While the headlines of the past 24 hours have fixed on the deaths of two US service members in a July 17 Iranian ballistic missile and drone strike on Jordan's Muwaffaq Salti Air Base — the first confirmed American combat fatalities of this phase of the war, and the trigger for Tehran's declaration that the June memorandum of understanding is now "effectively suspended" — a quieter and arguably more consequential contest has been unfolding in parallel. It is a fight over the loyalty of the Jordanian public itself.
CENTCOM confirmed that two American troops were killed and a third remains missing after Iranian ballistic missiles and drones struck US positions in Jordan on the night of July 17, with four additional personnel medically evacuated to Jordanian hospitals before being discharged. The US responded with an eighth consecutive night of strikes on Iranian targets, which it said were intended in part to "swiftly punish" the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps units responsible. Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Kazem Gharibabadi announced that Tehran considers the Islamabad-brokered MoU void, accusing Washington of having "violated their obligations" first. Kuwait reported intercepting fresh Iranian missile and drone attacks in the early hours of July 19, and Jordan's own air force said it downed ten incoming missiles overnight — the latest entries in a campaign that has now struck the kingdom's territory and hosted US installations more than a hundred times since the war began in late February.
That much is well covered by the wire services and cable networks. What is not being examined with comparable seriousness is the second, non-kinetic track of Iran's campaign against Jordan: a sustained effort, conducted openly through IRGC statements and allied Iranian parliamentarians, to turn the Jordanian street and the Jordanian armed forces against their own king.
A message written for two audiences
IRGC communiqués accompanying the strikes on al-Azraq have not been addressed only to Washington. Iran's Aerospace Force has, on multiple occasions, opened its statements with direct appeals to "the noble and honorable people and soldiers of Jordan," invoking the deaths of Iranian children in strikes it attributes to aircraft that transited Jordanian airspace, and calling on Jordanians to "cleanse the holy land of Jordan" of what it calls the killers of Muslims — language explicitly framed in religious and sectarian terms rather than the state-to-state register used elsewhere in Iranian messaging. A sitting member of Iran's parliament, Mojtaba Zarei, went further in February, urging Jordan's "fighting brothers" in both Arabic and Farsi to prepare to storm Muwaffaq Salti and "take American soldiers captive" once Iranian missiles had done their work — a call to insurrection against the host government's own security forces, issued from the Iranian legislature itself.
Iran has simultaneously pursued the argument diplomatically, with its UN ambassador telling the Security Council that Jordan bears "direct international responsibility" for hosting the F-15s, F-16s and F-35s that struck Iranian territory, rejecting Amman's formal denial. The dual-track approach is deliberate: delegitimize the Hashemite state's claim to neutrality in international fora, while simultaneously appealing over the king's head to segments of his own population.
Why Jordan is uniquely exposed to this message
This is not incitement falling on empty ground. Jordan's population is estimated at 60 to 70 percent of Palestinian origin, a demographic reality that has repeatedly translated into mass mobilization against the kingdom's security architecture whenever that architecture appears to serve Israeli or American interests — most visibly during the largest protest wave since the 2011 Arab uprisings, which followed Jordan's interception of Iranian missiles bound for Israel in 2025 and demanded abrogation of both the 1994 peace treaty with Israel and the US troop presence. Twenty-eight Jordanians were injured by falling debris from interceptions during the first week of the current war alone, giving the "Jordan pays the price for others' war" narrative a literal, physical grounding that Iranian messaging is engineered to exploit.
Amman has compounded its own vulnerability at precisely this moment. On July 16 — one day before the fatal strike on al-Azraq — Jordan's highest court formally dissolved the Muslim Brotherhood, ending 75 years of legal operation for the kingdom's oldest and most grassroots-popular opposition movement, whose political arm won a plurality in the 2024 parliamentary elections on a platform of hostility to the Israeli treaty and the American alliance. Analysts have warned that a heavy-handed enforcement of the ban risks provoking exactly the kind of unrest the monarchy has spent two years trying to avoid. Iran's appeals to the Jordanian street thus land in a country where the domestic political lid is already unusually loose, not one where such appeals face a united home front.
Amman's tightrope, and why it matters beyond Jordan
King Abdullah's government has responded to all of this with calculated ambiguity rather than confrontation: publicly insisting Jordan is "not a party to any war" and has not permitted its territory to be used for strikes on Iran, while its air defenses visibly intercept Iranian projectiles and satellite imagery cited by international outlets shows dozens of US strike aircraft concentrated at al-Azraq. Israeli analysts have noted that this line "could shift" toward open hostility to Tehran if Iranian attacks continue to kill Jordanians or if the regime in Tehran appears to be collapsing — but for now, the strategy is to absorb both the missiles and the psychological appeals without being drawn into declaring a side.
The reason this deserves more scrutiny than it has received is structural, not merely local. Jordan sits at the hinge of the region's entire post-1994 security order — bordering Israel, the West Bank, Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia simultaneously, and hosting the logistics backbone that has allowed Washington to sustain its air campaign against Iran at all. A war fought only in the skies over Tehran and the waters of the Strait of Hormuz is containable within existing frameworks. A war that succeeds in detaching a meaningful share of Jordanian public opinion — or Jordanian conscripts — from loyalty to the Hashemite state would not be. International coverage that treats Jordan solely as a passive transit corridor absorbing spillover damage is missing the part of the campaign that Tehran itself is treating as a second front: not a battle for Jordanian airspace, but for the political character of the Jordanian state itself.