Syria is reopening the Nassib border crossing with Jordan on Wednesday morning after a brief closure, and the two countries will jointly examine Jordanian airstrikes on suspected ISIL sites that killed at least seven people in southern Syria.
Syria is reopening the Nassib border crossing with Jordan on Wednesday morning, with regular passenger and commercial traffic resuming, state news agency SANA reported. Nassib is Jordan's only border crossing with Syria, and the two countries will also form a joint security committee to examine Jordanian airstrikes on suspected ISIL sites in southern Syria on Monday.
The strikes killed at least seven people in Deraa and Suwayda, including five members of one family, three of them children, and Syria's emergency ministry responded at four sites. The strikes followed a shooting at a Greek Orthodox church in Karak, Jordan, on Friday, for which ISIL claimed responsibility, which killed at least nine people and wounded 34. Jordan arrested two brothers and their brother-in-law on suspicion of carrying out that attack.
Jordan's Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said the strikes were based on field intelligence against confirmed threats and imminent terrorist operations, expressed deep regret over civilian deaths and stressed respect for Syria's sovereignty. One point remains openly disputed: Jordan claimed the strikes were coordinated with Syria, while Damascus denied this, and this story reports both positions without resolving them.
The reopening and the joint committee are reported by SANA as carried by Al Jazeera, while the death toll and the four response sites come from Syria's civil defence as reported through Associated Press and Reuters background coverage, which also confirms the coordination dispute. The church-shooting casualties and the arrests are reported in the same Al Jazeera account and have not been independently corroborated in this run, so they are attributed to that report.
The reopening matters because Nassib is the main gateway for trade and travel between the two countries, and its closure after the strikes threatened to turn a security operation into a wider diplomatic break. A joint investigation offers both capitals a way to contain the fallout without conceding the central dispute over whether Damascus was warned.
The committee's findings, and whether traffic resumes smoothly on Wednesday, will show whether the border reopening marks a genuine de-escalation or only a pause while both sides prepare their next positions.