At midnight on a brisk February evening, Imad al-Ash heard a knock at his door. He opened it to find what many Jordanians fear most — a force of nearly 40 agents from the country’s shadowy intelligence organization, known here as the mukhabarat.
Falling on the wrong side of the mukhabarat — which performs both international and domestic intelligence — strikes terror into even the most hardened enemies of Jordan.
But Al-Ash was far from the typical religious extremist or criminal that might draw the agency’s attention. A fifth year computer science student at the University of Jordan, he was not an activist and, although a devout Muslim, he steered clear of fundamentalist groups.
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