Keeping watch on an unsettled border

Jordanian border guards endure not just a wave of Syrian refugees but a surge in arms and narcotics trafficking

Two white flatbed trucks appear on the horizon, bounding over a dirt road through a wheat field that marks Syria and Jordan’s international boundary. At an outpost on a nearby knoll, two helmeted Jordanian border guards, rifles at the ready, squint at the new arrivals through the glare of the setting sun. Like many sections of the 378-kilometer border between Jordan and Syria, this stretch of frontier is a haunt for drug trafficckers, weapons smugglers and political and religious extremists eager to join the civil war raging in Syria.

But the group arriving around dusk atop the two white trucks is largely women and children, some of the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing violence that upended their lives in Syria. Through radio headsets, the Jordanian sentries inform the nearest border checkpoint of the appearance of the refugees. Within minutes, the Syrians are scrambling over a berm to safety in Jordan.

The task facing the Royal Jordanian Border Guards is daunting: In addition to conventional duties policing the international border, they’ve become a humanitarian assistance force for the war weary. It’s a task that has strained the resources of the kingdom, both physically and financially. The Jordanian-Syrian border has become the front line of a crisis that concerns not only Jordan – a nation of 6.5 million struggling to integrate an estimated 500,000 Syrian refugees – but the world at large seeking to contain extremism and criminality that could spill across the region.

“Every country must pay attention to training border guards. This is not just a Jordanian problem,” said Brig. Gen. Hussein al-Zyoud, commander of the kingdom’s border security forces. “If you had told me three or four years ago that my troops would be receiving 300,000 or 400,000 Syrians, I would have said it was impossible.”

In one sense, al-Zyoud has been blessed. For decades, Jordan has supplied thousands of troops to United Nations’ peacekeeping missions. Current missions include those to Haiti, Liberia, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Côte d’Ivoire. That experience amid global conflict zones, with its strong military-civilian flavor, has proven invaluable on the Syrian border, where many displaced people require delicate handling. Nearly three-quarters are women and children, and thousands stagger across the border with battle wounds, injuries and illnesses.

The flow of refugees at border outposts is unpredictable. A trickle one day can become a flood the next. In January 2013, 48,000 Syrians poured across the border, not counting border hoppers who slipped in without detection. “The number of refugees is always changing. You cannot count on it remaining stable,” said Lt. Colonel Salah al-Draidi. “At our Jabir crossing point, we had 100 to 150 people one day and 5,000 to 6,000 the next.”

Al-Draidi’s crossing point, northwest of Ar Ramtha in Jordan and Daraa in Syria, is the responsibility of the Royal Jordanian Border Guards’ 10th Battalion.

From there, the border extends hundreds of kilometers east to the Iraqi frontier, a journey on which the landscape shifts from fertile green valleys to largely unpopulated desert and mountains. A stiff breeze coming off the surrounding wheat fields and olive groves whips the Jordanian flag on a metal pole. The Syrian army blockhouse opposite the Jordanian outpost sits empty, a victim of fighting that occasionally results in stray mortar rounds crashing onto the Jordanian side.

On a particular day in June 2013, as dusk falls over the checkpoint, more than 100 refugees have been loaded aboard buses for transport to Za’tri, a massive tent city in northern Jordan that serves as the main refuge for displaced Syrians. Among the refugees, many lugging jugs of olive oil and suitcases overstuffed with clothes, stories abound about kidnapped husbands, artillery ravaged villages and civil anarchy.

As with his commanding general back at headquarters near the capital city of Amman, al-Draidi can’t focus his sole attention on the refugees, whose care after the initial crossing falls largely to civilian organizations such as the United Nations. What concerns al-Draidi and his commanders even more is the 200- to 250-percent increase in smuggling since the Syrian conflict began in 2011.

It’s a two-way problem: Jordanians smuggling goods into Syria and Syrians smuggling goods into Jordan. Shepherds have been killed for their sheep, which rustlers then attempt to whisk across the border in the dead of night. Narcotics traffickers seek Jordanian transit points to move amphetamines and other illegal drugs to the Gulf states. Tribal networks that straddle the international boundary complicate the job of the border guards even further.

Infiltrators, including Jordanian terrorists the Soldiers call “Takfiri,” have been captured carrying rifles and grenades through secret border passages. Likewise, Jordanian border guards acknowledge that Syria has become a rallying point for heavily armed multinational extremists. “The presence of weapons inside Syria must be controlled. If it leaks to Jordan, we have a major problem,” al-Draidi says.

International partnerships have been important to the border guard force’s mission. Canada, for example, has donated buses in which to move refugees from the border to the camps. The United States has helped install a sophisticated surveillance system equipped with night-vision cameras that pan the border for blind spots missed by the watch towers. Such electronic monitoring will ultimately encompass more than 300 kilometers of the Jordanian-Syrian border.

Nearly 1,000 officers and hundreds of vehicles cover that part of the border that separates Jordan and Syria. They contend with blinding dust and punishing heat in summer and flash floods and muddy roads in winters. To maintain a state of high vigilance, border guards are rotated among the watch towers and checkpoints. As much as possible, senior leadership shares in the hardships. Jordan’s King Abdullah II Ibn Al Hussein visited during Ramadan in 2012 and shared an evening meal with the men inside a modest guardhouse. Gen. al-Zyoud personally makes several trips a week to the border and recently avoided a scrape with a Syrian mortar shell.

Al-Zyoud recites the story of a border guard sergeant brought before him for disobedience. The Soldier had witnessed a 13-year-old Syrian boy being shot while struggling to cross the border. Disregarding orders, the Jordanian rushed to the bleeding boy and bound his wound with his military undershirt. The commanding general asked the sergeant why he had ignored the rules. The man’s answer: “I’m ready to take any punishment you’ll give me, but I had to save a life.” Instead of giving the man time behind bars, al-Zyoud used his discretion to reward him instead for his initiative.

It’s that sort of camaraderie in the face of unanticipated crisis that has earned international respect for the Jordanian border guards, policing what has become one of the world’s most challenging borders.

“It’s the defense of our country that keeps us going,” Lt. Col. al-Draidi said as night descended on the isolated outpost in northwest Jordan, the atmosphere punctuated by the occasional rumble of distant Syrian artillery fire. “When a Soldier knows he’s defending his home and wife, he knows why he’s here.”