Amman- I left what I thought was the everyday chaos of west Beirut yesterday to come to quiet Amman, Jordan’s comparatively sleepy, sprawling concrete block capital. On my last night in Beirut I went to a posh restaurant just east of the al-Amin mosque in the heart of the city’s bourgeois nouveau post-war downtown. A friend was playing beautifully lyrical Latin music of various stripes on a sublime, seemingly drone-less fall evening.
Lebanon is in a state of war with its hegemonic southern neighbor. Though it is by no means a total war, the whole country is currently under threat to varying degrees. It should be noted the conflict is not as narrowly against Hezbollah as the Israeli right would pretend,. Israel owns the skies over all of Lebanon from the Blue Line to the north and from the beaches to the Bekaa. Yet life in irrepressibly vibrant Beirut, with all of its many pitfalls and potholes, inexplicably carries on.
In making chit chat with a group of warm, southern EU expats, I briefly mentioned that it was my last night in Beirut and I’d be catching a flight to Amman the next afternoon. “Why?” one of them asked. “Amman is sooooo boring” chimed in another. I had to politely defend my choice of coming here to Amman to visit friends while explaining that Jordan was quite an interesting place often for what it is not as opposed to what Beirut is.
For decades, this modest desert nation has been in the eye of a regional firestorm. I was here in the spring of 2003 trying to figure out how the hell to get to Baghdad after the Americans and their Australian, British, and Polish quid pro quo partners had toppled the tin-pot dictatorship next door, AT the time, Amman felt secure and sincere in its simplicity. It was a high dive above a bottomless shark tank.
I will never forget a thought a patrician Jordanian MP shared with me at a dinner party held for visiting journalists at the time. “Here we have the fight for Palestine to our west, and the beginning of an occupation of Iraq to our east, but Jordan will remain steadfast.” This has laregly held true in the years since.
Of course it wouldn’t be all that long before the toxic side effects of the war-turned-insurgency in Iraq spilled blood here in Amman with the triple suicide attacks of November 2005. But in the grand tally of the political violence that would seep out of Washington’s deadly foreign policy blunder in Iraq, Jordan has, in the grand scheme of things, come away relatively unscathed. Emphasis on relatively.
Boarding the flight here yesterday I was I was reflecting on the people I met who were casually curious about my choice to travel to a place where, in their view, nothing ever happens. Later that night as I check into my hotel room, I open up Linkedin so to see my colleague’s post, “JORDAN-KARAK CHURCH ATTACK-Seven killed, 34 injured..” I immediately begin digging. A trio of gunmen attacked a funeral at a Greek Orthodox church in the southern Karak governorate about 90 kilometers as the crows flies due south of Amman.
Though it isn’t known as of yet if then men had affiliations with any of this region’s now global terror outfits, the AP reports that “Jordan’s prime minister Jafar Hassan said during a security meeting in Karak on Friday evening that the attack was a result of terrorist ideology and blind extremism” though PM Hassan isn’t pointing fingers at AQ, IS or any other such group as of now. The last thing the Hashemite kingdom needs is to fall into a prefabricated salafi-jihadi ideological trap by getting into an online war of words with men that can readily deploy suicide attackers when deemed necessary by their underground shura councils.
The kingdom has already been contending with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launching dozens of ballistic missiles and attack drones at bases hosting American troops here such as that in al-Azraq in Zarqa governorate on September 9th which damaged American military aircraft. Prior to that, the IRGC hit U.S. military assets housed at Prince Hassan Airbase in Mafraq governorate on September 2nd according to the Tehran-based West Asia News Agency.
The last thing this country needs is homegrown radicalized Sunnis attacking the country’s ethnic-Arab (Palestinian & Jordanian) Greek Orthodox minority. Islam is the state religion here with the country being almost 97% Sunni but Jordan prides itself on being not only tolerant of its own indigenous religious minorities but also of the various Asian faiths of its guest worker population and the Western religious traditions of tourists alike. King Abdullah swears the massacre at the Church of Saint George in Karak will not go unpunished.
At the time of this writing, the attackers are on the run. Jordan is strong but shaken. Its everyday tranquility has been trampled upon.