Jordan’s counterterrorism efforts

The Bureau of Counterterrorism and Countering Violent Extremism of the US State Department has recently published its country reports on terrorism 2015. 

Regarding Jordan, the report says that the Kingdom has been a key US ally in countering terrorism and violent extremist ideology since 2015 and that Jordan has lately become vulnerable to various threats due to its core location in a tumultuous region.

The report mentions how Jordan worked to prevent the flow of foreign terrorist fighters headed to Syria and Iraq, and how it restricted terrorism financing.

King Abdullah’s, the government’s, NGOs’ and others’ efforts to weaken and confront violent ideology were clearly mentioned.

Many positive points can be seen in the report; some other points need to be tackled seriously.

The report highly appreciates the role the Jordanian security agencies (intelligence, police) play, the way they cooperate and coordinate their work, especially in issues like border security, but the report also indicates that: “Jordan’s security and intelligence services do not coordinate with one another in all situations, including in terrorism incident response.” 

Although, the report does not mention specific cases or the level of this lack of cooperation, this is a point to be considered seriously in any coming revision of the country’s security work, especially in view of the increasing challenges and threats posed by “non-sophisticated terrorism”, where any information might be valuable and important to save the country from any brutal incident.

This is a problem that many countries share, due to the overlapping of powers.

Many security reports have recently been addressing cooperation between many criminal organisations and Daesh.

Another point to address is the issue of Jordan’s anti-extremist strategy, announced in the fall of 2014.

The report says that the strategy “remained under-resourced and unstaffed, however, and Jordan’s leaders are reticent to acknowledge domestic radicalisation, including self-radicalisation”. 

It is astonishing to discover that such important strategy was delivered to the US Department of State without publishing it in Jordan, or even talking about it to the local experts and the media. 

At the same time, it is obvious that this strategy is still a theoretical effort that could not, unfortunately, be implemented in the de-radicalisation battle, where every single day lost is becoming important.

Moreover, the report indicates that Jordan continued its efforts to expand its de-radicalisation process in schools and mosques, but “these efforts were rarely well-coordinated across government agencies”.

Today, Jordan needs to work more on enhancing coordination among its political and security institution, but at the same time, it needs a courageous position in pointing the sources of radicalisation.

This new counter-radicalisation strategy can never be implemented by a classical mode, or with the old way of thinking.

It needs new faces who know exactly how to diagnose the problem and how to address it based on a mid-term strategy.

This strategy should be far from what the Jordanian political system suffers from: nepotism, cronyism and favoritism.

Therefore, this strategy needs a new spirit that can really transform theories into actions.

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