Ammon News - AMMONNEWS - Hitched up in the sandy lot by the police station, next to the four-by-four trucks and the dune buggy, is some other important equipment for enforcing the law in this parched and forbidding desert valley: eight surly and perpetually masticating camels.
Six of the towering beasts are saddled up regularly for patrol by the local police to reach rugged areas or to off for tourists. The other two are thoroughbred racing camels, males, kept around to provide another kind of service.
“Any resident who wants to bring his lady camel by can come,” said Kayed Nasser, a handler in the station’s camel unit. “It’s a free service that we provide to citizens.”
This is the local station of Jordan’s Royal Desert Forces, a 4,000-man-strong branch of the national police force that is responsible for monitoring and patrolling the sparsely populated desert areas that cover four-fifths of this Middle Eastern monarchy.
The force is descended from a camel corps founded in the 1920s, when Britain, which had a mandate to rule the area, separated the region of Transjordan from Palestine. The force evolved after Jordan’s independence in 1946, relying more heavily on trucks and surveillance technology. Today, the camel patrols are a small, but still important, part of the Royal Desert Forces’ efforts to catch smugglers, track down stolen cars and keep family feuds from turning murderous.
The force’s officers hail from Jordan’s Bedouin tribes, meaning that they know how to operate in the desert and how to navigate the intricate social codes of the hundreds of thousands of Bedouin who live in those areas.
“The child of the city does not know how to interact with the Bedouin who live in the desert,” said Capt. Enad al-Jazi, a Bedouin and the deputy chief of the Wadi Rum station.
“We do,” he said, although he now spends more time in a four-by-four truck than on camelback.
The makeup of the force also sheds light on one factor that has helped maintain relative stability in Jordan, a key Arab ally of the United States, despite the turmoil roiling its neighbors.
Throughout its history, the monarchy of Jordan has not only maintained good relationships with the country’s tribes, it has also built them into the structure of the state by heavily recruiting their members into the army and security services, analysts say.
This has to do with Jordan’s past, which has left its eight million citizens split between “East Bankers,” or native Jordanians, and “West Bankers,” or the descendants of Palestinians displaced by the creation of Israel and its subsequent wars with its Arab neighbors.
Jordan’s rulers have long seen those descendants of Palestinians, who tend to care less about the monarchy, as a demographic threat to their rule, according to Ora Szekely, an associate professor of political science at Clark University in Massachusetts, who studies Jordan.
This sentiment increased after Black September, the violent battle that began in 1970 between the Jordanian Army and the Palestine Liberation Organization. Thousands were killed, but the monarchy won and expelled the P.L.O. from the kingdom.
“This cemented the decision and convinced the monarchy that the only people they could trust were the East Bankers,” Dr. Szekely said, “and especially the Bedouin.”
Since then, the ruling family has heavily stocked the security services with East Bankers who get perks like pensions and education benefits for their children, ensuring that entire families remain invested in the monarchy’s survival, Dr. Szekely said.
The importance of those ties between the tribes and the state has become more clear with the rise of the jihadists of the Islamic State in neighboring Iraq.
Since the American invasion in 2003 ushered in a Shiite-led government in Baghdad, the relationship between the state and the Sunni tribes has been battered, and many blame the discriminatory policies of former Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki for enraging the country’s Sunnis.
Some have outright joined the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL; others oppose its ideology but are happy to see it fight the government. Still others have taken up arms to fight it and accuse the state of giving them little help.
The difference of the Jordanian approach is clear to many here.
“In Iraq, Maliki oppressed the Sunnis, so they said, ‘Let ISIS come in and wreck their homes,' ” said Mr. Jazi, the deputy police chief. “Here in Jordan, the tribes are the nerves of the state.”
Though some signs of support for ISIS have cropped up in Jordan, the group is not known to have an operational presence here.
Analysts note that many other factors, too, have shaped the two countries’ fates. For one, Jordan, which is almost all Sunni, lacks the sectarian divisions that have proved explosive in Syria and Iraq.
Jordan’s monarchs have also mostly opted for more moderate means of dealing with internal dissent, making small political concessions instead of resorting to the mass killings of President Saddam Hussein in Iraq or President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
The biggest proof that Jordan’s approach has succeeded — at least so far — is this: “Jordan is still there,” Dr. Szekely said.
Elements of that durability were clear in the Wadi Rum station and in the career of Mr. Jazi, its deputy chief.
Welcoming a guest to a desert campfire where his men served rounds of tea and baked flatbread on hot coals, Mr. Jazi, 44, said he had joined the Desert Forces at age 16 and served on all of Jordan’s borders.
Most of his work had involved tracking men smuggling cigarettes, drugs, electronics and weapons between Jordan and its neighbors, an often hazardous job. His brother Atallah, who had also served in the force, was killed in 1991 in a shootout near the Iraqi border, Mr. Jazi said.
On occasion, Mr. Jazi’s unit had joined the riot police to break up demonstrations in Jordan’s cities, work he considers part of serving King Abdullah II, the official head of the Desert Forces. Photos of the king, dressed in a traditional Bedouin police uniform with red bandoleers crossing his chest and a silver dagger protruding from his belt, hang prominently in the force’s stations.
Much had changed, Mr. Jazi said, since the days when the deserts lacked roads and phone coverage and when officers did multiday camel patrols carrying only lentils, flour, ghee and powdered milk — sleeping with their camels around wood fires.
Now, Jordan’s army staffs most of the borders, and Mr. Jazi and his men work in trucks, or by cellphone.
One afternoon, a colleague called to tell him that four officers had been speeding in the desert when they got a flat fire and flipped their vehicle. All were unharmed, so Mr. Jazi dispatched a crew in another truck to retrieve them.
Later, his officers caught some Bedouins hunting without a license. They confiscated the poachers’ rifle, wrote them a court summons and released a falcon they had trapped and a pigeon they were using for bait, Mr. Jazi said.
He and his men spend little time in their boxy white police station, preferring to drink tea and gossip with the Bedouin who come by to visit in the red and black tent pitched on the lawn.
The camels rest nearby. All have names as well as official government numbers branded into their necks, like license plates. One was captured laden with drugs near the border with Israel and turned over to the force after its owner was jailed.
The station’s officers acknowledge that technology has largely made the camels unnecessary but say that the force of tradition keeps them there.
“They are the heritage passed down from our grandparents,” said Mr. Nasser, one of the camel handlers. “And we love them.”
Correction: November 30, 2014
An earlier version of this article misidentified one of the items that officers of Jordan’s Royal Desert Forces used to carry during multiday camel patrols. They carried ghee, not lard.
*New York Times
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