One morning last month, police sealed its branches across Jordan, the union was banned from operating for two years, and its 13 elected council members were arrested on secret allegations. Emergency laws passed to fight coronavirus have been used to detain some of the thousands of teachers who have turned out to protest, according to lawyers for the union.

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/19/jordan-arrests-1000-teachers-in-crackdown-on-union](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/19/jordan-arrests-1000-teachers-in-crackdown-on-union)

Neither a violent criminal, nor a political dissident, Obeidat is one of what lawyers estimate is about 1,000 teachers arrested across Jordan in the past few weeks as part of a crackdown on the kingdom’s largest independent trade union, the Jordan Teachers’ Syndicate. The 100,000-strong union held the longest public-sector strikes in Jordan’s history last October, culminating in what it called a “historic agreement” to increase teachers’ wages.