Jordan’s answer to Friday’s massacre at a church funeral came from the air and landed in another country. On Monday evening its fighter jets struck what the army called hideouts of terrorist groups in southern Syria, claiming to have killed and wounded many fighters and destroyed several vehicles. Which militants those were, Amman would not say.
Syrian rescuers told a different story. Its emergency crews counted seven dead, three of them children, after bombs fell on at least four spots across Daraa and Suweida. Most of those victims belonged to a single family whose tent outside Al-Tai was struck. Two elderly men, aged 80 and 60, died in separate strikes.
The two governments cannot even agree on whether they talked first. Amman insists the operation was coordinated with Damascus; Syria says it received no warning at all, has opened its own investigation and, via a senior diplomat, branded the raids a “treacherous attack”. Within hours it suspended all passenger and freight traffic at Nassib, the only commercial and passenger crossing between the neighbours.
It all goes back to Friday in Karak, a southern city, when three attackers turned their guns on people grieving at an Orthodox Christian funeral. The shooting left nine dead and more than thirty wounded. The king vowed the “harshest penalties” for whoever was behind it and asked for security arrangements to be re-examined.
Earlier on Monday, security forces detained three relatives, two of them brothers, after a shootout of roughly three hours; all three were badly injured. Amman believes the trio had ties to armed cells based on the Syrian side.
Christians number about 300,000 in a country of 11.5 million, and the attack has shaken a community long seen as secure. The closed border now adds an economic sting to a diplomatic rift.
