Introduction

In the early hours of April 15, 2025, units from Jordan’s General Intelligence Directorate (GID) amassed in the suburbs outside Amman to raid a network of makeshift facilities used by arms traffickers to manufacture homemade missiles and drones.¹ The facilities had been built by members of the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood (JMB), the country’s oldest opposition movement, which since 2002 had been controlled to varying degrees by a faction with ties to Hamas. Beginning in mid-2021, JMB members began traveling to Lebanon where Hizbollah and Hamas operatives allegedly trained them in arms production before they returned to Jordan.² Though the GID claimed that the JMB planned to use the weapons inside Jordan, at least a portion was trafficked to Palestinian militant groups in the West Bank.³ 

However, the April 15 raid was not merely a law enforcement action against smugglers. One week after the arrests, Jordan’s monarchy formally outlawed the JMB, alleging that the group as a whole posed a threat to Jordan’s national security.⁴ The allegations were rooted in long-standing charges that the JMB operated as a key node within a broader Iranian-backed network of arms traffickers linking Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and the West Bank.

Nine months later, the Trump administration took its own action, formally designating the JMB and the Egyptian and Lebanese chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as Specially Designated Global Terrorists due to all three factions’ ties to Hamas. The Lebanese chapter was also designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, a classification that triggers more powerful statutes.⁵ These designations of Muslim Brotherhood chapters by the Trump administration may have been a prelude to the joint U.S.-Israeli war against Iran that began on February 28, 2026, with Washington aiming to cast as wide a net as possible against Tehran’s proxy network in the lead-up to targeting the Islamic Republic itself. 

That said, allegations that the JMB in particular operated as a node within Tehran’s regional proxy network are not without merit. Since 2021, the group has participated in Iranian-led efforts to arm Palestinian militant groups in the West Bank that met with considerable success. Between October 2021 and October 2022, incidents of political violence involving Palestinian militant groups increased by 800 percent, the largest spike in violence in the area since the end of the Second Intifada in 2005.⁶ The spike was triggered in large part by an influx of arms supplied by the JMB and other groups. In addition to weapons manufactured by the JMB, Iranian proxies in southern Syria trafficked large quantities of arms and explosives to the West Bank through Jordan via a decentralized network of several dozen organized crime groups directed by members of Hizbollah, the Assad regime’s Military Intelligence, and the Syrian Arab Army 4th Division. 

By August 2022, these groups increasingly relied on a network of Bedouin tribesmen that maintained a presence in both Syria’s southeastern Suwayda province and Jordan’s northeastern Mafraq province, a remote desert region along both countries’ border with Iraq that has historically been difficult for Jordanian security forces to patrol.⁷

For Iran, generating violence in the West Bank served as just one component in a broader campaign of escalation against the United States and its allies that began in 2018 following the reimposition of sanctions on Tehran by the Trump administration. That year, Iran renewed efforts to arm and finance its proxies across the Middle East before launching a series of unprecedented attacks on energy infrastructure in the Arab Gulf states throughout 2019. 

Around the same time, Iranian operatives working alongside Hizbollah, the 4th Division, and other groups in parts of Syria controlled by the Assad regime began manufacturing large quantities of Captagon—a cheap amphetamine—that was trafficked and supplied a multibillion dollar retail market abroad, in particular to large markets in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.⁸ In addition to generating revenue, drug trafficking served as a means to establish contact with groups in adversary states that could later be repurposed toward more subversive ends. 

For Iran, smugglers and organized crime networks serve as useful proxies in predominantly Sunni areas such as Jordan, southern Syria, and the Palestinian territories.⁹ These networks are capable of fostering violence that can be exploited to pressure authorities to adopt a pro-Iranian agenda. By helping to facilitate a Palestinian uprising in the West Bank, Iranian-backed smugglers contributed to an increase in popular support for the JMB. The JMB’s rise in popular support from 2021 to 2024—particularly after Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023—along with Jordan’s shifting geopolitical alliances with Arab Gulf states, pushed Jordan to tolerate the JMB’s subversive activity and its ties to Iran.

This approach stands in stark contrast to Iran’s strategy in countries with large Shi’a populations, where Tehran often leverages the religious fervor of its proxies to establish de facto enclaves of control and weaken central authorities, as has occurred with Hizbollah in Lebanon, the Houthi movement in Yemen, and in some areas of Iraq controlled by Iranian-backed factions.

In some predominantly Sunni countries, Iran has tried to create Shi’a communities through proselytization.¹⁰ However, these efforts have rarely been successful and often produced a violent backlash. 

This report aims to shed light on how Iran utilized smuggling to cultivate proxies in Jordan, the key buffer separating Syria, Israel, and the Arab Gulf states. From 2021 to 2024, Jordan served as the main overland transit country for weapons and narcotics being trafficked across the region. As a country with close ties to the United States and a nearly 97 percent Sunni population, Jordan has historically been resistant to Iranian influence operations.¹¹ However, in April 2021, two key developments occurred in Jordan and the West Bank, both predominantly Sunni polities, that created an opening for Iran to expand its footprint. 

First, on April 3, Saudi Arabia allegedly backed a failed coup against Jordan’s King Abdullah II, who shortly after rewrote the country’s electoral laws to politically empower the JMB in future elections.¹² In so doing, King Abdullah II signaled his discontent with Riyadh, which had proscribed the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates as terrorist groups in 2014.¹³ 

For the next three years, Jordan’s monarchy granted the JMB unprecedented levels of operational freedom, allowing the group to openly campaign in elections on a platform of explicit radicalism despite its members’ role in trafficking weapons. This stood in stark contrast to earlier periods, when the group’s subversive activities triggered wide-scale crackdowns on JMB leadership, first in 2006 and again in 2014 and 2015. However, tensions between Sunni states enabled the rise of the JMB starting in 2021 and therefore helped enable greater cooperation between hubs of Iran’s broader proxy network in Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank. 

Second, on April 29, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas canceled much-anticipated legislative elections in the West Bank and Gaza Strip—the first since 2006—triggering an explosion of tensions between the PA and rival factions, who increasingly came to view violence as the only means to expand their power in the West Bank.¹⁴ This included Hamas but also members of Abbas’s own party, Fatah, which at the time was divided between three rival factions, each of which possessed ties to militant groups and had even clashed with each other over the previous decade. Over the next several months, dissident Palestinian groups increased their attacks against Israeli security forces in an attempt to curry popular support and position themselves as legitimate successors to Abbas.

This competition drove a sudden demand for weapons that could easily be met by Iranian proxies in southern Syria overseen by Hizbollah, with the newly empowered JMB available to bridge the gap between both regions. The influence of Iranian proxies in southern Syria increased following Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, after which Moscow redeployed thousands of troops out of Syria, including units in the south of the country that had collaborated with Jordan to combat weapon and drug smuggling.¹⁵ 

By mid-2022, Jordan’s monarchy found itself threatened by active Iranian proxies on both its northern and western borders aided by groups within Jordan itself. For many, the situation appeared to resemble the events of Black September, when Palestinian militias led by Yasser Arafat and backed by the Ba’athist regime in Syria fought a short civil war against Jordan’s monarchy in September 1970 that left thousands dead. 

As a result, from 2021 to 2024, the monarchy largely tolerated the rise of the JMB, whose political arm, the Islamic Action Front, went on to win legislative elections held in September 2024 and become the largest party in parliament. It would not be until after the December 8, 2024, overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria and the subsequent withdrawal of Iranian forces from the country that Jordan’s security forces cracked down on the JMB, raiding the group’s weapons facilities outside Amman and arresting dozens of its leaders.¹⁶ Following the overthrow of Assad, smuggling between Syria and Jordan fell precipitously, as did Palestinian attacks against Israelis in the West Bank.¹⁷ 

Iran’s intervention in Jordan between 2021 and 2024 provides an example of an underappreciated, low-cost tool that the country’s leadership can wield against the United States and its allies during periods of tension. In the context of the current war between Iran and the United States, Tehran can deploy organized crime networks in adversary states as a supplementary facet of a multipronged strategy alongside its use of conventional kinetic strikes and its traditional proxy strategy. Such tactics could heighten the already elevated sense of uncertainty felt by many in the region amid the ongoing, unpredictable behavior of both main parties to the conflict.

Similarly, Iran’s ability to exploit Jordan’s fallout with Saudi Arabia to strengthen its proxy networks carries lessons for today’s geopolitics, particularly in light of the divide that has emerged between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Since 2023, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have backed rival or opposing sides in the civil wars in Yemen and Sudan. In the latter, this rivalry has pushed Saudi Arabia to increasingly ally itself with the Iranian-backed Sudanese Armed Forces against the UAE-backed Rapid Support Forces, despite the presence of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists within the ranks of the former.¹⁸ 

The Saudi-UAE divide has proven a resilient feature of Middle Eastern geopolitics, even in the wake of the widespread attacks launched by Iran against Arab Gulf states after February 28, 2026. While many presumed that the outbreak of war between the United States, Israel, and Iran could at least temporarily heal intra-Sunni rifts, the UAE’s April 28, 2026, decision to leave OPEC provides further confirmation of the growing divide.¹⁹ Should these and other splits between traditional Sunni allies continue, they could create opportunities for Iran to direct greater support to Sunni Islamists. 

The rest of this report is divided into five sections. The first will outline the push factors that drove Iran to supply weapons to its proxies and instigate violence against American allies starting in 2018, along with the pull factors that further drew Iranian resources to the West Bank after April 2021—both of which combined to produce a significant increase in violence. The second section will provide an overview of the JMB’s role as an Iranian-backed subversive organization and show how the monarchy afforded the group an unprecedented degree of operational freedom from 2021 through 2024 compared to previous periods of tensions with the group. The third section will provide a detailed look at Bedouin trafficking networks in Suwayda and Mafraq and show how the withdrawal of Jordanian and Russian support to factions in the area served as another pull factor that created space for Iran to present itself as an alternative partner. The fourth section will provide an account of how Jordanian security forces shifted their approach to trafficking after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel along with the current state of smuggling following the overthrow of Assad. Lastly, the conclusion will discuss the lessons that can be learned from Iran’s 2021–2024 intervention in Jordan and their relevance for future scenarios.