The Egyptian government’s decapitation campaign against the country’s Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood – which has included measures on the national level and even against the Brotherhood’s messaging apparatus – has drawn the ire of the group’s organizational cousins in Jordan. Brothers in Jordan are not only displeased with Cairo’s actions, but they’re pretty sure they’ve located the culprit driving the effort:

“The coupists are trying to reestablish oppression and tyranny as well as absolute military rule. They want to silence opposition and turn everyone into followers.”… Bani Rsheid said the ruling “shows that the military rulers are going through a deep crisis and that they are weak and confused. Every day the coup’s agenda, which is linked to the Zionists and some countries in the Gulf, becomes clearer,” he added.

Jordanian Islamists, including and especially the Brotherhood, immediately slammed the Egyptian army’s actions, after the military reacted to weeks of mass protests throughout Egypt and removed the then-sitting Muslim Brotherhood-linked government of Mohammed Morsi.

The Jordanian Brotherhood’s strength has somewhat receded from where it was almost year ago, when some analysts had the group poised to parallel their Egyptian counterparts in overthrowing a national government and replacing it with Islamist rule. Brothers had spent the winter conducting mass protests, and had boycotted January elections with an eye toward delegitimizing the results.

The decline of the Brotherhood across the region, coupled with concrete steps taken by Amman, have since then somewhat stabilized the country. The situation, however, remains delicate:

If Islamist forces take over large areas of Syria or even become part of the regime there, many of the Syrian refugees in Jordan might serve as their branch in the Hashemite kingdom, for the furthering of ideological aspirations, and might combine forces with the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood in order to topple the Hashemite regime. Publicly, no one talks about this danger; however, according to sources in Jordan, Jordanian intelligence is monitoring the mood and the religious activities in the Syrian refugee camps in order to pinpoint future points of resistance.

[Photo: seçkin demir / YouTube]