Damascus and Amman set up joint inquiry into October airstrikes, sign eleven agreements

Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad Hassan al-Shaibani and his Jordanian counterpart Ayman Safadi met in Damascus on Monday 9 November at the third session of the Syria–Jordan Higher Coordination Council, with ministerial and technical delegations from both sides, Reuters reported from Damascus. The two governments announced a joint security and technical committee to investigate the circumstances of Jordan’s airstrikes of 26 October, which Amman said targeted Islamic State militants linked to a deadly attack on a church in Jordan’s Karak province. Syrian authorities say those strikes killed seven civilians in Deraa province, including three children; that figure is Damascus’s, and no independent verification or Jordanian counter-figure has surfaced. “Work is underway to redress the harm and compensate the innocent victims,” Shaibani told a joint press conference. No amount, mechanism or timeline was given.

The two sides signed eleven cooperation documents covering investment, civil aviation, food security, cloud seeding in the Yarmouk River basin, and a proposed railway connection linking Saudi Arabia to Turkey via Jordan and Syria. Shaibani said bilateral relations were at their strongest in decades, that twenty of Syria’s twenty-two ministries are now in direct cooperation with Jordan, and that bilateral trade had nearly tripled in the past year to roughly $330 million — a ministerial assertion offered without a base period or methodology. He said Jordan had shown “understanding and openness” over the Deraa incident. Safadi, per the wire, said the two countries were working together against cross-border drug trafficking, reaffirmed Jordan’s support for Syria against Israeli attacks, and urged international intervention to halt them before the region was pushed toward further escalation.

Assessment: The committee is the thing to watch, and almost nothing about it was disclosed: no composition, no terms of reference, no reporting deadline. Until those exist, a joint inquiry is a way of moving a casualty dispute off the diplomatic table rather than resolving it, and compensation remains an announcement, not a payment. Note what Amman bought with eleven signatures — Syrian acceptance that Jordan may strike ISIS targets on Syrian soil, framed as a shared security file rather than a violation. Note also where Safadi spent his sharpest language: on Israeli strikes, not on Jordan’s own.