Latest Articles From

Jordan

On a Trickle of Midnight Electricity, Syria’s Refugees See Home Receding

In a blaze of publicity, the Jordanian government and the UN announced last summer that the largest camp for refugees of Syria’s civil war would at last get legal electricity to replace its dangerous hodgepodge of illicit hookups. But in the precarious life of a refugee camp, even apparent improvements have their pitfalls, writes Dana Jebril.

“A grandmother will no longer tell stories to her grand children in the dark and children can now study in the evenings..."

Return to the Ancestral Cave

A winding mountain gorge, immense temples and edifices carved into its narrow rock walls; a vast and complex water collection and storage system to wring an artificial oasis out of the desert: Petra can seem more like a fantasy than a real place. But this Jordanian valley, once the center of a desert empire, remained until the 1980s an inhabited town, its inhabitants living in homes carved into the rock among the two thousand year-old temples. And now they are coming back.

The people of Um Sayhun village in the Petra region have plenty of the same grievances of other underdeveloped villages in Jordan

The Gunslinging Legislators of Amman

When a member of Jordan’s parliament opened fire on a colleague with an AK-47 a few months ago, his colleagues were shocked, shocked, and quickly voted to expel him. Al-Safir Al Arabi’s Mohamed Al-Fudhailat here traces the history of parliamentary gunslinging in Jordan.

Date: September 10, 2013. Place: Jordanian House of Representatives.

Jordan Fears a New Palestinian Fifth Column?

In virtually every Arab country, being a Palestinian refugee is something of a bureaucratic nightmare. For Palestinians forced out of their homes in Syria by war, Jordan has been anything but welcoming.

Jordan likes to present itself as a hospitable country, being the haven for over 200,000 Syrians according to official figures. But not for the 1,550 Palestinian refugees from Syria carrying UN travel documents; Jordan is trying to push them back out of the country.