Many Jordanians back ISIL despite pilot's killing

Saba Abu Farha | Special for USA TODAY

MA'AN, Jordan — Sitting in a café, Abu Mohammed sadly but proudly told the tale of his 20-year-old son, Mustafa, joining the Islamic State.

"One night, he was not in bed," said Mohammed. "Three days after his disappearance, a masked man came to our home and told us he went to Syria to fight the Shiite infidels."

Mustafa died five months ago fighting the forces of President Bashar Assad, a Shiite. "God chose my son," Mohammed said. "It's breaking my heart and his mother's. He was still a child. We dreamed of his marriage."

"But now he is a martyr," he concluded as a small group listening to him broke out in applause.

Even as Jordan launched intense airstrikes this week against the Islamic State to avenge the extremist group for burning to death a captured Jordanian fighter pilot, the militants enjoy support in the kingdom.

While the horrible killing, captured on video, has sparked outrage in much of Jordan, including protests in the capitol of Amman, this city — 150 miles south — remains a hotbed of support for the Islamic State.

Jordan has long had its own homegrown radical Islamists, and residents here have clashed with government troops in the past two decades over Jordan's alliance with the United States. In recent months, there has been an outpouring of pro-Islamic State activity in the city. In September, for example, Jordanian authorities cracked down on demonstrators waving the Islamic State's black flag.

Ma'an residents refused to publicly condone the Islamic State's cruel execution of the pilot, Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh, 26. Many feared reprisals from Jordanian officials if they spoke out against King Abdullah's call to arms. But Muslim clerics in the city's mosques regularly praise the Islamic State, comprised of Sunnis, for opposing Assad's brutal regime.

"Jihad in Syria is our duty, more important at the present time than jihad in Palestine," said Islamic State sympathizer Aub Hassan.

Hassan is a Salafist jihadist, one who believes in a version of Sunni Islam that dovetails with the Islamic State's harsh theology. Salafist jihadism is the dominant interpretation of Islam in Ma'an, said Abu Tawela, a secular political activist in the city. He said the more moderate Muslim Brotherhood, which advocates for expanding Islam's role in public life, also has a foothold. Both are united in their contempt for Shiite Muslims.

"The general atmosphere in Ma'an supports the Syrian revolution," Tawela said. "It is natural that the imams of the mosques damn Bashar Assad."

The situation has led radicals in Ma'an to regard the Jordanian government as the enemy for participating in U.S.-led airstrikes against Islamic State militants, who conquered around a third of Iraq and Syria last summer and now govern the region as a caliphate.

"Young heroes who fight in Syria, or are arrested by the Jordanian security service infidels — they deserve to die in paradise and a decent life in this world," Hassan said.

About 300 young men have left Ma'an to fight in Syria, say local residents interviewed over the course of the past year. About 100 have returned, 30 of them injured. Another 120 have died and Jordanian authorities have arrested around 70, convicting them of illegally fighting abroad and sentencing them to three years in prison.

Some Ma'an residents are angry with the Jordanian government for not stopping recruiters who induct naive young men into the Islamic State or staunch the flow of fighters to Syria.

"They do not arrest the youth before they leave," complained Abu Abdul Rahman, who hasn't heard from his 16-year-old son since he left to fight six months ago.

Ma'an Mayor Majid Sharari said Salafi jihadists pander to young men who lack work and other opportunities, often appealing to their pride as Sunni Muslims. "They feel indignant about what has been going on for years," he said. "This justifies the killing and traveling to Syria in defense of their religion."

Some young men who joined the Islamic State change their minds when they are exposed to the militants first-hand.

Jordanian authorities arrested Abu Adil, 23, as he returned across the border from Syria but later released him because of a lack of evidence.

He described a well-worn induction technique that brought him from Ma'an to the battlefields of Syria, including a stranger who approached him at his mosque and invited him to listen to a charismatic leader. Unemployed, Adil believed he had little to lose.

"He didn't tell me that he is connected to the Islamic State and asked me to go with him to religion lessons carried out by a great sheik," said Adil. "The sheik lectured on the importance of jihad, and the suffering of the Syrians. I felt a strong desire to fight so I went to fight in Syria against the infidel Assad's regime."

The stranger and the sheik then made him an offer he couldn't refuse.

"I left Ma'an after they promised to help my family," said Adil. "I have a wife and five children. I was lured by the Islamic State in Jordan. When they gave me very large sums of money, I could not reject them."

He abandoned the Islamic State and fled Syria after witnessing the group commit horrors that contradicted their self-proclaimed Islamic mission. Similarly, many respected Islamic clerics have condemned the fiery death of the Jordanian fight pilot, saying the Quran reserves punishment for Allah.

"I escaped from Syria after discovering that the leaders of the Islamic State aren't really keen on Islam," Adil said. "They are really a group of mercenaries."