Jordan’s Interior Minister, Mazen al-Faraya, today, Saturday, February 17, announced the establishment of a joint contact cell comprising liaison officers from Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria, and is concerned with exchanging expertise about drug smuggling operations.
Al-Faraya said after the meeting that brought together the interior ministers of the four parties in Amman that everyone recognizes the existence of a major problem, which is the drug problem, and countries are working at the national level to deal with this phenomenon. However, without a joint coordination effort by the gathering countries, there will not be results as hopeful.
The Jordanian minister added, “The most important thing we agreed upon is the recognition of the problem and the agreement on the need to follow up on these meetings at the ministerial and technical levels, and the establishment of a joint contact cell with liaison officers from the different countries concerned with exchanging expertise and training and following up on the previous and subsequent information, and tracking the shipments from the countries to their final destination.”
The ministerial meeting comes amid continuing attempts to smuggle drugs from Syria towards Jordan, where the Jordanian army thwarted such an attempt on February 7, resulting in the death of three smugglers and injuring others, and seizing large quantities of drugs, in addition to injuring a member of the Jordanian border guard forces.
Jordanian tension with the regime
This meeting was preceded by a state of tension between Amman and Damascus, after the Syrian Foreign Ministry’s statement on January 23, which criticized the Jordanian strikes on locations and points in southern Syria with the purpose of combating drug smuggling operations from Syria to Jordan.
The statement considered the Jordanian strikes unjustified and also referred to what it called the influx of tens of thousands of “terrorists” and huge quantities of weapons from neighboring countries, including Jordan, which was followed by an official Jordanian rejection of any implications that the Jordanian borders were ever a source of a threat to Syrian security.
The spokesman for the Jordanian Foreign Ministry, Sufian al-Qudah, pointed out that Amman provided the “Syrian government” during the Joint Committee meetings with the names of the smugglers and the entities behind them, and with the locations of drug manufacturing, storage, and smuggling lines under their control, but no real action was taken to neutralize this threat. He pointed to the fact that smuggling attempts witnessed a “dangerous increase” in their numbers.
This part seemed to be a response and denial of what was stated in the Syrian Foreign Ministry’s statement, accusing Jordan of lack of cooperation, and mentioning messages from officials in the regime to their Jordanian counterparts, which have not received any response or compliance.