Jordan’s rebel support wanes amid Syria gains
AMMAN IS EAGER TO REOPEN NASSIB BORDER CROSSING, THE MAIN ARTERY FOR ITS PRODUCE HEADING TO LEBANON, TURKEY AND EUROPE
Standing on the edge of this once busy border crossing, you can glimpse the black, white and red of the Syrian flag across the no-man’s-land linking Jordan to Syria. Off to one side, a group of soldiers lounges around an entrenched tank, as army trucks kick up dust on a dirt track hugging the border.
It’s a novel sight: For more than three years, it was the opposition’s tricolour flag that flew over the arched entrance to Syria, and it was the rebels who patrolled the wheat-covered fields nearby.
But that was before a government blitz on the southern Syrian province of Dara’a this month pushed the rebels to the brink of surrender.
Although Jordan had long supported the rebels, the change is not entirely unwelcome.
This desert kingdom, long a conduit for the fighters and USsupplied arms and ammunition that fuelled the insurgency against Syrian President Bashar Al Assad, finds itself weary of the rebels and the long war.
Jordan has now launched a rapid rapprochement with Damascus, even as Syrian progovernment forces, backed by Russian warplanes, move to consolidate their grip over the country’s south.
Positive step
“The presence of the Syrian army ... is a positive step and serves Jordanian national security,” said Brigadier General Khalid Massaid, military commander of Jordan’s northern region, in an interview with the state-run Al Rai newspaper this month. Echoing the rhetoric used by Damascus, which regularly describes the rebels as terrorists, Massaid said the Jordanian army had been forced to secure the border while it was in the hands of “terrorist organisations”.
Jordanian officials and rebel commanders, however, said Massaid was referring to militant elements within the opposition, including fighters affiliated with Al Qaida and Daesh, which still hold parts of Dara’a.
And in recent weeks, Jordan has restricted aid shipments from its territory into Syria pending approval of the Al Assad government, even as more than 230,000 people remain displaced in southwestern Syria, according to a United Nations report released Wednesday.
“Before, the (UN) Security Council had authorised crossborder aid to go through without Syrian government permission. But now it’s the Syrian government that’s on the other side of the border, so the whole mechanism is in question,” said an aid worker, adding that one convoy had been waiting on the Jordanian side of the border since June 27.
Paramount in Jordan’s calculations is the Jaber-Nassib crossing, a vital passageway through which almost a fifth of the kingdom’s exports flowed before the Syrian civil war erupted in 2011.
When the Syrian region fell into rebel hands in 2015, it delivered yet another blow to Jordan’s reeling economy.
“We’re hoping matters will return to how they were in 2010 before the war,” said Odeh Ra- washdeh, head of the Jordanian Farmers Union, in a phone interview earlier last week.
The Jaber-Nassib crossing, he said, had been the main artery for Jordanian produce heading to Lebanon, Turkey and Europe.
Although merchants tried to circumvent the closure by sending their goods to the Jordanian port city of Aqaba as well as Haifa in Israeli-occupied Palestinian 1948 areas, it was often too expensive and produce would often spoil in transit.
“There was no real alternative market. Iraq took a little bit ... Gulf countries barely got anything from us,” said Rawashdeh.
Meanwhile, no fewer than 5,000 truckers are waiting to begin hauling goods through the crossing, said Mohammad Daoud, head of the Jordanian Truck Owners Association, in a phone interview on Thursday.
“We’re expecting to start back-to-back transfer of goods at the crossing within 20 days,” said Daoud, explaining that goods would be trucked to the crossing before being transferred to vehicles driven by Syrian drivers on the other side.
“Jordanian drivers driving goods into Syria will happen in six or seven months,” he predicted.
Thaw in relations
The thaw in Amman’s relations with Damascus comes as the rebels suffered a symbolic defeat on Thursday when government forces regained control of the city of Dara’a.
With most of the southwestern province back in government hands, Damascus has now turned its sights to Quneitra province, home to rebels and the Khalid Bin Walid Army, a Daesh affiliate that holds a wedge of territory near the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and Jordan.
“Dara’a city is now totally under the sovereignty of the Syrian state, under the symbol of the Syrian Arab Republic, our flag,” a reporter from the pro-government Ikhbariyah news channel said as the camera lingered on a large national flag hanging from a tower in Dara’a’s main square.
Yet the city represents more than just the heart of the rebel bastion that until last month stretched over two-thirds of the province; it was the birthplace of the uprisings against Al Assad.
“The message was that this was where the revolution began, and here’s where it ended. That’s what the regime wanted to say,” pro-opposition activist Ebrahim Nour Al Deen said by phone on Thursday.
Dara’a’s fall sounds the death knell for Westernbacked opposition factions considered to be a palatable alternative to the hard-line terrorist groups that control the remaining rebel enclaves. But their offensive stalled in June 2015, and when Russia threw its support to Al Assad by joining the war four months later, they never regained their footing.
When a ceasefire brokered by Moscow, Amman and Washington in 2017 took hold, opposition backers saw little reason to continue their support.
“When the Americans withdrew, they took along with them the Saudis and the Emiratis,” said Rakan Khdeir, the commander of a Syrian tribal force trained and supplied by Jordan. Khdeir, who is based in Amman, said Jordan has little choice now but to deal with Damascus as a “fact of life.”
“Jordan liked to help the rebels, but it was unable to do it on its own,” he said.