The Gangs of Syria

A casual observer of the Syrian uprising could be excused for viewing the conflict as a battle between good and evil. The narrative that dominates Western media coverage certainly paints the struggle as a black and white contest between freedom-lovers and bloodthirsty authoritarians. But in reality, this ethnic quarrel should be described only in a smear of grays. Contrary to neoconservative innuendos, the story of Syria is not that of a unified rebel army, acting on a popular mandate against an unsupported tyrant. Rather, it is the story of a multi-layered, kaleidoscopic civil war.
Of Syria’s myriad ethnic and religious elements, it is true that most, though certainly not all, wish to dispose of President Bashar al-Assad. But most factions, gripped by the fears of a post-Assad state, also wish to destroy one another. The once anti-autocratic rebellion, in other words, has devolved into an internecine war of ethnicity and ideology. Through this devolution, the rebels have destroyed all prospects of a pluralistic, post-Assad democracy, and have rendered the West’s pro-resistance designs both unrealistic in their goals and immoral in their effects.
The Ethnic Cauldron
To understand the fractionalization of Syria, one must first understand the nation’s demographics. Sunni Arabs, by far the largest ethno-religious group, make up approximately 65 percent of the population. The Kurds, a non-Arab people with irredentist ambitions, compose eight percent of the total.
Though only representing 13 percent of the population, the Alawite sect of Shia Islam controls the state bureaucracy, almost in its entirety. Christians, accounting for 10 percent, compose the only other significant “ethnic group,” as small smatterings of Druze, Turkmen, and other obscure peoples fill the remainder.
The Sunni Arabs, the meat of the resistance, have been embittered about their relegation to second fiddle in civil society since the early 20th century. Though they had deprived Alawites of the most basic civil rights before World War I, the Alawites would turn the tables beginning in the 1920s through their complicity with the French counterinsurgency in the region. Having gained control of the military, the Alawites slowly took over the Syrian government in the 1950s before consolidating power through Hafez al-Assad’s installation as dictator in 1970. For the next 42 years, the Sunnis became inured to the rule of an ethno-religious group they had once suppressed. Hafez al-Assad and his successor, Bashar al-Assad, would come to be symbols of Sunni discontent. But the hatred of these leaders touches merely the surface of historical foment; the substance of the Sunni gripe lies not with the abuses of Syria’s political vanguard, but with the Alawite sect in general.
Indeed, the sectarian atrocities committed by Sunni rebels make painfully clear that the war is one of ethno-religious grievance. In Sunni cities like Homs, Alawites must disguise their accents for their own survival, and in certain regions, such as rural Hama, Alawites who travel outside of their village confines are routinely murdered. In one chilling Reuters account, 39 Alawites from the village Rabia were slaughtered, one of whom was dismembered and delivered in a paper bag to his family.
The atrocities committed against the Sunnis, mostly by the gruesome pro-regime shabbiha, are equally repugnant. These are the massacres with which we are most familiar, smattering the front pages of most major Western, Saudi, and Egyptian newspapers. In one such incident, 108 Sunnis, including 34 women and 49 children, were summarily executed in two “line-ups.”
Before rushing to judgment, one must note that the actions of the pro-regime forces, however offensive, are typically driven by fear rather than by bloodlust. These pro-government factions are collections of Alawites, Christians, and other minority groups, who believe correctly that a Sunni takeover would lead to massacre, exile, and abuse for their respective peoples. As longtime Western liaison to the Assad regime, Trinity University Professor David Lesch explained to the HPR, “the shabbiha is motivated by survival, by the belief that if the Sunnis come to power, they’d be wiped out. Unfortunately, this fear is not unfounded… this is a cycle that’s been repeated throughout Middle Eastern history.”
After half a century of Alawite domination, the Sunni majority is also driven by fear of marginalization and abuse. Thus, what political scientists call an “ethnic security dilemma” has now taken hold of Syrian society, as multiple groups attempt to destroy one another in a self-defeating, but self-perpetuating effort to ensure their own security.
Confounding Western moral stereotypes, the Christian component of these pro-regime forces is as much a party to the security dilemma as any other actor. Though the group had been largely insulated from the pernicious elements of Syrian society by the relatively secular Assad regime, 2.1 million Christians now find themselves among the victims of lurid Sunni violence. The Syrian Orthodox Church for instance has described an “ongoing ethnic cleansing” against Christians by the Free Syrian Army, and has claimed that Islamists of the al-Faruq brigade have expelled 90 percent of Christians from Homs, confiscating their possessions in the process.
Speaking to the HPR from the Syrian National Council (SNC) headquarters in Ankara, SNC spokesman Radwan Ziadeh claimed that the Christians would “be protected” in a rebel-controlled Syria “because they are part of the revolution.” During the conversation, Ziadeh even implied that Christians supported the resistance, but this pro-rebel narrative is little more than a propagandistic façade. As Lesch notes, and as is factually true, “Bashar al-Assad has co-opted Christians into the government,” and it is Assad’s pro-minority regime to which they have staked the survival of their community.
The ethnic groups that have avoided this dilemma have often done so by forming irredentist militias. While some have tucked their separatist ambitions into folds of the Free Syrian Army, the Kurdish peshmerga in the northeast have organized into fully autonomous militias of their own. They now control at least one significant city, and with northern Iraq a de-facto Kurdish state, the specter of an independent Kurdistan has stoked separatist ambitions.
With Kurds pining for independence, Sunnis conniving against Christians and Alawites, and Alawites dependent on a destructive regime, one must wonder how this broiling ethnic cauldron, artificially constructed by French imperial whims, ever sustained itself in the first place. It turns out that in addition to a healthy dose of Ba’athist nationalism, the fabric of civil society was reliant on a Leviathan. As Lesch pointed out in The Atlantic, most Syrians looked “across the borders into Lebanon and Iraq to see how sectarian-based countries can implode and fall apart.” Because of their observations, they long accepted a “Faustian or Hobbesian bargain of ‘we will provide stability in a very unstable neighborhood in return for your support and subservience.’” When the stabilizing Leviathan was removed, an interethnic, post-state civil war inevitably arose.
A Holy War
Ethnic sectarianism is not the only casus belli; paralleling the region’s other recent upheavals, the disparate views of Muslims on the role of religion in society have all found violent expression in Syria. On one side of the spectrum, as already alluded to, the Druze, Christians, and, of course, the Alawites favor a strict secularity of the sort provided by Assad’s Ba’athist regime. On the largely Sunni side of the spectrum, thousands of jihadists and armed Islamic extremists have flooded into Syria from neighboring countries, as well as from Kuwait, Tunisia, Algeria, and Pakistan. Meanwhile, as journalist Patrick Seale points out, “Muslim clerics in several Arab countries are inciting young men to go to Syria and fight,” ensuring a steady flow of radicals. These jihadist cells, including al-Qaeda, are demanding a greater role in the management of the rebellion, and Syrians involved in the struggle claim that anti-Assad forces have become increasingly fundamentalist. Even commanders of the FSA, an organization theoretically ambivalent on these issues, have claimed that their struggle is one between Islamists and secularists. “For the first time, we are able to proclaim the word of God throughout this land,” one FSA official pronounced to the BBC. 
Speaking for the SNC, Ziadeh downplayed the role of the radical Islamists in the resistance, describing their numbers as “small” and portraying rebels as, “freedom-fighters…. [aiming] to free their country from dictatorship.” Ex-Israeli ambassador to Syria and current University of Tel-Aviv Professor Itamar Rabinovich provided the HPR with a more balanced assessment, conceding that the conflict was, “not started by the Muslim Brotherhood,” but also asserting that, “Islamists of all shades are well-represented in the militia… and the SNC… they are there, and they are significant.”
Not only does this polarization contribute to the irreconcilability of pro and anti-regime forces, but it also has divided the resistance’s base of support. Sarah Birke and Katie Paul documented for The New Republic extreme unease amongst the Sunni populace over the Islamism of anti-Assad militias in the rebel region of Jebel Zawiya. Furthermore, because of the radicalizing resistance, Alawite defectors who have taken up arms against their former comrades find themselves extremely isolated within a movement increasingly anathema to their interests. Thus, even if the extreme ethnic tensions that underlie the Syrian Civil War could be assuaged, discordant views on religion in government would make responsible statecraft impossible.
The Gangs of Syria
Compounding these ethnic and religious divides, the sheer disorganization of the rebels has led to a spider-webbing of the civil war’s political fault lines. The basic unit of anti-Assad resistance could best be described as a gang. There are hundreds of them, ranging in seriousness from a group of miscreants organizing over Facebook to a highly militarized network with a sophisticated leadership structure.
Unfortunately, many gangs are more interested in loot than they are in justice. In a New York Times dispatch from Aleppo, residents claimed that not only were rebels fighting pro-regime forces, but they were also battling rival militias over control of the city. Militia roadblocks that robbed Syrians of all ethnic stripes were also commonplace.
Even those ‘gangs’ with nobler intentions are hopelessly disjointed. Though the FSA is attempting to legitimize itself as the central anti-Assad coordination center, even the hawkish Institute for the Study of War (ISW) concluded that it “functions more as an umbrella organization than a traditional military chain of command.” Most of the militias nominally affiliated with the FSA maintain no direct contact to its leadership, and plenty of militias dismiss the FSA’s authority altogether. Lesch told the HPR that the rebels were “certainly not one group,” a product of the Sunnis’ “natural decentralization.” What’s worse, he claims, militias of a fundamentalist strain can typically rely on aid from conservative sources in the Arab world, allowing them to dismiss the FSA with a flap of the hand. Journalists Sarah Birke and Katie Paul even encountered three such militias in the Idleb sub-region of Jebel Zawiya, an area characterized by the ISW as a stronghold of FSA influence. Their regional inquiries found all local militias proud, and even boastful, of their independence from upper command structures.
Similarly, the Syrian National Council, Syria’s nominal opposition government, performs few useful functions. Without any pro-regime groups, moderate or otherwise, nor any Kurdish nationalists, the SNC has little chance of transcending the sectarian fray. Ziadeh conceded that reconciliation across these cleavages was currently impossible for the council, given Assad’s obstinacy. Even the SNC’s members characterize the organization as an ineffective, hopelessly corrupt front for Islamists, frustrations which led to the March resignation of three of the Council’s most prominent liberal members, Haitham al-Maleh, Kamal al-Labwani, and Catherine al-Talli.
Partly because of this leadership vacuum, most anti-regime militias show little in the way of civility. Among other abuses, one armed group, Saquor al-Sham, was shown on YouTube sending off captives in booby-trapped cars to blow up army checkpoints.  Though Western media rely disproportionately on rebel rumors, it should come as no surprise that these roving gangs of young Islamists are hardly more disciplined than the pro-regime forces.
The Futility of Intervention
With all sides motivated by fear or faith, a pro-rebel intervention would simply tilt the scales in favor of one people at the expense of another. The result, if we base our predictions on expert testimony and actual rebel actions, would simply be the replacement of a secularist, pro-Shia, pro-minority regime, with a conservative, anti-minority, Sunni one. Furthermore, as the fault-lines of the conflict are largely ethnic and religious rather than political, it is hard to see how the deposition of Assad would assuage sectarian violence.
Even if the West supported the resistance, it remains unclear which elements the intervening powers would back. There is no organized resistance, a fact that neoconservatives readily admit. The Free Syrian Army and Syrian National Council are fractured, unrepresentative of the rebel movement, and tainted by Islamism. According to Lesch, “hundreds of CIA agents” are on the ground trying to separate the democratic wheat from the radical chaff. But with a gang-driven, revanchist Sunni population dominated in the countryside by religious conservatives, we might be simply culling worms from a rotten apple.
So what will happen if the West refuses to intervene? This is a matter of debate among experts, but it currently seems unlikely that the Assad regime will fall anytime soon. Despite the panoply of high-level defections and the frenzied coverage of Homs and Aleppo, the government still controls the vast majority of the country.
But as civil war continues, with the Syrian government ostracized from much of the world and hated by many of its subjects, its military and administrative capacities will likely atrophy. If the government’s hold on Syria collapses altogether, it is  probable that the country will devolve into fiefdoms. Rabinovich opines that the Alawites will construct a rump state in their mountainous heartland between Turkey and Lebanon, while the plains and the Mediterranean coast fall under Sunni control. The Kurds would also create an independent state in the northeast, forcing a cascade of strategic assessments in Ankara, Baghdad, and Tehran.
Thus, the kaleidoscope of Syria, in the absence of interference, will revert to its component parts or stay in the hands of the minorities. In the former case, the artificial, colonial boundaries of Syria would essentially melt into a more natural arrangement.
Neither of these options, Balkanization or continued minority domination is ideal, especially given Assad’s recent lack of scruples. But a brutal, Islamist tainted, anti-minority confederation of gangs is not a preferable alternative. Given their conservative tendencies, gruesome thuggery, and closed tent, trigger-happy approach to minorities, robust support of the rebels would simply be a means of pouring fuel onto the raging sectarian fire.