Ammon News - AMMONNEWS - The four-lane highway from Amman to Damascus, which was still open to traffic until last week, now ends abruptly at the Jordanian border, where a closed gate and wary policemen wait. “GOD BYE” reads the sign hanging above it, which some time ago lost one of its “O”s.
Jordan has sealed the last official crossing on its 375km border with Syria at Jaber after Free Syrian Army rebels seized the border post at Nasib, on the Syrian side, from government forces. It is shut until further notice, highlighting the impoverished and war-burdened monarchy’s vulnerability to the four-year-old Syrian war.
The closing of the border post — which was followed by looting of a Jordanian-Syrian duty-free zone at the border by Syrian villagers — comes at a time when the Jordanian economy is already under pressure from hosting more than 1m Syrians who have fled the conflict, the costs of which are only partly covered by foreign aid.
“Trucks are stopped at the border and . . . the Jordanian economy loses every day,” says Nabeel Romman, president of the Jordan Free Zones Investors Commission. “We are in a closed circle: look at all our neighbours — all the borders have a bad situation and when you close the borders you spoil the economy.”
Early on Thursday morning, after the FSA seized Nasib, looters from nearby Syrian villages swarmed on foot, by bicycle or by car into the free zone, which straddles the two countries’ border, and seized food, computers, cash and about 350 new cars. Jordanian businesses estimate they lost $100m worth of property in the melee.
“They didn’t leave a forklift, a winch or a bulldozer — they took everything,” says Maher al-Souri, who with his brother Khaled owns a company that was pillaged. Khaled flips on his iPhone through photographs of their ransacked family business: rooms strewn with documents, upturned furniture, missing windows, a ripped-out chandelier lying on a desk.
With trucks trapped inside both Jordan and Syria, companies are pressing the Jordanian and Syrian governments for compensation. Jordan’s interior ministry has established a committee to assess the losses to companies, although Mohammed al-Momani, Jordan’s information minister, says that the task will be difficult because so much paperwork was lost.
Jordan, which has taken pains to remain neutral in the Syrian conflict, did not intervene to stop the looting, angering some merchants. “The problem for us is that it’s a free zone and two-thirds of it is inside Syria,” says Mr Momani. “It was problematic for us to do anything from a security perspective.”
Jordan closed its other border crossing with Syria at Ramtha in 2011, a few months after the uprising against Bashar al-Assad’s regime began. Refugees are still crossing into Jordan via humanitarian border crossings and aid is entering Syria through Jordan via Ramtha under the auspice of the UN. While trade with its northern neighbour has dwindled since the war began, traders in both countries and Lebanon still use ports in Lebanon and Syria’s Tartus, then the overland route to import cars, food and other goods from Syria to Jordan and farther on to Gulf countries.
Up until last week the Souri family, whose business was looted, were shipping goods such as marble, iron and charcoal through Tartus. The Jordanian-Syrian free zone turned over about $500m of goods last year, down from $1.4bn a year before the war began, according to Mr Romman.
With the Syrian land route closed the alternatives — both in Jordan and neighbouring Arab countries — are slow and expensive. Jordanian importers can also bring goods via sea through Haifa in Israel — or on the long journey through the Suez Canal to the Red Sea port of Aqaba — but both routes take longer and cost much more than shipping overland through Syria.
On Jordan’s eastern border, truckers crossing through Iraq are required to pay transit levies to the Islamic State “caliphate”. Some shipments of high-value goods such as cars that used to cross Jordan are now taking the sea route too, via Suez, to the Iraqi port of Basra.
A Syrian trucker stranded on the Jordanian side of the border when last week’s battle began was bringing a shipment of biscuits into Jordan and preparing to take cardboard boxes back home.
He says he heard bombing from government warplanes during the fighting, but adds that regime forces surrendered the border post with “barely any fight”. The man, who is from Damascus and declines to give his name because of the war in his home country, is brewing tea on a compartment shelf under his truck a few hundred metres down the road from the post, which he is confident will reopen. “I am going to stay put,” he says. “Everything has to stay here until they open up — they have to open.”
*Financial Times
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