Conclusion

Jordan provides a useful case study into Iranian proxy warfare strategy due to the significant constraints Tehran operates under inside the country. Understanding how Iran can successfully operate under such constraints is especially relevant today following the joint U.S.-Israeli war in Iran that began on February 28, 2026. 

Despite suffering significant military setbacks in the war, Tehran has responded by cleaving harder to a high-risk, high-reward strategy, pursuing more audacious and aggressive action. Such behavior suggests that Iran may be willing to lean further into supporting subversive activity in adversary states like Jordan, despite the challenges involved.  

As an overwhelmingly Sunni nation, Jordan offers Iran few opportunities to cultivate ties to ideologically aligned groups capable of seizing or holding territory. The monarchy’s historic ties to the United States similarly prevent Jordanian leaders from seeking ties with Iran on mutually beneficial grounds. 

As a result, Iran’s strategy for winning influence in Jordan is limited to exploiting gaps within Jordanian society brought about by foreign and domestic disputes that Iran can leverage to cultivate allies. In Jordan, smugglers and organized crime proved to be one of Iran’s top tools to achieve this end. By helping to smuggle arms between southern Syria and the West Bank between 2021 and 2024, Jordanian weapons traffickers helped initiate an uprising among Palestinian militants that amplified popular support for the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood (JMB), a Sunni group with ties to Hamas. 

To carry out this smuggling, Iran relied on a network of Bedouin tribes in Syria’s southeastern Suwayda province who possessed cross-border kinship ties in Jordan’s northeast Mafraq province. Following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Moscow redeployed thousands of troops out of Syria, including in the south of the country, which afforded smugglers significantly greater freedom of movement in and around the Syrian-Jordanian border.

By mid-2022, Jordan faced Iranian-backed proxies along both its northern and western borders, a scenario reminiscent of the instability witnessed during Black September in 1970, when Palestinian militias backed by the Ba’athist regime in Syria tried to overthrow the monarchy, leading to a brief civil war that left thousands dead. 

All this occurred as Jordan experienced a major fallout with Saudi Arabia following the latter’s alleged involvement in the failed April 3, 2021, coup against Jordanian King Abdullah II, along with major disagreements between Amman and Riyadh over solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The rift between Jordan and Saudi Arabia—Iran’s top rival in the region—played to Tehran’s advantage and presaged a shift in Jordan’s regional posture toward groups like the JMB and the global Muslim Brotherhood, which Riyadh, along with Abu Dhabi, opposed and proscribed as terrorist organizations in 2014. 

Within months of the attempted coup, Jordanian authorities carried out an overhaul of the country’s electoral system that guaranteed the JMB greater influence in the country’s politics and within society. Though primarily an intra-Sunni affair, this rift between allies played to Iran’s advantage, creating further space for the JMB to integrate itself into Iranian-backed trafficking networks linking Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and the West Bank. 

As a result, from 2021 to 2024, Jordan’s monarchy tolerated the JMB, allowing the group to take part in subversive activities that in previous years would have triggered major crackdowns on the organization’s leadership, and allowing its members to promote radical discourse that threatened and undermined the Jordanian state, a key Iranian objective. This effort served as a piece of Iran’s strategy adopted to impose costs on the United States and its regional allies in response to the reimposition of American sanctions on Iran in 2018 by the Trump administration. 

The lesson posed by Jordan’s fallout with Saudi Arabia, in particular, carries importance for the future, as a similar fallout between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has further upended regional alliances and led to open war between the countries’ proxies in Yemen.²⁶² Though the joint U.S.-Israeli war in Iran has shifted focus away from this intra-Gulf rivalry, the UAE’s April 28, 2026, decision to leave OPEC suggests that Abu Dhabi’s rivalry with Riyadh will likely remain a feature of regional geopolitics for the foreseeable future. While the Saudi-UAE dispute stems from a number of issues, as occurred in Jordan, differences between both states over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and relations with Israel more generally since October 7, 2023, have been a key source of tension.  

Analysis of Iran’s actions in Jordan also reveals the importance of client agency in determining the scope and success of Tehran’s ability to intervene abroad. Almost all of the Sunni groups that Iran partnered with in the West Bank, Jordan, and southern Syria—including Hamas, the JMB, AFT, and others—at times opposed Iran’s objectives domestically and in more distant theaters, allying themselves with rival patrons that worked to limit rather than facilitate Tehran’s regional expansion.

Even after Iran began to redirect money to Hamas in 2019 in the hopes of instigating new waves of violence in the West Bank, the group’s leadership instead elected to pursue talks with Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas to form a unity government as their preferred means of expanding their influence, efforts which for two years helped keep the level of violence low. 

It wasn’t until Abbas canceled PA legislative elections in April 2021 that Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and dissident Fatah factions came to view violence as the most effective means of achieving political power, creating significant demand for weapons that served as a pull factor drawing Iranian resources into the area. 

West Bank violence remained at high levels until a major direct conflict between Israel and Iran’s top proxy Hizbollah in September–November 2024 changed the dynamic. The war significantly weakened Hizbollah and its ability to defend the regime of Bashar al-Assad, which was overthrown by rebels in December after 13 years of punishing civil war. Iran lost the most critical piece of its network infrastructure linking its proxies in Iraq, Lebanon, and elsewhere, dealing an unprecedented blow to its ability to coordinate the activity of its proxies across the Levant and create push factors capable of influencing dynamics in the region. 

In this new environment, Jordanian security forces were free to crack down on the JMB. They arrested dozens of the group’s leaders in April 2025 and formally outlawed the organization, paving the way for a formal designation of the JMB by the United States as a terrorist group in January 2026. 

Iran’s adversaries in turn should take advantage of this opportunity to address unresolved pull factors which throughout the second half of 2025 proved sufficient to resuscitate Iranian-backed smuggling networks across the Levant and trigger a small uptick in West Bank violence. This includes dedicating more resources and focus to reduce Israeli settler attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank, creating alternatives to the black market economy for Syrians in the south and elsewhere, and providing an outlet for JMB remnants seeking to reconcile with the state while ensuring that militant factions remain under surveillance.

So long as these and other pull factors continue to exist, hostile actors—including Palestinian armed groups, Syrian smugglers, and dissatisfied Islamists across the region—will continue to seek support from Iran and potentially other patrons with sufficient will and capacity to influence events in these and other theaters.