The treacherous terrorist attack on a church in Karak governorate came as a terrible shock to the Jordanian and Arab conscience. It violated the sanctity of a place of worship in an attempt to stab at the values of religious coexistence and harmony.
What deepened the shock is that this painful attack, which took innocent lives, is the first of its kind in Jordan's history to target a Christian place of worship. That gives it a shocking particularity in a country known for a rare model of social stability despite its sensitive geopolitical position.
Across the Arab world, the crime is not unique; it belongs to a dark history that includes earlier bloody episodes in Egypt, Iraq, and Syria. But a close look at the frequency and trajectory of such attacks, in number and in kind, shows that their intensity has declined markedly in recent years. They have shifted from coordinated suicide operations to sporadic strikes by isolated sleeper cells, which seek soft targets to announce their existence and to show that claims about drying up their sources are untrue. The first conclusion, then, is that terrorism has declined organizationally, in its structure and in the weight of its targets, without its danger disappearing.
This heinous crime cannot be separated from its political context: the exploitation of acute regional tensions and international ideological incitement. With the Middle East in military ferment and confrontation centered on the war with Iran, extremist cells have tried to exploit states' preoccupation with these larger conflicts and, true to form, to strike state and society by surprise.
At the same time, the media machine of the takfiri organizations exploits hardline Western statements to recruit online and to indoctrinate their lone wolves. Targeting a Christian church is a sick reaction and a deluded revenge, meant to ignite manufactured sectarian chaos in a safe and stable society that has never known such strife.
The problem goes beyond excess in religion. It is a wholly mistaken understanding of religion, and of how truly to defend the teachings and values of Islam. That understanding, which leads to the killing of innocents, is the real conspiracy against the Arab and Islamic world, and institutions, societies, and elites must confront it.
When an Arab or Muslim state succeeds, through its military and intelligence institutions, in building a security wall that resists penetration, extremist thought runs into a structural impotence. It changes the method and target of its treachery, turning from regular forces to "illusory victories" in open social spaces: places of worship, or museums, as in the March 2015 attack on the Bardo Museum, next to the parliament building in Tunis. At this stage, civilian gatherings and peaceful houses of worship become the crime scenes of lone wolves, who exploit these soft targets' lack of protection to cause the greatest possible bloodshed and media shock.
Here lies the paradox of the lone wolf: organizational fragility combined with a capacity for treachery. Structurally, lone wolves are the weakest, most fragmented, and most isolated links in the chain of extremism, unable to confront or penetrate fortified security sites. Their danger lies in the impossibility of predicting their random movements. They strike soft targets without warning, to prove that military weakness need not prevent them from harming social peace.
Extremist thought persists, and refuses to die, because it is not merely a military organization that can be dismantled. It is a closed cognitive structure and an ideological system that feeds on economic fragility and crises of identity. It has a defensive mechanism known in the literature on terrorism as "tactical dormancy," and a capacity to mutate and to reproduce its ideas across history, turning every kind of fragility in this tense world to its use. Its drivers, hate speech, a sense of marginalization, geopolitical tensions, and civilizational shocks, renew themselves.
So, the territorial defeat of the organizations does not kill the idea. It turns it into a "liquid idea" that travels through digital space. That is how such thought sleeps through periods of security pressure, only to wake again as cluster cells or lone wolves the moment one of its drivers meets a lapse in vigilance that can be exploited to score a bloody goal.
The security approach has done its part well against terrorist organizations. Lone wolves, however, require of us a deeper, more attentive, and stricter social vigilance.
