Jordan outreach to new Syria government is turning point - analysis

Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi met with the new Syrian leadership on Monday.

He spoke to Ahmed al-Sharaa, the head of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the group that took over Damascus on December 8, whereby the former Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, and his regime fell.

Since then, Sharaa has been hosting a plethora of delegations from abroad, including Turkey, Qatar, the UK, France, Germany, and the US. The meeting with the Jordanians is important because Jordan is a neighbor, and it has a long history of complex ties to Syria.

Al-Ain media in the United Arab Emirates wrote about the meeting between Safadi and Sharaa. This illustrates how closely the Gulf is watching developments in Damascus.

It should be noted that the Gulf states and Amman were ready to reach out to the Assad regime in the last several years. The goal was to enable it to return to the Arab League. Now that Assad is gone, these same countries have to shuffle the deck.

Support for Syrian security

Jordan’s Foreign Ministry posted about Safadi’s trip. Senate member Mohammad Al-Momani, who is the media affairs minister and official spokesman for the Jordanian government, told reporters on Sunday that “the Jordanian position on the recent events in Syria... expresses the sincerity of relations between the two brotherly countries, in addition to its support for achieving security for Syria, the unity of its territories, and the stability of its institutions.”

Amman wants to secure its northern border. This is important because the Syrian Civil War led to much uncertainty in Jordan.

First of all, hundreds of thousands of Syrians fled to Jordan and were hosted in refugee camps and cities in northern Jordan. Some Syrians in southern Syria have tribal, familial, or historical ties to people in northern Jordan. It has a 375-km. border with Syria, and a lot of it is made up of empty deserts. This leads to security concerns.

It’s worth noting that after the Syrian Civil War began in 2011 and 2012, beyond the refugee crisis, there was also an ISIS threat between 2013 and 2018 to Jordan.

It fought ISIS and took this threat seriously. Jordan also coordinated with the US, UK, and others to back Syrian rebels in southern Syria. This “southern operations room” or southern front rebel support collapsed in 2018 when the Russian-backed Syrian regime returned to southern Syria.

The rebels reconciled but waited for an opportunity. When the regime began to collapse in early December, they returned to march on Damascus. This could provide Jordan with key influence in Dara’a city and other areas in southern Jordan.

US role

MEANWHILE, THE US has a role in Tanf in Syria near the Jordanian and Iraqi border. This garrison is both near Jordan and an IDP (internally displaced persons) camp called Rukban. It is a forlorn post in the desert, but it matters.

The US has been training a group of Syrian rebels in Tanf. This group is called the Syrian Free Army. It used to be called the Maghawir al-Thawra or Revolutionary Commando Army. Americans who served in Tanf called it the Mat for years before its name change.

This group played a limited role on December 7-8 in taking areas from the collapsing regime in the Homs province near Palmyra.

There is another aspect of the Tanf garrison that may matter to Jordan – a site called Tower 22 in the country’s east. This area is not far from the Syrian border, and Iranian-backed militias in Iraq targeted it in January 2024.

The drone attack killed three American service personnel in Jordan. Amman has been very sensitive about these issues, including hosting the US Armed Forces in Jordan.

Three American soldiers were also killed in Jordan in 2016 during the King Faisal Air Base shooting incident.Now, all eyes are on Jordan-Syria ties. There are still 680,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan, Al-Ain media reports. This is about half the number that was once there at the height of the refugee crisis.

“7,250 Syrians have returned to their country across the Jordanian border since the fall of Bashar al-Assad regime, the Jordanian Interior Ministry said last Thursday,” Al-Ain reported.

Jordan also hosted a meeting in Aqaba on December 14 to discuss Syria. Eight Arab countries attended, as did the US, France, Turkey, the EU, and the UN.

Jordan meeting with Syria

On December 14, Jordan hosted a meeting on Syria with the participation of foreign ministers from eight Arab countries: The United States, France, Turkey, and the European Union. A UN representative was also in attendance.Jordan’s King Abdullah stressed during the that there were concerns over chaos erupting in Syria.

“Over the past years, Jordan has suffered from continuous infiltration and smuggling of weapons and drugs... by land from Syria,” Al-Ain media said.

Now, in Syria, much of the Assad drug trade empire has been uncovered by the new authorities. Where once Iranian-backed gangs in Syria would threaten Jordan via organized drug smuggling, even using drones, now this trade may be reduced.

The historical connections of this region are important. During the era of the Arab Revolt and the formation of the British and French Mandates, which divided this landscape into what is now Syria and Jordan, a number of Arab notables met in northern Jordan near Umm Qais to protest the colonial decisions.

A short-lived Arab Kingdom of Syria was led by King Faisal while his brother Abdullah became king. Faisal’s rule in Syria was ended by the French in 1920, and he fled first to Dara’a and then left Syria, heading for Haifa.

Damascus attempted to invade Jordan in 1970 to support the Palestinians during the short Jordanian Civil War, also known as Black September. This matters because although the region moves on, the proximity of Jordan, Syria, and Israel in this complex meeting point of various countries continues to be overshadowed by history today.

Israel, for instance, has advanced into the buffer zone of the ceasefire line from 1973. Both Israel and Jordan are watching southern Syria closely.