AMMAN: Issam was reduced to tears recounting his life as a drug addict, as Jordanian authorities press an unprecedented campaign in the Muslim-majority country where substance abuse remains taboo.
Slogans such as “No to Drugs” are part of the new drive, launched in the wake of a worrying rise in the number of cases of addiction, possession and smuggling, to raise overall awareness of the issue, according to the anti-narcotics department.
Jordan’s public security directorate has also started a primetime radio show that airs every Tuesday to address the dangers of drug addiction.
“Drugs have made me an outcast. No one respects me or even looks at me,” Issam said during the show, hosted by Major Anas Al-Tantawi of the anti-narcotics department.
“It got to the point where I sold my furniture and my five-year-old daughter’s gold earrings ... I tried to commit suicide twice.”
As the show came to a close, Tantawi said: “They are victims, and we must help them, not discard them.”
Brigadier Anwar Al-Tarawneh, director of the anti-narcotics department, told AFP there has been a 32 percent increase in cases of addiction, possession smuggling in Jordan since 2017.
The evidence is there. In a room in the department, the shelves are crammed with white plastic bags and brown envelopes bulging with seized drugs — including heroin, cocaine and amphetamines. Some were smuggled into the country in hollowed-out books, or shoes or disguised as pastries in a box.
But authorities say hashish is the most commonly used drug in the kingdom, where 20,000 people were arrested in 2018 for drug abuse.
Drug traffickers in Jordan, which has a small population of just over nine million, face sentences of between three and 20 years, depending on the amount and type of drugs seized.
Under a 2016 law, addicts are exempted from serving time if they agree to treatment at a rehabilitation center.
But drug addicts are generally still looked down upon by Jordan’s conservative society.
“Drugs are a (vice) that affects one’s mind, soul, finances and health,” Muslim preacher Raed Sabri, who has a YouTube channel, told AFP.
Recovering addicts however must be “cared for and not discarded so that they can again be contributing members of society,” he insisted.
The kingdom’s anti-drugs campaign targets those aged between 18 and 27, who make up 47 percent of users, according to the anti-narcotics department.
According to Jamal Al-Anani, a psychiatrist and drug addiction specialist, “curiosity, lack of maturity and stress” are the main causes that lead to addiction among teenagers.
Apart from workshops in schools and universities, Tarawneh said authorities were using “modern methods,” including social media, to reach those most vulnerable.
At a 170-bed rehab center in the capital Amman, affiliated with the public security directorate, posters on the walls read “Drugs are a Monster, don’t come near” and “Drugs are a Waste of Money.”
Treatment lasts between one and two months, said Fawaz Al-Masaeed, the center’s director.
“There are three stages: detox, treatment and rehabilitation,” he told AFP, and the center follows up with patients for four months after their discharge.
Omar, 32, said his mother encouraged him to check in to the center after having struggled with drug addiction for 14 years.
“A friend offered me a cigarette when I was depressed, telling me ‘Take this, it’ll make you relax,’” Omar, now a father of four, told AFP.
“When I asked for another, I realized it was hashish ... I was 18 years old.”
After years of substance abuse, “my health deteriorated, I lost 27 kilos, I lost my job, and it strained my relationships with everyone around me. I destroyed my life.”
Now after his rehabilitation, Omar hopes “to start a new life.”
Jordan campaigns to combat drug addiction taboo
Jordan campaigns to combat drug addiction taboo
- The number of drug addictions in Jordan increased by 32% since 2017
- Authorities arrested 20,000 in 2018 for drug abuse
Turkiye’s top diplomat meets Syria’s new leader in Damascus
- Hakan Fidan had announced on Friday that he planned to travel to Damascus to meet Syria’s new leaders
- Turkiye’s spy chief Ibrahim Kalin had earlier visited the city on December 12, just a few days after Bashar Assad’s fall
A video released by the Anadolu state news agency showed the two men greeting each other.
No details of where the meeting took place in the Syrian capital were released by the ministry.
Fidan had announced on Friday that he planned to travel to Damascus to meet Syria’s new leaders, who ousted Syria’s strongman Bashar Assad after a lightning offensive.
Turkiye’s spy chief Ibrahim Kalin had earlier visited the city on December 12, just a few days after Assad’s fall.
Kalin was filmed leaving the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, surrounded by bodyguards, as broadcast by the private Turkish channel NTV.
Turkiye has been a key backer of the opposition to Assad since the uprising against his rule began in 2011.
Besides supporting various militant groups, it has welcomed Syrian dissenters and millions of refugees.
However, Fidan has rejected claims by US president-elect Donald Trump that the militants’ victory in Syria constituted an “unfriendly takeover” of the country by Turkiye.
Syria’s de facto ruler reassures minorities, meets Lebanese Druze leader
- Ahmed Al-Sharaa said no sects would be excluded in Syria in what he described as ‘a new era far removed from sectarianism’
- Walid Jumblatt said at the meeting that Assad’s ouster should usher in new constructive relations between Lebanon and Syria
Syria’s de facto ruler Ahmed Al-Sharaa hosted Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt on Sunday in another effort to reassure minorities they will be protected after Islamist militants led the ouster of Bashar Assad two weeks ago.
Sharaa said no sects would be excluded in Syria in what he described as “a new era far removed from sectarianism.”
Sharaa heads the Islamist Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), the main group that forced Assad out on Dec. 8. Some Syrians and foreign powers have worried he may impose strict Islamic governance on a country with numerous minority groups such as Druze, Kurds, Christians and Alawites.
“We take pride in our culture, our religion and our Islam. Being part of the Islamic environment does not mean the exclusion of other sects. On the contrary, it is our duty to protect them,” he said during the meeting with Jumblatt, in comments broadcast by Lebanese broadcaster Al Jadeed.
Jumblatt, a veteran politician and prominent Druze leader, said at the meeting that Assad’s ouster should usher in new constructive relations between Lebanon and Syria. Druze are an Arab minority who practice an offshoot of Islam.
Sharaa, dressed in a suit and tie rather than the military fatigues he favored in his militant days, also said he would send a government delegation to the southwestern Druze city of Sweida, pledging to provide services to its community and highlighting Syria’s “rich diversity of sects.”
Seeking to allay worries about the future of Syria, Sharaa has hosted numerous foreign visitors in recent days, and has vowed to prioritize rebuilding Syria, devastated by 13 years of civil war.
Pope Francis again condemns ‘cruelty’ of Israeli strikes on Gaza
- Comes a day after the pontiff lamented an Israeli airstrike that killed seven children from one family on Friday
- ‘And with pain I think of Gaza, of so much cruelty, of the children being machine-gunned, of the bombings of schools and hospitals. What cruelty’
VATICAN CITY: Pope Francis doubled down Sunday on his condemnation of Israel’s strikes on the Gaza Strip, denouncing their “cruelty” for the second time in as many days despite Israel accusing him of “double standards.”
“And with pain I think of Gaza, of so much cruelty, of the children being machine-gunned, of the bombings of schools and hospitals. What cruelty,” the pope said after his weekly Angelus prayer.
It comes a day after the 88-year-old Argentine lamented an Israeli airstrike that killed seven children from one family on Friday, according to Gaza’s rescue agency.
“Yesterday children were bombed. This is cruelty, this is not war,” the pope told members of the government of the Holy See.
His remarks on Saturday prompted a sharp response from Israel.
An Israeli foreign ministry spokesman described Francis’s intervention as “particularly disappointing as they are disconnected from the true and factual context of Israel’s fight against jihadist terrorism — a multi-front war that was forced upon it starting on October 7.”
“Enough with the double standards and the singling out of the Jewish state and its people,” he added.
“Cruelty is terrorists hiding behind children while trying to murder Israeli children; cruelty is holding 100 hostages for 442 days, including a baby and children, by terrorists and abusing them,” the Israeli statement said.
This was a reference to the Hamas Palestinian militants who attacked Israel, killed many civilians and took hostages on October 7, 2023, triggering the Gaza war.
The unprecedented attack resulted in the deaths of 1,208 people on the Israeli side, the majority of them civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli figures.
That toll includes hostages who died or were killed in captivity in the Gaza Strip.
At least 45,259 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in the Palestinian territory, the majority of them civilians, according to data from the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza.
Those figures are taken as reliable by the United Nations.
Iran’s supreme leader says Syrian youth will resist incoming government
- Iran had provided crucial support to Assad throughout Syria’s nearly 14-year civil war
- Iran’s supreme leader accused the United States and Israel of plotting against Assad’s government
TEHRAN: Iran’s supreme leader on Sunday said that young Syrians will resist the new government emerging after the overthrow of President Bashar Assad as he again accused the United States and Israel of sowing chaos in the country.
Iran had provided crucial support to Assad throughout Syria’s nearly 14-year civil war, which erupted after he launched a violent crackdown on a popular uprising against his family’s decades-long rule. Syria had long served as a key conduit for Iranian aid to Lebanon’s militant Hezbollah.
Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in an address on Sunday that the “young Syrian has nothing to lose” and suffers from insecurity following Assad’s fall.
“What can he do? He should stand with strong will against those who designed and those who implemented the insecurity,” Khamenei said. “God willing, he will overcome them.”
He accused the United States and Israel of plotting against Assad’s government in order to seize resources, saying: “Now they feel victory, the Americans, the Zionist regime and those who accompanied them.”
Iran and its militant allies in the region have suffered a series of major setbacks over the past year, with Israel battering Hamas in Gaza and landing heavy blows on Hezbollah before they agreed to a ceasefire in Lebanon last month.
Khamenei denied that such groups were proxies of Iran, saying they fought because of their own beliefs and that the Islamic Republic did not depend on them. “If one day we plan to take action, we do not need proxy force,” he said.
Four killed in helicopter crash at Turkish hospital
- Footage from the site showed debris from the crash scattered around the area outside the hospital building
ANKARA: Four people were killed in southwest Turkiye on Sunday when an ambulance helicopter collided with a hospital building and crashed into the ground.
The helicopter was taking off from the Mugla Training and Research Hospital, carrying two pilots, a doctor and another medical worker, the health ministry said in a statement.
Mugla’s regional governor, Idris Akbiyik, told reporters the helicopter first hit the fourth floor of the hospital building before crashing into the ground. No one inside the building or on the ground was hurt. The cause of the accident, which took place during heavy fog, was being investigated.
Footage from the site showed debris from the crash scattered around the area outside the hospital building, with several ambulances and emergency teams at the scene.
