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Ammon News - AMMONNEWS - Jordan has made a surprising economic and security rebound amid the Sunni war in neighboring Syria, a report said.

The Washington Institute for Near East Policy asserted that Jordan exceeded expectations of the United States and other allies in restoring stability despite the massive flow of refugees from Syria.

In a report, the institute said King Abdullah, who met President Barack Obama in February 2014, defused a rising Islamist opposition and restored the loyalty of Bedouin tribes.

A turning point was said to have been the military coup in Egypt, which ousted its first Islamist president, Mohammed Morsi. The report said the Brotherhood in Jordan was stunned by the coup and led to divisions within the movement.

“These developments — in addition to widespread fears of instability a la Syria and Egypt — have convinced the Jordanian street to acquiesce for now, enabling Amman to dodge the bullet of its own Arab Spring,” the report said.

“Despite the deterioration next door and the 16 percent increase in the kingdom’s population, Jordan is paradoxically more stable today than when the two leaders [Abdullah, Obama] met in March 2013,” the report, titled “Jordan Not Out of the Woods Yet,” said.

Research fellow David Schenker said Abdullah overcame such challenges as a 30 percent budget deficit, an opposition movement called Hirak that included Bedouins and a massive Syrian refugee presence in northern Jordan.

The report said more than 400,000 Syrians have already registered as refugees in Jordan.
“Meanwhile, protest fatigue, intelligence infiltration, and a series of lengthy incarcerations of tribal opposition leaders took a toll on the Hirak,” the report said.

The last major demonstration of Hirak took place in November 2013 in the southern city of Tafila. Unlike the much larger protests, the Tafila march drew only 50 people.

Schenker warned that Jordanians still complain of endemic official corruption, economic deprivation and the new Syrian refugee sector.

He cited the presence of nearly 1 million Syrians as the biggest threat to the kingdom’s stability.

“If these Syrians plant roots in the kingdom, they will undoubtedly aggravate latent tensions in a society already divided between tribal-origin Jordanians and the Palestinian refugees who constitute some 60 percent of the population,” the report said. “If the war in Syria is not ended soon, Jordan’s respite from the instability that has swept the Middle East since
2011 may prove only temporary.”

*World Tribune