Iraq–Jordan border

A line between two new kingdoms

Until the First World War this desert was part of the Ottoman Empire, and nobody needed a line here. The border exists because of what came after: the Arab Revolt of 1916–18, and Britain and France dividing the Ottoman Empire's Arab lands between them.^[1]

In 1920 the San Remo conference turned the wartime Sykes–Picot understanding into mandates. Britain took Mesopotamia and Palestine, and France took Syria and Lebanon.^[1] France expelled Faisal from Damascus in July 1920. Britain made him King of Iraq in 1921, and his brother Abdullah became ruler of Trans-Jordan, a new semi-autonomous emirate.^[1] Both lay under British mandate, and no one wrote down where one ended and the other began.^[1]

Britain did care about the desert between them. It saw a land link across it toward India and South Asia as vital, much like the Suez Canal.^[1] So the question was never which villages went where, because there were almost none. The border just had to connect two fixed points.

Two endpoints, then a straight line

The endpoints were settled first, in other treaties. In 1922 Britain's agreements with Ibn Saud's Sultanate of Najd ended the Iraq–Najd frontier at Jabal ʿUnayzah, near where latitude 32°N crosses longitude 39°E.^[1] In 1931 a Franco-British protocol fixed the northern end near Jabal at-Tanf, on the line between French Syria and the British mandates.^[1]

In the meantime, Trans-Jordan's 1928 nationality law gave only a provisional description: a line from 39°E, 32°N to the nearest point on the 1920 Anglo-French frontier.^[1]

The first agreement both sides signed came in the summer of 1932. It was an exchange of letters between Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri as-Saʿid, the British Resident in Amman C.H.F. Cox, and Emir Abdullah.^[1] The letters allowed the line to follow landmarks as long as it stayed within 5 km of a straight line. But no boundary commission was ever appointed, so it simply stayed a straight line. As late as 1970 it had no boundary markers on the ground.^[1]

“Between these two terminal points the frontier follows where possible prominent physical features, provided that it shall not diverge more than 5 kilom. from a straight line between these two terminal points.”^[1]

The road and the pipeline

A road did get built across the desert. The only paved, all-weather road across the border crosses near its midpoint, about 43 miles (69 km) south of the Syrian tripoint.^[1] Next to it ran the Iraq Petroleum Company pipeline, which carried Iraqi oil to the Mediterranean at Haifa until 1948. After 1948 the pipe was taken up and Iraqi oil went west through Syria instead.^[1]

Today that road is the only official crossing: Karameh on the Jordanian side, Trebil on the Iraqi side. It is the main land route between Jordan's port of Aqaba and Iraq.^[3] Iraq closed it in July 2015 to stop Islamic State fighters taxing trucks on the Iraqi highway. It reopened on 30 August 2017. Jordan's exports to Iraq had fallen by about 70% during the closure.^[3]

1984: the straight line gets doglegs

In March 1984, in the middle of the Iran–Iraq War, the two governments signed a new boundary agreement.^[4] At the time Iraq depended heavily on Jordan: the port of Aqaba and the road across this border carried much of its trade and war supplies.^[4]

The new line leaves the old one in the south. It starts where Iraq's border with Saudi Arabia ends, as redrawn in their December 1981 treaty, and runs to the old ʿUnayzah tripoint. From there it turns sharply several times before rejoining the northern stretch, which runs straight to Syria.^[2][4] The turns swap small areas of land. One of them put a desert airstrip that had straddled the old line entirely inside Iraq.^[4] You can see the swaps on the map above, where the dashed 1932 line departs from today's border.

Jordan ratified the 1984 agreement. When the US State Department's Geographer reviewed it in 1992, there was no evidence Iraq had done the same, and the treaty had not been deposited with the United Nations. The US therefore treats it as a de facto boundary: both countries use it on their maps and respect it in practice.^[2]

People on both sides

Almost nobody lives along the line itself. Herding tribes have long grazed and watered their animals on both sides, and in 1970 the US Geographer noted that these movements carried on undisturbed. There were no active disputes over where exactly the line ran.^[1] The nearest town on the Jordanian side is Ar Ruwayshid, roughly 80 km west of the crossing on the same highway.^[2]