The Magazine

Jordan's Baathist Boom

The economy is humming, thanks to Iraqi cash.

Sep 5, 2005, Vol. 10, No. 47 • By LEE SMITH
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Amman, Jordan

A GROUP AFFILIATED with Jordan's own Abu Musab al Zarqawi has claimed responsibility for the August 19 missile attack in Aqaba that targeted two U.S. Navy ships and killed one Jordanian soldier and injured a taxi driver in the neighboring Israeli resort of Eilat. Other Zarqawi plots have been interrupted, including a major chemical attack on Amman last spring, making this the first successful terrorist operation in Jordan--one of the Arab world's most security-conscious states--since the beginning of the Iraq war. Though it exposed a level of cooperation between Jordan and the United States many Jordanians were apparently unaware of, reactions here have been surprisingly blasé.

The night of the attack, I was dining with a group of Jordanians in one of Amman's fashionable night-life areas, and people seemed more concerned about the imminent return of Abu Qatada, a Jordanian-born fundamentalist sheikh whom the Blair government is only too happy to disgorge after the July bombings in London. "I really thought Jordanians would be freaked out when we finally got hit," says Rana Sweis, a 25-year-old Jordanian journalist. "And if it had happened two or three years ago, people would've been shocked and afraid. Things are very stable here, and Jordanians are very cautious. But look around you, everyone's out tonight."

Perhaps the relative calm is due to the fact that everyone else in the region has been hit considerably harder. Or maybe, as Fares Braizat, a researcher at the University of Jordan's Center for Strategic Studies, explains, it's because "Jordan was definitely not the target. If it was," he told me in his Amman office, "they would've gone after the capital here."

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