World: Jordan: The King Takes On the Guerrillas

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The fighting grew fiercer as the sun rose, however. From whitewashed houses and the ramshackle huts of refugee camps, guerrillas fired on tanks and armored vehicles moving into Amman. Anything that moved in the capital was raked by vicious crossfire. Stranded in the Jordan Inter-Continental Hotel, guests watched as an armored vehicle raced down the street outside and laced a nearby building with 75-mm. shells. "Amman is on fire," reported a guerrilla radio communique. The city looked it; a column of thick black smoke from burning petroleum tanks hung in the generally clear and sunlit sky.

Offer to Brothers

The battle between army and guerrillas was not an even one. In addition to 25,000 regulars, the fedayeen could muster 25,000 ragtag militia. Against this sizable but largely undisciplined unit stood the King's 56,000-man force, the best-drilled and most efficient army in the Arab world. Originally trained by Britain's Sir John Bagot Glubb, the army's three armored and nine infantry brigades are equipped with 300 Patton and Centurion tanks, 270 armored and scout cars and 350 armored personnel carriers. Though trained to fight in desert or rural situations, the troops proved adept at street fighting. Gradually, their advantage began to show. By nightfall of the first day, much of Amman was reported in army hands and the battle swirled around the refugee camps where the guerrillas had the edge.

With the army enjoying the upper hand in Amman but still plagued by snipers, Field Marshal Majali called for a cease-fire so that "our brothers, the fedayeen, can join us." The offer had underlying purposes. For one, Amman's population is largely Palestinian; rather than root out the guerrillas, a process that would have cost countless civilian lives, the army preferred to wait them out. The cease-fire could give Majali a chance to shift more of his forces from Amman to the north, where guerrillas from Syria and Lebanon were slipping over the border to join the fight. The guerrillas rejected Majali's call. Arafat declared "revolutionary control" over the region and ordered his forces to fall back on a triangle marked by the towns of Irbid, Mafrak and Zerká.

In the countryside, the situation was cloudy. The guerrillas made some gains: at Ramtha, on the Syrian border, the army wanted to cut the Damascus-Amman highway to sever fedayeen supply routes. At week's end the fedayeen still held the road. But ammunition shortages bothered the beleaguered guerrillas. "Use your rockets only against tanks," was the repeated message from the fedayeen radio in Amman.

In an effort to stop the fighting, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser dispatched his chief of staff, Lieut. General Mohammed Ahmed Sadek, to arrange a truce. Sadek was unsuccessful.

If Hussein were to defeat the guerrillas, what would his victory do to the power balance of the Middle East?