
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