Ammon News - AMMONNEWS - Terror chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has made peaceful Jordan his next target, it was feared last night.
And the refugees who have fled there could be first in the line of fire.
The self-declared ruler of the new caliphate spanning Iraq and Syria has already seized key border points.
Now his fighters – wearing suicide belts and armed to the teeth – are said to be poised to launch an invasion.
Despite a huge military response from the Jordanian army, Syrian civilians at the UN Refugee Agency’s new Azraq camp off the main highway from Iraq are now once more in the danger zone.
Having trekked hundreds of miles across the body-strewn battlefields of Syria to escape fighting between ISIS insurgents and Kurdish rebels, they now find themselves facing a new threat from the growing band of Sunni militants.
Jordanian political analyst Oraib al-Rantawi said the ISIS menace to the stable kingdom was real and imminent.
He added: “We cannot afford the luxury of just waiting and monitoring. The danger is strategic – and getting closer.”
Foreign diplomats and the Jordanian government last week expressed fears over the increasing threat to a country that is a crucial Middle East ally of the West and a buffer zone between the two war-torn nations of Iraq and Syria.
US President Barack Obama is so concerned he is providing a £2.9million counter-terrorism fund for countries on the front lines of the spreading uprising.
The Mirror was the first British newspaper to be allowed inside Azraq. It is the world’s first purpose-built refugee camp and even has its own supermarket, supplied by the World Food Programme.
Built in under a year, Azraq is a sprawling makeshift city of metal-framed kit shelters spread over six square miles.
One innocent refugee, Eesha, 11, told how her family fled the north eastern Syrian city of Hasakah, where bloody battles had become part of daily life .
She said: “A lot of my friends died. We had to leave when ISIS surrounded our village. We came to Jordan because we thought we’d be safe here. Now we are not so sure.”
*Mirror