Alwaght- Some 900 Jordanians are fighting for ISIS and al-Qaeda terrorist groups in neighboring Syria and Iraq, Reuters cited an unnamed Jordanian official as saying on Tuesday.
The terrorists mostly left Jordan, a staunch US ally, in the early years of the conflict between 2013 and 2014, the senior official said.
The Arab official claimed that Amman has used issuing prison sentences for militants arrested before joining terror groups in Syria and Iraq or for those who returned Jordan as a deterrent.
This strategy explains why far fewer militants have come from Jordan than from other countries that do not share borders with Iraq and Syria, the official said.
Amman is anxious to forestall any danger from the return of radicalized citizens who have fought with an organization with unrivalled brutality, prompting the accelerated efforts at an early stage that have resulted in hundreds of arrests of people before they head to Syria.
"If they leave and participate in fighting, they become battle hardened and exposed to brutality, therefore posing a bigger threat if they come back," he said.
"Our priority is to ensure they don't leave the country in the first place," he said.
The Jordanian official revealed that their US-backed government, which like western countries spares no effort to topple the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, differentiates between militants who join terror groups to fight against Syrian government and those militants who are influenced by ISIS' ideology.
It seems that Jordan's Western-trained security forces, like their American and European partners CIA, MI6 and son, employ double standards towards terrorism with categorizing terrorists into good and bad ones.
