The crime at Hamoud Church in Karak struck something deep in the Jordanian consciousness. Beyond the brutality of the killings and the number of victims, there was a sense that the attack had targeted the very basis of their shared life. The church in Karak is part of the city’s history, memory and social fabric. Christians are not a community on society’s margins whose place within it needs explaining; they are integral to its formation. Jordanians therefore felt that the gunfire had struck their own home, and that some of those who had gone to mourn a woman had themselves returned as martyrs, in a crime that violated both life and death. 

The King’s presence and the solidarity expressed across society and the political spectrum reflected a shared national conviction: the crime must not achieve its deeper purpose of turning religious difference into mutual fear and destroying trust built over generations. The first confrontation with terrorism begins by defeating the meaning it seeks to impose on society, and by affirming that the victims are our own people and that protecting churches, mosques and freedom of worship is a national responsibility that allows no hesitation. 

Yet solidarity, essential as it is, must become knowledge, policy and sustained action. Otherwise, after each crime we will simply reaffirm the values we believe in, then return to the same routines while leaving the conditions that allow such crimes to recur operating out of sight. 

The initial announced toll was seven dead and 34 injured. By the morning of 24 October, reports indicated that it had risen to eight dead and 40 injured, while the perpetrators’ organisational connections remained under investigation. This distinction is fundamental. Condemnation of the crime is unequivocal; attributing it to a particular organisation and establishing the nature of that relationship require evidence. Similarities in targets and methods cannot substitute for an investigation. 

Waiting for the investigation’s findings does not, however, mean suspending analysis. We have an accumulated body of research on Jordan’s jihadi current: its changing generations and networks, its social profile and its experience of imprisonment. This allows us to place the event in a deeper context and avoid reducing it to a fleeting media image or using it to reproduce reassuring explanations that do not withstand the evidence. 

The dormancy we mistook for an ending 

Part of the shock stems from the belief that ISIS ended with the collapse of its territorial state in Iraq and Syria, and that years of relative calm meant the ideas it carried had been extinguished. Our study, Jordanian Jihadis and the Collapse of the ISIS State, posed a different central question. Also published as a chapter in Islamists in Jordan: Religion, State and Society, issued by the Politics and Society Institute with contributions by Hassan Abu Hanieh and Abdullah al-Taie, it asked: what had actually collapsed, and what had survived? Had military defeat produced an ideological reassessment, or merely reduced activity pending different circumstances? 

This was why we returned to the current after its surge had receded, seeking to understand the effects of defeat and imprisonment, particularly as people detained during the organisation’s expansion approached the end of their sentences. Treating this transition as the automatic end of the problem assumes that an idea dies when the authority embodying it falls, and that people necessarily reconsider their convictions when the organisation they believed in loses. Experience supports neither assumption. 

Some followers may interpret defeat as a test of faith, the result of leadership mistakes or a conspiracy, without questioning the underlying idea. Others may genuinely withdraw, while a third group may simply suspend its activities under security pressure. These are different trajectories that cannot be collapsed into a single outcome, nor measured solely by the number of attacks. 

The study therefore warned against relying on surface appearances. Dormancy may reflect an important security success in restricting operational capacity, but it does not establish that the environment reproducing a readiness for violence has disintegrated. We must distinguish between the collapse of the state, the weakening of the organisation, the survival of the current, and the persistence of local networks that carry its ideas and allow it to regenerate. 

The confrontation in Ramtha in November 2025 was a reminder of this. The Public Security Directorate announced that two brothers espousing takfiri ideology had been killed during a raid in which three members of the security force were injured. The incident pointed both to the persistence of the threat and to the importance of family ties in understanding some of its manifestations. It did not, in itself, establish an organisational link to the latest crime in Karak. 

Conversely, a large and horrific attack does not necessarily indicate a large central organisation directing an extensive network inside the country. It may involve a small group or individuals connected by prior relationships. Investigations may uncover contact abroad, or ideological influence without direct organisational affiliation. Influence, support, direction and command are different levels of involvement. Careful analysis distinguishes between them rather than inferring the presumed size of an organisation from the scale of the tragedy. 

Churches had already appeared among the targets in earlier case files. The more recent study found that churches accounted for 3.8 per cent of the planned targets in its classification, alongside security agencies, foreign interests, embassies, tourists and other targets. This figure describes targets identified in the files, not the probability of an attack. It nevertheless shows that what shocked society when it became a bloody reality had already existed in the thinking of some groups. 

Within the logic of ISIS, a civilian can become a target and a sacred place a killing ground when the world is reconstructed around excommunication, the legitimisation of bloodshed and terror. The deeper question is how a person comes to believe that killing neighbours or fellow citizens is legitimate, and how that conviction acquires a force strong enough to override everyday social bonds and everything that should prevent the crime. 

From the organisation to the small social world that sustains it 

This question leads us to a concept central to our studies: the jihadis’ ‘social club’. By this we mean the network of relationships that gives ideas an environment in which to live and endure: kinship and marriage, friendship and collegial ties, the neighbourhood, mosque and club. Within these circles, discourse does not circulate as an abstract text. It is carried by trust, loyalty, affection and belonging. 

A young person may trust someone before accepting an idea, and join a circle of friends before joining an ideological group. Personal experiences are then reinterpreted within the group. Private difficulties, political frustrations and religious questions are assembled into a single narrative that explains their suffering, identifies who is responsible and proposes a way to respond. 

The strength of this environment lies in its capacity to offer more than a message. It provides recognition, status, companionship and a sense of purpose. Abandoning the idea may threaten the entire social world a person has built around it. Challenging an extremist conviction may therefore require helping someone build relationships and a life beyond the circle that has monopolised their sense of belonging. 

This exposes the limits of explanations that make the internet the principal cause of everything. Our study assigned primary relationships a central role in recruitment and mobilisation, while treating the internet as a facilitator of communication, propaganda and contact with members of the organisation abroad. This does not deny online recruitment; it prevents us from reducing the entire process to a screen. 

The question is not only what young people watch, but who sends them the material, why they trust that person, who discusses it with them and which group gives it legitimacy. The sender may be a relative who joined the organisation abroad, a university colleague or a neighbourhood friend. Contact may begin online and develop into a social relationship. The two worlds overlap, but policing content alone does not dismantle the relationships that give it influence. 

This becomes more important with the generational and familial transformation. The book documented cases in which connections to the current extended from father to son, sometimes across three generations, alongside the involvement of brothers, sisters and minors. Some environments had become capable of transmitting memories, symbols and relationships even as the names of organisations and leaders changed. 

This is not a biological inheritance of extremism, nor a judgement on families. A family may be the first to suffer and the best placed to save its children. But ignoring socialisation within these circles prevents us from understanding their persistence. Stigmatising an entire family may also destroy one of the most important bridges out of extremism. 

We therefore need to trace the histories, or genealogies, of cells and groups: how people met, how influence travelled, and how kinship, imprisonment and foreign contacts shaped their relationships. A new group may not be a direct organisational continuation of an earlier one, yet may emerge from some of its relationships, memories and sources of trust. Treating each case as a separate beginning leaves this history unexplained. 

Who should prevention reach 

Understanding this environment requires revisiting familiar stereotypes about its members. They are not all unemployed, poorly educated or drawn from a single social class. Nor can the label ‘mentally ill’ serve as a collective diagnosis that dispenses with research. Psychological assessment is a specialised, individual undertaking; the brutality of an act does not establish its psychological origins. 

Correcting the picture also requires precision in using our own studies. The Sociology of Extremism and Terrorism in Jordan drew on a database of 760 cases, with different levels of information available across indicators. It identified people with lower educational attainment and people without work, alongside business owners, professionals, teachers and employees. It revealed social diversity that cannot be explained by a single factor. 

The more recent study, covering 2017–2021, identified an important shift. Bachelor’s degree holders accounted for 36.9 per cent of those for whom educational data were available, while the analysis placed the combined share of university-educated people and students at around 68 per cent. Those recorded as having no work accounted for 7.6 per cent of the available occupational data. This is not a national unemployment rate calculated against the labour force, but it is sufficient to challenge the assumption that lack of work is the overarching explanation. 

Engineering students and graduates were also prominent. Information on university specialisation, however, was available for only 36 cases. The finding cannot be converted into a percentage for the current as a whole, nor can a university discipline be made responsible for explaining extremism. The point is that education, employment and class position provide no automatic immunity. Prevention focused exclusively on young people who have left education and have no work may overlook important groups. 

We examined part of this question in a study co-authored with Moamen Gouda and Neven Bondokji, published in the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, volume 50, issue 5, 2023, pages 1275–1297, under the title ‘Understanding the Jihadi Salafi threat in Jordan in 2011–2017’. It was first published online on 24 May 2022. 

That study analysed a database of 780 cases, with varying data availability across indicators. It used relative deprivation to understand the relationship between education, employment and satisfaction with one’s social position. What matters is not simply what a person has, but the gap between their expectations and what they feel able to attain. Someone may have a job yet see no future, hold a degree that fails to deliver the recognition they expected, or enjoy relative stability while searching for an identity and a role in a larger cause. 

Frustration is widespread, however, while extremists remain a minority. Relative deprivation does not automatically become violence. The social network gives frustration an ideological interpretation, places it within a narrative of conflict and presents violence as a route to recovering dignity and agency. Understanding requires connecting circumstances, ideas and relationships rather than selecting one and discarding the others. 

The shift also appears geographically. The comparison presented in the more recent study shows Zarqa’s share falling from around 40.7 per cent in the earlier data to approximately 27 per cent, while Amman’s rose from around 12 per cent to 32 per cent. These are shares within the observed samples, not prevalence rates among residents. They nevertheless require us to update the geography of prevention and examine neighbourhoods, camps and local networks rather than relying on cities historically associated with the current. 

People under 30 also accounted for 79 per cent of the 280 cases for which ages were available in the more recent study, alongside a troubling presence of minors and school students. This takes us directly to institutions of education and socialisation, and to the need to distinguish between an adolescent at the beginning of recruitment, a propagandist, a recruiter and someone who has moved into planning violence. Different trajectories require different interventions. 

Prevention before prison and after release 

If this is the nature of the phenomenon, counterterrorism cannot be reduced to apprehending and isolating people, important as that is when an actual threat exists. Security agencies stop attacks and protect lives. On their own, however, they cannot give a young person meaning, address their relationships and fears, or construct a credible route out of the group. 

Jordan has accumulated important experience, from the Amman Message to preventive plans and programmes in correctional and rehabilitation centres. But effort does not remove the need to assess impact. What has changed because of these programmes? Which groups have they reached? Has change endured after they ended? Where have they failed, and why? 

We need to move from counting activities to measuring outcomes. The number of seminars, lectures and participants tells us too little about changes in convictions and behaviour. Someone may attend a programme without being persuaded, change their behaviour without reconsidering their beliefs, or revise some beliefs while needing time and support to break with earlier relationships. Evaluation must account for these differences. 

This is where the integrated approach we advocated becomes important. It begins by defining the problem and the responsibilities of those involved, then builds a continuous pathway linking prevention, judicial proceedings, rehabilitation and life after release. It creates possible exit points at every stage rather than waiting for the trajectory towards violence to be completed and then addressing its consequences. 

Before a case reaches the courts, where the law and the nature of the case allow, opportunities for assessment and early intervention should exist, particularly for minors and those at the earliest stages of influence. Distinguishing curiosity, sympathy, propaganda, recruitment and planning is not leniency. It is a condition for choosing an appropriate response and avoiding a situation in which someone with limited involvement becomes more firmly embedded in an extremist environment. 

During trial and the serving of a sentence, the legal process should be accompanied by an individual understanding of the case. What are the person’s motives and relationship to the group? Are they open to reconsidering their position? Who in the family can help? What are their educational, psychological and social needs? A judicial file establishes legal responsibility; it does not, by itself, provide a rehabilitation plan. 

In prison, we must ask what happens during a sentence rather than simply count the time remaining. The study documented cases of renewed extremist activity after release, including one in which four people met in a juvenile detention facility and their relationship developed after release into a new criminal case. These examples do not establish a comprehensive national rate of reoffending. They reveal the possibility that an institution intended to promote rehabilitation can become an environment for forging relationships that reproduce the problem. 

Policies governing classification, separation and the mixing of prisoners therefore require evaluation based on outcomes, as do living conditions, treatment and family contact. The aim is to protect the institution, prisoners and society, while recognising that humiliation or a lack of prospects may give narratives of grievance further material. Applying the same measure to everyone overlooks differences in influence and readiness for violence. 

Bringing in preachers and religious scholars is not enough, important as religious dialogue and the dismantling of interpretations that legitimise killing are. Some cases are driven by a need for status, anger, loyalty to friends or bereavement. These require psychologists, sociologists, behavioural specialists and family practitioners working in a team able to build an individual programme and review it periodically. 

Release begins a phase no less important. A person returns to family, work and neighbourhood, and may also return to the network that recruited them. If education, employment, travel and reintegration are blocked while the group alone remains willing to receive them, we have narrowed the very exit options we are asking them to choose. 

The study therefore called for counselling and behavioural support alongside follow-up, and for reviewing the blanket application of restrictions without regard to individual circumstances and conduct. Security monitoring proportionate to risk remains necessary. It should be accompanied by support that enables those who want another life to build one and see a tangible result from their decision, rather than remain indefinitely trapped in the identity of a former prisoner. 

Above all, these stages must be connected, with clear responsibilities and defined outcomes. Rehabilitation loses part of its effect if it stops at the prison gate. Follow-up loses its purpose if it consists only of observation without opportunities for intervention and support. An integrated approach means institutional responsibility for the whole pathway. 

Countering the social club through a life of belonging 

This policy cannot succeed if it is confined to people who have already entered the judicial system. The wider struggle concerns the environments in which recruitment takes shape and society’s ability to provide relationships, roles and sources of meaning that can compete with those offered by extremist groups. 

Universities have a central place here. The substantial presence of students and university-educated people in the more recent study makes dialogue clubs, student unions, party activity and intellectual debate part of prevention. These must be real spaces for participation and disagreement, where young people feel able to question, influence decisions and assume responsibility in public life. 

Asking young people to be moderate is insufficient if their major questions are met with intimidation or indifference. We need reasoned debate and the capacity to construct arguments, hear different views and reconsider assumptions. This goes beyond an occasional lecture about extremism to a university life that allows politics, ideas and citizenship to be learned through practice. 

Participation in public life also enables young people to test ideas against a plural reality, discover the limits of absolute judgements and move from imagining the transformation of the world in a single stroke to accomplishing something measurable. Such experiences weaken the appeal of a group that promises a grand heroic role, then consumes its recruits in pursuit of its own project. 

The same applies to neighbourhoods, towns and camps. If extremist networks provide companionship, recognition and belonging, genuine social spaces must be available in sport, music, theatre, reading, volunteering and local initiatives, led by young people who find sustained roles within them. 

This does not mean that an arts event dismantles a cell. A rich cultural and social life broadens a young person’s world, relationships and choices, reducing the ability of a closed group to monopolise belonging. Part of the struggle concerns who can occupy time, generate meaning and build trust. 

When it was prepared, our study identified a gap between the current’s presence in certain environments and the limited availability of youth, cultural and dialogue spaces there. We need to update that diagnosis and identify resources and needs with residents themselves, without stigmatising them or treating their communities as suspect. Partnership builds the trust prevention needs; collective suspicion destroys it. 

Civil society should therefore not be reduced to implementing activities designed in advance or brought to the fore only after a crime. It should participate, alongside universities, researchers and experts, in diagnosis, programme design and evaluation, with access to the data research requires and safeguards for privacy. How can institutions be expected to understand a phenomenon if they cannot access the information needed to do so? 

What we need is cumulative knowledge that answers specific questions. Who is drawn in? How does the process begin? What accelerates it? Which interventions help people leave? Why does an intervention succeed with one person and fail with another? Research expertise then becomes part of policymaking, and revising programmes becomes evidence of learning rather than repeating them because their labels sound appropriate. 

None of this can be separated from the anger accumulated through the genocidal war in Gaza and the wars that followed, or from feelings of powerlessness and blocked avenues for action. Identifying these conditions, however, does not establish that they caused the latest crime, nor does it equate solidarity with Palestine with extremism. It underscores the importance of peaceful political and civic action so that violent groups cannot appropriate anger and redirect it towards killing innocent people. 

When young people have avenues for protest, assistance, organisation and expression, pain can become constructive humanitarian and political action. Closing the public sphere and then merely condemning the consequences leaves the hardest questions unanswered: where can young people take their anger, who helps them understand it, and what route do they see towards making a difference? 

This is the thread connecting the crime in Karak to the accumulated lessons of research. Protecting society requires thwarting attacks and holding perpetrators accountable, while also dismantling the current’s capacity to reproduce itself through ideas, relationships, socialisation, prisons and the gaps in which it finds room to operate. 

The ISIS state has collapsed, but the danger it left behind cannot be measured solely by the territory it lost. It must also be measured by the remaining capacity to recruit, legitimise killing and monopolise belonging. If solidarity with the victims is to become more than an immediate response, we must turn it into sustained policy, grounded in research, opening routes out of extremism and giving young people reasons and roles through which to belong to the shared life this crime sought to attack.