AMMAN, JORDAN (AP) – Jordan’s monarch is travelling to Germany for a spine surgery, Jordan’s palace announced on Saturday.
King Abdullah II, 60, will undergo a surgery to treat “a herniated disk in the thoracic spine” at a hospital in Frankfurt next week, and will return home after a recovery period of one week.
The statement from the Arab kingdom’s Royal Hashemite Court said the king suffers from intermittent spine pain “as a result of parachute jumping during his years of service in special operations”, and doctors advised him to receive the surgery as the pain increased recently.
King Abdullah ascended the throne in 1999 after the death of his father, King Hussein.
The kingdom has been mostly stable in a turbulent Middle East and received hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the civil war in neighbouring Syria over the past decade.
Last year, a rift within the royal family went public for the first time after the king put his half brother under house arrest on charges of attempts to destabilise the country. In March, the palace said that Prince Hamzah has apologised for his role in the rare palace feud and is seeking the king’s forgiveness.
