Jordan

Yes.

We are talking about the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait.

Why target them specifically rather than having them just buy American defense systems like they usually do?

Because the American systems are struggling against this specific threat, and the Gulf States know it.

War with China.

The Journal, quote, before Iran carried out its attack that killed three U.S. troops in July, Tehran acquired high resolution satellite images of the base in Jordan from Chinese entities.

That's Chinese entities.

Clearest evidence so far, according to the journal, that Chinese support for Iran during the war has had lethal consequences for U.S. forces.

The Chinese helped kill American troops in the Middle East.

Period.

The Chinese helped Iran kill American troops at the airbase in Jordan.

All Chinese entities are Chinese governmental entities.

I mean, we touched on at the start about the multicultural and diverse aspect of the UAE.

Just having, you know, things like the ackn- the acknowledgement that talking to a Brit in certain language and taking it for granted they'd know what you were talking about could be completely misconstrued for a Lebanese or a Filipino or an Indian or a Jordanian, and that's something that you can never learn in a, in a leadership book, right? [laughs] It's kinda...

It's the s- it's the softer skills that, that I've, you know, really leaned into and valued.

Does that, does that equally play a role in creativity? You know, in an office with a bunch of Brummies in Birmingham being creative-

So let me start with this.

The Wall Street Journal reports on something that I shared with y'all months ago, that a Chinese satellite company or an entity associated with the government, the CCP, shared imagery, satellite imagery, of a U.S. military base in Jordan with Iran's IRGC.

The Iranians then used that Chinese assistance to better target our service members, and they did.

The Iranians then killed three U.S. troops and injured others to include traumatic brain injuries.

So I started just doing clinical work and then started to realize no one knows what to do with these children.

There's still these problems, of course, in Syria and in southern Jordan and Iraq.

But I started in Afghanistan and just understanding like, Where do they go? How do we help them? And how do we get them not to recruit other children that they were enmeshed with who would be released much faster than them? I think the biggest problem is politics.

Even repatriating adults and families is completely, from my experience, quite confusing, chaotic, and not clear.

And then we established six other satellite branches across the world in different universities.

We have one in Jordan at the University of the Middle East.

We have one in Nairobi at the Kenyatta University.

We have one at George Washington in D.C. We have one at Bournemouth University in London.

You've also got the, of course, the this mutual defense, this Mecca pact thing, all of this could open.

And in Jordan as well, the regime there, the monarchy is increasingly looking a bit shaky.

The regime is 90% potential terrorists in Jordan.

It's full of little jihadis.

It would love to flood across the border.

The Jordan Valley border is more porous than it should be.

Israel has been working over the last year or so to beef up the military presence there.

But this is looking like we could have the beginnings of a multi-front conflict with one of the fronts within the territory of Israel itself.

Let's head to the Middle East now.

We're joined by our correspondent in Jordan, Madeline Crowde.

Madeline, over in Turkey, dozens of people have been detained.

This is following raids targeting LGBTQ+ groups and venues.

What exactly is going on?

Yeah.

So it's early Monday morning here in Jordan, and Turkish authorities have cracked down on multiple LGBTQ+ groups and individuals on Sunday morning.

Now, this is an escalation of its decade-long hostility towards that community, especially in the lead up to the elections, and simultaneous police raids began at 1:00 AM in five major cities and resulted in the detaining of dozens of members of the community after breaking into association offices and popular hangout spots.

Fled what became Israel.

So what's the purpose of UNRWA? The UNRWA started as a project after several attempts to try and find political solutions, either get the refugees back, which Israel wouldn't allow, or have them settle in host states, be they, it could be Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, mostly these states, some Iraq, and so on.

And that didn't work out as well too, right? Because the Arab states said, not only do we don't want refugees here, we want a Palestinian state, right? And so there was this decision in the UN called the 194 Resolution to basically give a right of return to the Palestinians and their descendants.

And so this decision, along with the need in the host states to provide some work and relief, basically created UNRWA, right? Increasingly the work part was kind of reconfigured.