It is high time to address internal front

Although The Rakban terrorist attack on a military post in the Syrian-Jordanian border area has been shrouded in mystery since June 21, 2016, it is a wake up call for all of us. 

The Rakban border outpost is the cornerstone of a new high-tech security system being installed with support from the US along the 442km border with Syria and Iraq. It was expected of Daesh to send some of its fighters and suicide operatives to target Jordanian military as the war between the two sides had been dragging for two decades, since Jordan had a role in the death of their commander and ideologue Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, mentor of current leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, in Iraq on June 7, 2006.

Around 2,500 Jihadi Salafists from Jordan are reportedly fighting in Syria and Iraq. Some of them have recently returned to Jordan to confess that they were recruited by Jabhat Al Nusra and Daesh, when their handlers used the theme of confronting a Syrian Alawite regime slaughtering thousands of Sunnis. 

As long as the civil war continues in Syria, there will be more Sunni recruits joining Daesh, regardless of the state-of-the-art security technology at the border. 

It is ideology that attracts new recruits to Daesh, and electronic fences cannot stop the appeal to younger generations to help their wounded Sunni brethren. 

Jordan has declared war on Daesh and sent its best F16 fighter pilots to bomb its headquarters in Syria, but it is yet to be able to mobilise Muslim clergy, scholars and preachers to issue one single fatwa (Islamic edict) saying that Daesh is an apostate group of non-Muslims. 

Many fatwas have been issued condemning acts by Daesh, but none has exposed the ideology of Daesh as that of heretics, the killing of whom is a religious order.

Jordan, within its fight against Daesh, has to distribute pamphlets to students in preparatory schools to refute the Daesh claims of being the only defenders of the Syrian Sunnis against the massacres of Alawites. 

Three months ago, a security raid dismantled an alleged Daesh sleeping cell in Irbid, with seven members killed in the operation. Three weeks ago, six General Intelligence Department officers were killed inside their offices in Ain Al Basha, and last week, seven were killed in the Rakban Border Guard outpost. Most of the attackers were Jordanians. 

It is high time to address the internal front, so that no more of our younger generations would fall prey to the fangs and claws of Takfiri jihadists.