Encircling Jordan Through Southern Syria

Israel wants to encircle Jordan from all directions from the West Bank extending to southern Syria, and perhaps at some stage through the Jordanian-Iraqi border with the aim of strangling Jordan and weakening it.

The southern Syria front appears quiet in geopolitical relations, but this is a false impression. It has become directly threatened by Israel, because Israel wants to control all of southern Syria and create an extended geographic buffer along the Syrian-Jordanian border, which may later extend to areas adjacent to Iraq. This means Jordan would lose geographic continuity with Syria, which implies the separation of two Arab countries and all that entails in social, political, and security impacts. This is the most dangerous aspect Jordan must guard against, in addition to the economic cost and the destruction of all plans for major projects between the two countries, as if Syria will be removed from the map of the Levant in this manner and relocated to another position.

That is a strategic reading, but there are also daily indicators that are worrying, making Jordan classify Israeli behavior in southern Syria as deeply hostile to it. Nothing illustrates this more than the seizure of water basins in southern Syria, which supply Jordan with water. Israeli desiccation policy through Syria coincides with the blockade on supplying Jordan with water from Palestine, which means the strategic objective is to deprive Jordan of water and cause damage to its agriculture in the context of pressuring and weakening it.

Added to this is the pursuit of creating breakaway statelets on the borders with Jordan, replicable in different Syrian areas these are Israeli entities with alternative identities. Jordan sees the Sweida model as an extremely grave danger to it, for various reasons, and considers it dangerous to the Syrian interior, as it could lead to internal fighting and civil war as a rejection of separation, leading to new waves of migration from Syria to Jordan. Furthermore, the success of separation would lead to secessionist projects among other Syrian components.

Jordan’s intelligence also indicates that Israeli intermediaries have become linked to drug trafficking networks in southern Syria, and are being deployed to exhaust Jordan’s security through drug smuggling campaigns. Paradoxically, some drug dealers in the South have replaced the smuggling networks that protected them under the previous regime with new Israeli networks, under the guise of raising money to create armed groups and finance separatist projects in southern Syria. This means that the final targets of smuggling have become security, military, and separatist political objectives, not merely goods being transported to Jordan.

Jordan’s strategic assessment of the Israeli role in southern Syria does not stop here; it extends to creating Syrian security reverberations with Iraq due to chaos that reflect back on western Iraq and extend to Jordan. This strategically means the possibility of encircling Jordan from its eastern borders, with all the security, political, and social costs that entails, especially in light of sectarian confrontation in the region.

Due to Israeli projects and regional blowback, the costs of these projects intensify, to the point where their effects have reached the Strait of Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab. Everyone knows there are impacts on various countries, including Jordan and Egypt. This means in overall assessments that encirclement is coming from all direction’s security, political, military, and economic because of climates of chaos, unresolved confrontations, and deferred ones.

The geopolitical file for Jordan does not appear comfortable at all, because dangers are escalating and increasing, and future assessments point to worse possibilities, which means Jordan’s immense sensitivity about southern Syria does not come from exaggeration, but from awareness of the likely sequences that will come as a result of this front across the entire region.

Encircling Jordan through southern Syria means for Jordan an attempt to exhaust it in preparation for a plan involving both the West Bank and Iraq fronts, and not merely temporary cross-border disturbances on Jordan’s northern borders.