Inside Jordan’s royal crisis: why the prince turned to tribal leaders for support

Inside Jordan’s royal crisis: why the prince turned to tribal leaders for support

About eight years ago, Prince Hamzah bin Hussein brought an idea to his half-brother, the King of Jordan. For years, the many tentacled Jordanian security and intelligence services had been at odds with each other, caught up in a decades-long battle for control of the most powerful institutions in the Arab kingdom. Two previous chiefs of the Dairat al-Mukhabarat, or General Intelligence Directorate, had been jailed for corruption.

"It was a dark period,“ says a western diplomat. "Open corruption, inter-services turf battles, briefing and counter-briefing on each other, completely eroding their effectiveness.“

Unseated as crown prince in 2004, Prince Hamzah had been asked by King Abdullah to come up with a plan to make himself useful to the Hashemite dynasty. That day, says a person briefed on the exchange, the brash prince made a bold suggestion: unite all the military intelligence services into one wing and place him in charge. King Abdullah declined. Placing Prince Hamzah “” who the king had passed over in favour of his own son for succession to the throne “” in such a powerful position was "unthinkable“, says the person.

Since that rejection, Prince Hamzah, 41, has pursued a different track “” making deep inroads into the far-flung