by Joby Warrick
But the title now was his, and so was the country. Abdullah now owned the sagging economy, the fractious politics, the sectarian tensions, the regional disputes.
At one stroke, he had also inherited legions of enemies. Some were close to home, and covetous of his job. Others were foreign powers who saw an independent Jordan as an obstacle to their own designs for the region. Still others were religious extremists opposed to the very idea of a secular, pro-Western state called Jordan. In the early months of 1999, as the newest heir to the Hashemite throne settled tentatively into his perch, all were watching closely to see if he would fall.
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To serve as ruler of a Middle Eastern country is to give up any expectation of dying of old age. It’s especially true in Jordan, where the extraordinary perils of the job seem to generate a kingly appetite for dangerous hobbies.
Hussein survived at least eighteen assassination attempts in his lifetime. He was just fifteen on the summer day in 1951 when his grandfather—Jordan’s first king, Abdullah I—was shot to death by a Palestinian gunman as the two royals were visiting Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque. The young prince gave chase, narrowly escaping death himself when the assassin turned and fired a bullet that deflected off a medal on his uniform, according to the palace’s version of events. Later, his enemies would try ambushes, plane crashes, and even poisoned nasal drops, which Hussein discovered when he accidentally spilled the dispenser and watched in horror as the frothing liquid cut through the chrome on his bathroom fixtures. The king dodged death so many times that he took on an aura of invincibility. Jordanians would often say that Hussein possessed baraka—Allah’s favor. The prospect that one of his sons could be equally blessed seemed unlikely.
Hussein refused to be deterred by the attacks. If anything, they increased his appetite for risky pastimes: racing cars and flying helicopters and fighter jets. Once, famously, while entertaining Henry Kissinger, he had taken the former U.S. secretary of state and his wife on a gut-churning chopper tour of the country, zipping across Jordan’s rolling terrain as the helicopter’s skids shaved the tops off palm trees. Kissinger would later recall that his wife tried politely to ask the king to climb to a safer altitude.
“I didn’t know helicopters could fly so low,” she said.
“Oh! They can fly lower!” the king replied. Then he dropped below treetop level and skimmed along the ground. “That really aged me rapidly,” Kissinger said.
In choosing Abdullah as his successor, Hussein picked a leader who resembled him at least in that respect. In contrast to the cerebral and cautious Prince Hassan, the king’s brother, Abdullah shared his father’s informal bearing and devotion to high-testosterone pursuits. As a young boy, Abdullah would squeal with delight whenever his father put him in his lap and took off for a spin through the desert in his roadster, the dust billowing behind them as the car blew down empty highways to strains of the cartoon theme song “Popeye the Sailor Man.” His adrenaline addiction spurred a lifelong interest in motorcycles, race cars, airplanes, and free-fall skydiving.
Abdullah excelled at wrestling, track, and schoolboy pranks at his American prep school, and as a military cadet at Britain’s prestigious Sandhurst academy, he turned down an infantry officer’s commission for the speed and firepower of battle tanks. He liked driving the Fox, a nimble, tanklike armored vehicle with a thirty-millimeter cannon, and wheels instead of tracks. Once, he led a column of Foxes on an expedition along the M4 motorway west of London, squeezing every ounce of horsepower from the boxy vehicles until they were flying past the civilian traffic. After a few minutes at full throttle, he peered out of the turret to see a police cruiser racing alongside of him, lights flashing. The officer motioned the column to stop and then approached Abdullah in the lead vehicle, shaking his head.
“I have no idea how I’m going to write this up,” the officer said. The cadets were eventually released with a warning.
The prince’s reputation for daredevilry nearly scuttled his courtship with his future queen, Rania al-Yassin, even before it officially started. The stylishly beautiful Rania was a twenty-two-year-old marketing employee for Apple Inc. when the two met at a dinner party. Abdullah was instantly smitten, but Rania shunned his advances. Abdullah was then a thirty-year-old armored-battalion commander with perpetually sunburned skin and a bad-boy reputation, and Rania, the daughter of middle-class Palestinian parents, had no interest in being his latest conquest, Abdullah would acknowledge in his memoir years later.
“I’ve heard things about you,” Rania had said.
“I’m no angel,” Abdullah admitted. “But at least half the things you hear are just idle gossip.”
The two finally agreed to date. Six months later, having mustered the courage to pop the question, he drove Rania to one of his favorite spots in Jordan: the summit of a small mountain that had been the setting for daring hill-climb car races for both Abdullah and his father. “I had hoped for a more romantic proposal,” he acknowledged afterward. But this time, Rania did not push him away. They were married on June 10, 1993, just ten months after they were introduced.
Yet, in the weeks after he became King Abdullah II, all traces of the brash battalion commander and adrenaline junkie faded from view. The man who had plunged from airplanes hundreds of times moved quickly to eliminate risks, at least those that threatened his survival as monarch. He set out to repair his tattered relations with members of the royal family, offering the position of crown prince to his younger brother Hashem, son of Hussein’s popular fourth wife, the American-born Queen Noor. But he fired or demoted top officials of the security services whom he suspected of having close ties to his uncle, his stepmother, or other royals. He then decreed that his own, decidedly nonroyal wife would become queen. After that, Queen Noor left Jordan for good.
Other risks beckoned from beyond the border, so the new king launched a diplomatic offensive aimed at mitigating the biggest ones. He traveled to Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf emirates to patch a nearly decade-old rift over Jordan’s policy of neutrality during the first Iraq war. He invited Israel’s prime minister, the notoriously pugnacious Netanyahu, to Amman for a get-acquainted luncheon. He even tried to improve ties with Syria, reaching out first to President Hafez al-Assad and then, after the autocrat’s death, befriending his son, Bashar al-Assad, another Western-educated thirty-something who had been a surprise choice to succeed his father.
Then, finally, it was time to make peace with the Islamists. Or, at least, with some of them.
Jordan’s kings have long sought to preserve stability in the country through an uneasy alliance with the country’s religious fundamentalists, allowing them a voice in Parliament and moving cautiously with reforms to avoid causing offense in what remained a deeply conservative tribal society. King Hussein relied on the Muslim imams in the 1960s and 1970s to help him beat back threats from Marxists and Pan-Arab nationalists. Many of these same clerics were furious when Hussein made peace with Israel in 1994, yet the king managed to maintain cordial ties with the country’s most prominent Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood, which he repeatedly praised as “the backbone of the country.”
The new king would try a similar approach. A few weeks after taking office, Abdullah invited the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood to an informal meeting at his hilltop residence. The clerics arrived at the palace, a gaggle of flapping robes and wagging beards, bearing a list of complaints about mistreatment of prominent Muslim activists. They groused about media censorship and the country’s arcane election laws, which they said were tilted to prevent the group’s political candidates from winning seats in Parliament. Abdullah listened politely, and then, as the meeting wound down, he offered his visitors an unexpected gift: the government would immediately free sixteen Muslim Brotherhood activists who had been jailed following a street protest. The visitors seemed charmed, telling journalists afterward that the new king was a friend to the Islamists.
“Your Majesty, we are with you, as o
ne team, one body that trusts you,” the Brotherhood’s leader told Abdullah.
If only it were that simple. Despite the occasional rhetorical barb hurled at the monarchy, the Muslim Brotherhood was effectively part of the Jordanian establishment. Other Islamists would not be swayed by the release of a handful of detainees, or by vague promises to broaden electoral choices. The Muslims wanted a say in running the country, even if they were divided about where they would take it.
Abdullah was willing to yield, to a point. The young king had already spoken in interviews about his intention to see Jordan become a true constitutional monarchy, headed nominally by a king but governed by a prime minister chosen by the people’s representatives in Parliament. But Abdullah’s advisers insisted that reforms should come slowly. In a country with few democratic traditions, attempting too much change too quickly could backfire, they argued. The Islamists already commanded large numbers of supporters, and they were organized, motivated, and well funded. They could easily win a popular vote, putting the country’s future in the hands of a movement whose leaders included men with a radically different vision for Jordan from that professed by the Muslim brothers.
The turbaned men seated around Abdullah’s table could be reasoned with. But there were others in Jordan and the region who held no regard for reason, in the Western sense. They could only be fought.
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Jordan already bore deep scars from previous struggles with Islamic extremists, dating back to its earliest days as a monarchy. Some saw the very existence of the state as anathema, an attempt by colonial powers to keep Muslims divided and weak. As they saw it, Jordan’s royal family, the Hashemites—rulers of the holy city of Mecca for nine hundred years—had played a role in the betrayal.
It is true that no country called Jordan existed—and, likewise, no group of people called Jordanians—until the early twentieth century. For a thousand years, the arid lands east of the Jordan River were part of Islamic empires, or caliphates, that at times extended from North Africa to the Balkans and encompassed all of the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant. The first caliphs, who were viewed as successors to the Prophet Muhammad, ruled from Damascus and Baghdad. They were supplanted in time by the Ottoman Turks, who expanded the Islamic Empire and established an Ottoman Caliphate under the supervision of powerful sultans in Istanbul. The Turkish conquerors permitted limited self-rule in Mecca, allowing the Hashemites to retain control of the city’s holy sites in a tradition dating back to the tenth century. Then, early in the twentieth century, came a Hashemite whose ambition and audacity would alter the family’s destiny and redraw the boundaries of the Middle East.
Sharif Hussein bin Ali, the seventy-eighth emir of Mecca and the great-grandfather of Jordan’s King Hussein, came to power as the Ottomans were lurching toward collapse. After the Turks sided with Germany at the outset of World War I, Sharif Hussein began secret negotiations with Britain with the aim of instigating a rebellion seeking Arab independence. In 1916, he agreed to help Britain and the Allied powers drive against the Turks in exchange for a promise of future British recognition of the new Arab-Islamic nation. Four of the sharif’s sons—Ali, Faisal, Abdullah, and Zeid—would lead Arab armies in what became known as the Great Arab Revolt, at times fighting at the side of the British Army officer T. E. Lawrence, later immortalized by historians and filmmakers as Lawrence of Arabia.
The Arabs were victorious, but Britain’s promises to Sharif Hussein expired even before the conflict ended. Britain and France preemptively divvied up the captured Ottoman lands into British and French protectorates under the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916. After the war, the maps were redrawn to create entirely new states, including the kingdoms of Iraq and Syria and, on the narrow strip of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, a Jewish homeland that would later become Israel.
On the eastern side of the river, home to Bedouin tribes and vast deserts, the British carved out an enclave for Sharif Hussein’s third son, Abdullah I. The British had taken a small step toward honoring their promises to the ruler of Mecca, but their creation—initially called the Emirate of Transjordan, and later the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan—seemed a few ingredients shy of a real country. No historical precedent existed for such a country, nor was there anything resembling a national identity among the scattering of tribes who lived in the region. The new state lacked significant reserves of oil or gas, or minerals for mining, or water for agriculture. Even its emir, Abdullah, had been imported from abroad. Many political observers at the time assumed that Transjordan would quickly collapse as an autonomous state, to be absorbed by one of its larger neighbors.
The first serious threat came from the Ikhwan hordes who invaded the country in the 1920s and were finally dispatched by Saudi intervention. Then, in the late 1960s, it was Palestinian guerrillas who threatened Jordan’s sovereignty. A patchwork of militant groups, drawn from the four hundred thousand Palestinian immigrants and refugees massed in Jordan after three decades of wars, staged attacks on Jordanian troops and tried repeatedly to assassinate King Hussein. The monarch launched an offensive that became known as Black September, killing thousands of Palestinian militants and driving many more into Syria or Lebanon. Heavy clashes spilled into the largely Palestinian town of Zarqa, where the man who would become known as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was then a boy of four years.
In the 1980s, it was regional unrest that threatened to spill across Jordan’s relatively peaceful borders. Thousands of Palestinian youths clashed with Israeli troops in the first intifada, or uprising, while young Jordanian men volunteered by the hundreds to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Some returned to their villages and refugee camps with military skills and new ideas. A few, like Zarqawi, formed into groups and began looking for ways to continue the struggle against perceived enemies of Islam.
And yet radicals such as these were few in number, and notoriously disorganized. Like other Arab rulers, Jordan’s monarchs sought to contain the threat by fostering powerful and ruthless intelligence networks to keep the extremists in check. At the same time, they would co-opt relatively moderate Islamists by granting them positions of privilege and offering limited political freedoms. Abdullah, like his father, supported the Muslim Brotherhood’s role as a moderate opposition force in Jordan. And, like his forebears, he would look for ways to bolster the informal alliance, by granting occasional favors and concessions that would benefit the group’s leadership politically and ensure loyalty to the crown.
Just such an opportunity arose in March 1999, as the country marked the end of the official forty-day mourning period for King Hussein’s death. In a tradition dating back to Jordan’s founding, new kings are expected to declare a general amnesty in the country’s prisons, granting royal pardons to inmates convicted of nonviolent offenses or political crimes. It was a way to clean the slate and score points with important constituencies, from the Islamists to powerful East Bank tribes. To ensure the maximum political return, members of Parliament were given the task of nominating release-worthy prisoners and drafting the amnesty’s legal particulars. Their list quickly grew to five hundred names, then a thousand, then two thousand. And still lawmakers pushed for more.
A debate over the names spilled into the open. Whereas the new law excluded anyone convicted of a violent crime or terrorism, some lawmakers wanted to free dozens of detainees convicted of draft dodging or of conspiring in attacks against Israelis. Others pushed for pardons for the so-called Arab Afghans, veterans of holy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan who had formed Islamist cells after returning home.
“Jordan is on the threshold of a new phase of its history, which means that the government should turn a new page, especially with political detainees,” Saleh Armouti, president of Jordan’s Bar Association, told the Jordan Times as negotiations dragged on. But some of the country’s law-enforcement chiefs saw a disaster in the making.
“Most of them will be repeat offenders and we will see their faces again a
nd again,” a police official complained to the same newspaper. “Most of them are thugs who will harm people when they are free.”
In the end, the list, now with more than twenty-five hundred names, was endorsed by Parliament and sent to the palace for the final approval. The king, then just six weeks into his new job and still picking his way through a three-dimensional minefield of legislative, tribal, and royal politics, faced a choice of either adopting the list or sending it back for weeks of additional debate.
He signed it.
Many months would pass before Abdullah learned that list had included certain Arab Afghans from the al-Jafr Prison whose Ikhwan-like zeal for purifying the Islamic faith should have disqualified them instantly. But by that time, the obscure jihadist named Ahmad Fadil al-Khalayleh had become the terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. And there was nothing a king of Jordan could do but berate his aides in an exasperated but utterly futile pique.
“Why,” he demanded, “didn’t someone check?”
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On the evening of March 29, 1999, a caravan of prison vehicles arrived at al-Jafr to haul away the first of the Islamist prisoners granted freedom under the royal amnesty. Under the law, the state is obliged to deliver inmates to the town where they were first arrested, so Zarqawi and his mentor, Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, took seats on the van bound for Amman. They carried their few belongings, and freshly stamped release papers that reinstated their rights as free citizens, able to work, visit, associate, and travel just as any other Jordanian citizen. The Amman van’s driver waited until dark, then eased the vehicle through the main gate, past the guards and machine-gun nests, past the drooping, parched palm trees planted along the driveway, and finally onto the rough asphalt of the highway leading to the capital. For the first time in five years, they were free men.
But not entirely free. Both men had wives and children they barely knew, families that had scraped by during their confinement, surviving on handouts from relatives. Both were subject to continued scrutiny and even harassment from the country’s secret police. And both were bound to the Islamist brotherhood they had forged together in prison, though to differing degrees.