“Daesh is not Islam,” said Jordanians on Wednesday night, distancing themselves from the Islamic State in the streets and in the newspapers, on the radio and on Twitter and Facebook, where profile photos were swapped for graphics of the Jordanian flag in a heart, or waving behind Jordan’s King Abdullah, or with a roaring lion promising revenge. Within minutes of the video’s online release, Jordanian officials were condemning ISIS on national television. “The blood of our hero martyr, Muath al-Kaseasbeh, will not be spilt for nothing,” said military spokesman Mamdouh al-Ameri. King Abdullah and his aides vowed an “earth-shaking” response of “relentless” war to avenge the “cowardly act of terrorism.”

Within a few hours, Sajida al-Rishawi and Ziad al-Karbouli, another Iraqi convicted on terrorism charges, had been executed by the state.

When Kaseasbeh’s plane was shot down over Raqqa, Syria on Christmas Eve, Jordanians responded with a mix of support and frustration. “Bring our son Muath back,” Jordanians demanded, but many with a postscript: He shouldn’t have been flying over Raqqa in the first place. In Karak, Kaseasbeh’s father complained that King Abdullah had forced his son—and Jordan’s sons—into someone else’s conflict. To average Jordanians, who are struggling to survive employment and energy crises as chaos sweeps the region and sends refugees flooding across their borders, stability is the first priority. “Two days ago, people were still saying, ‘This isn’t our war,’” said the Jordanian journalist Etaf Roudan on the morning after the video surfaced. “They thought, ‘Daesh didn’t come to us. Why should we go to them?’”

Until recently, Jordanians had shown no more than wavering support for the U.S.-led campaign against ISIS (Jordan has long provided a military base for American operation in the region, but its participation in the anti-ISIS coalition has involved not just hosting Westerners but conducting airstrikes with them). Patriotic songs blasted on national TV when airstrikes were first announced in August. But in Amman’s cafes, Jordanians huddled and whispered, “How can we bomb our Muslim and Arab brothers?” When I asked Syrian friends in Jordan what they thought, they shared photos of injured children in Raqqa. The captions sarcastically thanked Barack Obama, asking what had happened to his “red lines” on the use of chemical weapons by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Conspiracy theories proliferated in private conversations that I had and on social media, with some saying ISIS was sponsored by the CIA, others speculating about Israeli involvement with the group, and many deriding the coalition as another Western-led crusade. Meanwhile, Jordan tightened its anti-terrorism laws, reactivating the death penalty and expanding the jurisdiction of military courts to detain and prosecute suspected jihadist supporters.