Category Archives: Jordan

Did Jordan’s closest allies plot to unseat its king?

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Alleged sedition and a royal family feud may have been driven by a broader plan to reshape the Middle East

The phone call that shook the Jordanian government came in the second week of March this year. On the line to the General Intelligence Directorate (GID) in Amman was the US Embassy, seeking an urgent meeting about a matter of national importance. The kingdom’s spies were startled. Danger was brewing on the home front, they were told, and could soon pose a threat to the throne.

Within hours, the GID had turned its full array of resources towards one of the country’s most senior royals, Prince Hamzah bin Hussein, a former crown prince and half-brother of the king, whom the Americans suspected was sowing dissent and had begun rallying supporters. By early April, officials had placed Hamzah under house arrest and publicly accused the former heir and two close aides of plotting to unseat King Abdullah.

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‘I blamed myself’: how stigma stops Arab women reporting online abuse

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Women in the Middle East and north Africa say social codes leave them unable to talk about social media abuse as pandemic pushes sexual harassment off the streets

The first pornographic picture sent shivers of shock through Amal as she stared in horror at the phone screen. Until now, she had responded politely to the older man who had been messaging her on Facebook, hoping to deter his questions about her life with curt, one-word replies.

More lurid pictures followed, some from pornographic magazines, others of the man himself in sexual poses. “I started to blame myself and feel that I invited this because I had replied to him,” says the 21-year-old, who is a university student in Amman, Jordan.

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Jordan’s King Abdullah describes ‘shock and pain’ over alleged coup plot

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Monarch says authorities foiled an act of sedition with arrests of former crown prince and others

Jordan’s king has claimed authorities foiled an act of sedition with the weekend arrests of a former crown prince and 17 other people, describing the events as the “most painful” ordeal of his reign.

“Nothing can come close to the shock and the pain and anger I felt, as a brother, and head of the Hashemite family, and as a leader to this dear people,” the king said in a written statement on Wednesday.

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Jordan bans coverage of alleged plot involving Prince Hamzah

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Information clampdown to keep investigation into king’s half-brother ‘secret’, says prosecutor general

The prosecutor general in Jordan’s capital, Amman, has banned the publication of any information about an alleged plot said to involve the king’s half-brother, Prince Hamzah, state television said.

“In order to keep the security services’ investigation into Prince Hamzah and the others secret, [it is decided] to ban the publication of anything related to this inquiry at this stage,” the prosecutor Hassan al-Abdallat said.

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Jordan’s Prince Hamzah defiant after being put under house arrest

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King Abdullah’s half-brother says he will disobey the army’s orders not to communicate with outside world

Jordan’s estranged Prince Hamzah bin Hussein has said in a voice recording that he will disobey orders by the army not to communicate with the outside world after he was put under house arrest.

The half-brother of King Abdullah and the former heir to the throne said in the recording released on Monday by the country’s opposition that he would not comply after being barred from any activities and told to keep quiet.

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Jordan’s government accuses Prince Hamzah of plot to destabilise country

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Deputy PM says authorities intercepted communications between prince and foreign parties

A senior Jordanian official has claimed authorities foiled a “malicious plot” at the “zero hour”, as a new round of arrests reached the closest aide to Prince Hamzah, the royal alleged to have unsuccessfully conspired to oust his half-brother, King Abdullah, in a weekend coup.

The foreign minister and deputy prime minister, Ayman Safadi, said on Sunday that the country’s intelligence services had intercepted a plot as it was about to be carried out. He offered scant details but said Hamzah had liaised with a foreign government to destabilise the kingdom.

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Jordan’s former crown prince says he’s under house arrest – video

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The half-brother of Jordan’s King Abdullah said on Saturday that he had been placed under house arrest and accused the country’s leadership of corruption and incompetence. Prince Hamzah bin Hussein said in a video statement that Jordan’s military chief had visited and told him he was not allowed to go out, meet other people or communicate with them. He said his security detail had been removed and his phone and internet service cut

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Jordan’s former crown prince under house arrest over alleged coup

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Authorities also arrested two aides after raiding King Abdullah’s half-brother’s palace in capital Amman

Jordanian authorities raided the palace of the kingdom’s former crown prince on Saturday and arrested two senior aides after uncovering what intelligence officials believe was an attempted coup against the ruling monarch, King Abdullah.

The arrests focused on a network allegedly connected to Prince Hamzah bin Hussein, a half-brother of King Abdullah, who was removed from his post 16 years ago.

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Jordan’s health minister steps down over hospital oxygen failure deaths

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At least six patients in died due to shortage of oxygen supplies, state media reports

Jordan’s health minister has stepped down after at least six patients in a hospital Covid-19 patient ward died due to a shortage of oxygen supplies, state media reported.

The Jordanian prime minister, Bisher al-Khasawneh, ordered an investigation into the deaths early on Saturday morning at a government hospital in the town of Salt, 13 miles (20km) north of the capital, Amman.

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How the Arab spring engulfed the Middle East – and changed the world

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An era of uprisings, nascent democracy and civil war in the Arab world started with protests in a small Tunisian city. The unrest grew to engulf the Middle East, shake authoritarian governments and unleash consequences that still shape the world a decade later

A decade ago this month, protests forced Tunisia’s authoritarian president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, to flee his country. It was a quick and relatively peaceful revolution, coming after decades of stagnant but entrenched regimes across the Arab world.

Few at the time understood the power of the images of unrest being broadcast online and into homes across the Middle East. Within weeks, other significant protest movements would emerge, and by the middle of 2011, leaders in Cairo, Tripoli, Sana’a, Damascus and elsewhere were under serious pressure or had been swept away by a tidal wave of peaceful demonstrations and armed resistance.

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Jordan scrambles to affirm its custodianship of al-Aqsa mosque

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Amman fears warming Israel-Saudi relations may threaten its hold on holy Islamic site

Jordan is scrambling to affirm its custodianship of the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem after a meeting between Israeli and Saudi leaders raised fears in Amman that the fate of one of Islam’s holiest sites could be up for grabs in a normalisation deal between the two countries.

Warming relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, capped by a weekend visit by Benjamin Netanyahu to the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, have alarmed Jordanian leaders already unnerved by Riyadh’s regional posturing. They fear al-Aqsa could be in play as the Trump administration tries to secure a regional legacy in its dying weeks.

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Anger towards Emmanuel Macron grows in Muslim world

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Protests take place in several countries against French president in aftermath of crackdown

On the front page of a hardline Iranian newspaper, he was the “Demon of Paris”. In the streets of Dhaka he was decried as a leader who “worships Satan”. Outside Baghdad’s French embassy, a likeness of Emmanuel Macron was burned along with France’s flag.

Rage is growing across the Muslim world at the French president and his perceived attacks on Islam and the prophet Muhammad, leading to calls for boycotts of the French products and security warnings for France’s citizens in majority-Muslim states.

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Sexual assault, forced labor, wage theft: garment workers in Jordan suffer for US brands

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Activist groups work towards improving labor conditions in textile factories but abolishing the industry’s ‘norms’ is an uphill battle

Mehedi Mehedi, a 36-year-old Bangladeshi garment worker who had spent 14 years working in Jordan, left the country forever last December. It was not an easy decision to make: Mehedi had met his wife in Jordan, he had no guarantees of finding a job back in Bangladesh, and he was desperate to work in order to support his chronically ill father.

In Jordan, Mehedi had been working for a subcontracting factory that supplies apparel to brands like Ralph Lauren, Under Armour, and American Eagle. But after spending his last six months without regular pay, he had reached a breaking point.

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Jordan arrests 1,000 teachers in crackdown on union

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Coronavirus laws used to quash protests after country’s largest independent union suspended

He spent 17 days on the run, moving surreptitiously, sleeping in different homes. When Sharaf Obeidat saw security forces surrounding his building, he knew it was over. “They’ve arrested me,” he managed to write on Facebook, before he was hooded, handcuffed and led away.

Neither a violent criminal, nor a political dissident, Obeidat is one of what lawyers estimate is about 1,000 teachers arrested across Jordan in the past few weeks as part of a crackdown on the kingdom’s largest independent trade union, the Jordan Teachers’ Syndicate.

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‘We’re fighting a ghost’: six months on, coronavirus victories remain fragile

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Governments are at a nebulous stage: past the initial shocks but still without a clear end in sight

Nobody is clapping any more. Six months since Covid-19 registered as an urgent threat, and one country after another spiralled into lockdown, the nightly outpourings of solidarity with essential workers have petered out.

Governments behind which people rallied earlier in the outbreak are again facing criticism and scorn. Panic at the scenarios that filled imaginations in those first weeks – of millions of imminent deaths, medical systems buckling and food supplies running scarce – has largely abated.

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Jordan could ‘look positively’ on one-state solution if Palestinian-Israeli rights equal

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Prime minister Omar Razzaz says Israel’s annexation plan would destabilise region

Jordan’s prime minister has said his country could view positively a “one-state democratic solution” to the Israel-Palestine dispute, as he warned that Benjamin Netanyahu’s plans to annex parts of the West Bank could unleash a new wave of extremism in the Middle East.

Omar Razzaz told the Guardian that the Israeli prime minister’s annexation policy would be “ushering in a new apartheid state” that could be a radicalising force and further destabilise the region.

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Jordan bans smoking and vaping in indoor public spaces

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Decision follows recent revelation country has highest rates of tobacco use in the world

The Jordanian government has banned smoking and vaping in all indoor public spaces a week after a Guardian investigation revealed tobacco use in the country had become the highest in the world.

The country’s health ministry said on Wednesday all enclosed public areas would now be “100% smoke-free environments”, building on an existing but widely flouted ban on smoking inside government buildings, and ending an exemption for hotels, cafes and restaurants provided they separated smokers from non-smokers.

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Covid-19 intensifies elder abuse globally as hospitals prioritise young

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Older patients turned away or left untreated, while domestic abuse is also rising, leading charity reports

When Souzi Bondeko’s grandfather started showing symptoms of Covid-19 and was struggling to breathe, she took him to a hospital in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, where he was put on a ventilator.

She dashed home to get some food and returned to be told by a member of staff that he had been taken off the machine as it it was needed elsewhere.

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‘Big tobacco wants our youth’s lungs’: rise of smoking in Jordan

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Despite one of the world’s highest smoking rates, many politicians believe a ban will effect the economy

When patients quit cigarettes at the King Hussein Cancer Center’s smoking clinic they are asked to be patient with their children. Often their offspring have been exposed to so much secondhand smoke that they have become addicted, too.

“For every four cigarettes their parent has smoked, the child has smoked one,” says Firas al-Hawari, a physician who directs the clinic. “We can control the parents with medication, but the kids are going through withdrawals because we don’t have them on medication.”

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Global report: China hails coronavirus response as world death toll tops 400,000

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Beijing denies cover-up or delay, while countries easing lockdowns face spike in cases

The number of confirmed deaths from coronavirus globally has topped 400,000, as the Chinese government released a report lauding its own response to the pandemic that emerged in the city of Wuhan six months ago.

As more countries prepared to continue easing their lockdowns from Monday, Singapore’s prime minister warned the city-state’s citizens that they were entering a tougher world of slowing demand and travel restrictions for the foreseeable future.

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