SELDOM has a newly arrived diplomat presented credentials under conditions as bizarre as those that faced U.S. Ambassador L. Dean Brown in Amman last week. Brown, who had been pinned down for seven days in the beleaguered American embassy as civil war raged outside, clambered aboard a Jordanian armored personnel carrier and was whisked to Al-Hummar Palace on the fringe of the city. There, King Hussein accepted the envoy's credentials and discussed emergency U.S. assistance for Jordan. The fact that the King was on hand and receiving ambassadors indicated how the struggle was going. During ten days of battle, between the Jordanian army and the guerrillas of the Palestine liberation movement, the army seized several fedayeen strongholds in and around Amman, practically destroyed a guerrilla redoubt not far from the capital at Zerká, mauled a larger force of Syrian tanks and troops, and laid siege in the north near Syria to guerrilla-held Irbid, Jordan's second-largest city after Amman. The royal army said it had captured an estimated 5,000 prisoners, including the two top aides to Yasser Arafat, head of Al-Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization, which includes eleven major guerrilla groups. Among the army's captives were twelve Syrians, who said they had been told before moving into Jordan that they were about to fight Israelis; they seemed stunned to find themselves facing other Arabs.
Hussein's victory, however, was bought at an enormous cost. Two years ago, in the midst of a less sanguinary struggle with the fedayeen, the tough little monarch warned: "If I don't rule this country, then I shall burn it." He still rules, but much of his country is already in ruins; and the Palestinians, who account for approximately two-thirds of his 2,200,000 people, are not likely to forget how he cracked down on the guerrillas.
The army estimates civilian casualties at about 1,800; the guerrillas claim 10,000 are dead. "God is my witness," said Arafat in a letter to Arab heads of state. "A massacre has been committed. Thousands of people are under the debris. Bodies have rotted. Hundreds of thousands of people are homeless. Our dead are scattered in the streets. Hunger and thirst are killing our remaining children, women and old men." Only reluctantly did the guerrillas agree at week's end to a cease-fire arranged by Sudanese Strongman Jaafar Numeiry and pressed by Arab leaders meeting in Cairo (see following story). The truce had hardly taken effect before Numeiry and other Arab leaders were accusing Hussein of breaking it.