The Ammarin Tribe:

The Ammarin are derived from the tribe of Bani Atiyeh, a large tribe with branches in the Hijaz (in Saudi Arabia), Jordan, and Egypt. The Ammarin tribe consists of five branches: Eyal Awwad, al-Shousheh, Eyal Hameed, al-Gmour, al-Hasaseen, and al-Bakhaiteh. Eyal Awwad the Ammarin Fuqara, the branch of Eyal Awwad.

The Ammarin claim descent from two brothers of Bani Atiteh, called Atiyeh and Nasser. The former of these two stayed in Hijaz while the latter came to Rakhm, in southern Palestine. From that deereh they traveled to Gaza where they traded with a merchant called Abou Khadra, who sold to them on credit. In due course, their debts to him grew to the point where he asked for repayment, which they could not provide. He took seventy-five of their horses, which were not sufficient to cover the total value of the debt, but they were a major loss for the tribe. Enraged, they burned his books of accounts by way of revenge. But Abou Khadra was a man of parts. He gathered his men and attacked the Ammarin. The battle developed into a major massacre of the tribe, after which they moved east, across to Wadi Araba into Jordan.

At some point in the early nineteenth century, Awwad, an ancestor of today’s Ammarin, bought land in Beidha, close to Petra, for the price of ten goats and a gun. His estate, which was a plateau in the mountains, came to be known as Farsh Eyal Awwad (roughly, the estate of the sons of Awwad). Slowly, his cousins and their families joined him. As the tribe grew, competition, and later conflict, developed between them, and the neighboring tribes, al Rafai’ah and al Saeediyeen. After a bloody battle, which the Ammarin won, the Saeediyee fled to Buseira (near Tafileh in southern Jordan), while the Rafai’ah were expelled to Khirbet al Rafai’ah, also near Tafileh.