A threat to Jordan is a threat to Israel

DEBKA

Jordan’s King Abdullah has warned the Obama administration in an urgent message that US air strikes alone won’t stop the Islamic State’s advances in Iraq and Syria and, what is more, they leave his kingdom next door exposed to the Islamist peril. ISIS would at present have no difficulty in invading southern Jordan, where the army is thin on the ground, and seizing local towns and villages whose inhabitants are already sympathetic to the extremist group. The bulk of the Jordanian army is concentrated in the north on the Syrian border. Even a limited Islamist incursion in the south would also pose a threat to northern Saudi Arabia, the king pointed out.

Abdullah offered the view that the US Delta Special Forces operation in eastern Syria Saturday was designed less to be an effective assault on ISIS’s core strength and more as a pallliative to minimize the Islamist peril facing Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf emirates.

DEBKAfile’s Washington sources report that US officials refused to heed Abdullah’s warning and tried to play it down, in the same way as Secretary John Kerry tried Monday, May 18, to de-emphasize to the ISIS conquest of Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s largest province.

At a news conference in Seoul, Kerry dismissed the Islamists’ feat as a “target of opportunity” and expressed confidence that, in the coming days, the loss “can be reversed.”

The Secretary of State’s words were unlikely to scare the Islamists, who had caused more than 500 deaths in the battle for the town and witnessed panicky Iraqi soldiers fleeing Ramadi in Humvees and tanks.

Baghdad, only 110 km southeast of Ramadi, has more reason to be frightened, in the absence of any sizeable Iraqi military strength in the area for standing in the enemy’s path to the capital.

The Baghdad government tried announcing that substantial military reinforcements had been ordered to set out and halt the Islamists’ advance. This was just whistling in the dark. In the last two days, the remnants of the Iraqi army have gone to pieces – just like in the early days of the ISIS offensive, when the troops fled Mosul and Falujah. They are running away from any possible engagement with the Islamist enemy.

The Baghdad-sourced reports that Shiite paramilitaries were preparing to deploy to Iraq’s western province of Anbar after Islamic State militants overran Ramadi were likewise no more than an attempt to boost morale. Sending armed Shiites into the Ramadi area of Anbar would make no sense, because its overwhelmingly Sunni population would line up behind fellow-Sunni Islamist State conquerors rather than help the Shiite militias to fight them.

Iran’s Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan, who arrived precipitately in Baghdad Monday, shortly after Ramadi’s fall, faces this difficulty. Our military sources expect him to focus on a desperate effort to deploy Shiite militias as an obstacle in ISIS’s path to Baghdad, now that the road is clear of defenders all the way from Ramadi.

In Amman, King Abdullah Sunday made a clean sweep of senior security officials, firing the Minister of Interior, the head of internal security (Muhabarat) and a number of high police officers. They were accused officially of using excessive violence to disperse demonstrations in the southern town of Maan.

The real reason for their dismissal, DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources disclose, is the decline of these officials’ authority in the Maan district, in the face of the rising influence of extremist groups identified with Al Qaeda and ISIS, in particular.

May 19, 2015 | 3 Comments »

Subscribe to Israpundit Daily Digest

Leave a Reply

3 Comments / 3 Comments

  1. If Jordan is attacked or suffers a rebellion the past paradigm of seeking to maintain “stability” should be abandoned. The destabilization of Jordan might be an opportunity to disappear the only obstacle to the pals settling in Jordan, the 80% part of the mandate territory that is JEW FREE where Jews cannot own land or be citizens that is ruled by imported foreigners.

    I think that the chaos surrounding Israel has demonstrated that perhaps the former paradigm of maintaining stability rather than allowing and benefitting from destabilization should be reconsidered. Especially considering the potential enormous benefits which could be realized by opening the floodgates in an eastward direction. Israel should not remain married to paradigms which may have outlived their usefulness.

    The only benefit that Israel receives from protecting them is that they do not make war on Israel… So what, Israel can protect itself and should think out of the box toward a big potential rather than only see the negatives. The pundits were wrong on their prognostications of the Arab Spring for Israel, so far…. and we can only ever say “so far” for any situation.

  2. So, all things considered, how long will it be before Zahal will have to defend Israel and maybe Trans-Jordan as well, against ISIS?

    In the Middle East, realism must be based on considering the worst of all possible outcomes.

    Arnold Harris
    Mount Horeb WI

  3. Meanwhile Syria accuses Jordan of training jihadis to topple him. I think the IS threat is a false flag. i think the only jihadis Jordan fears other than Irans proxies are the MB who were linked to the Egyptian MB. All the sunni monarchies appear to have (LOL) “mixed feelings” about IS which appears to be the most successful sunni org against Irans proxies 🙂 .
    similarly:

    A senior Israeli security official who spoke on condition of anonymity said that the recent spate of attacks in the Israeli Golan Heights’ sector originated exclusively in those territories under Assad’s control. According to that security official, these attacks are “an Iranian effort to use ‘proxies’ against us.” He claimed that no attacks had been launched against Israel from territories controlled by Jabhat al-Nusra or the Free Syrian Army, both of which are fighting against Assad, and there is an agreement that Israel will not interfere with their activities against the Syrian president.

    Read more: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/05/israel-turkey-cooperation-against-iran-syria-sunni-axis.html#ixzz3abYXe0q2

    I wonder if that agreement not to interfere with the sunni jihadis extends to helping them 🙂 . Also, I wonder how the agreement came about (LOL)? Was the GCC involved, you know, the ones that sent the jihadis.

    Wheres felix ? 😛