The Arab Spring comes to Syria
Syria is not isolated from what is happening in the Arab world. We are part of this region. We influence and are influenced by it, but at the same time we are not a copy of other countries.
Bashar al-Assad speech to the People’s Assembly, 30 March 2011.
Syria’s Presidential Palace towers over Damascus. Built by Hafez al-Assad, its imposing white marble walls stand alone on Mount Mezzeh in the west of the capital like a modern-day castle, leaving the Syrians below with no doubt who is in charge. Yet Hafez’ son and successor, Bashar al-Assad, used this looming fortress only for official functions, and opted instead to live with his family in a modest apartment in the nearby upper middle-class neighbourhood of Malki. Living among the people, surrounded by minimal security and even driving his own car were important components of an image that Assad and his supporters carefully crafted. Contrasting himself to his father and other Middle Eastern dictators, Syria’s President was presented as approachable, modern and popular. It was therefore sitting on a leather sofa in his home rather than in the cold empty palace that Assad gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal on 31 January 2011. He spoke of his confidence that the wave of unrest spreading across the Arab world at that moment, soon dubbed ‘the Arab Spring’, would not spread to Syria. In what would prove to be a hubristic gloat, he claimed, “We have more difficult circumstances than most of the Arab countries but in spite of that Syria is stable.”1
Six weeks earlier a frustrated youth in far off Tunisia had unexpectedly set the Middle East aflame. On 17 December 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi a 26-year-old street vendor, self-immolated in frustration at the latest in a long line of humiliations meted out to him by the authorities. Within hours protests erupted in his home town of Sidi Bouzid in the poor Tunisian interior. Opposition swelled and spread to the capital, Tunis. On 14 January, under popular pressure Tunisia’s military ended the 24-year autocratic rule of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, who fled by plane for exile in Saudi Arabia. Few expected events in Tunisia to reverberate elsewhere.2 When Saddam was toppled in 2003 it had not led to the regional democratic awakening that the Bush administration had hoped for, so why should a small country on the Arab world’s periphery be different? Western and regional governments had for decades discounted the importance of the Middle East’s populations, dealing directly with autocratic rulers and with little thought to popular opinion. Yet the people power of the Tunisians inspired copycat protests across the Arab world where populations shared the frustrations and hardships of Mohamed Bouazazi. First came protests in neighbouring Algeria on 29 December 2010. Then, once Ben Ali fled, a wave of unrest erupted in Jordan on 14 January 2011, Oman on the 17th, Egypt on the 25th and Sudan on the 30th. Egypt, the most populous Arab state saw sustained, widespread and mostly peaceful public protest, with hundreds of thousands gathering for days in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Echoing events in Tunisia, on 10 February in the name of the people the military ousted Hosni Mubarak, who had ruled for thirty years. This in turn set off another wave of regional protest, hitting Iraq on 12 February, Bahrain on the 14th, Libya on the 17th, Kuwait on the 19th, Morocco on the 20th and even eastern Saudi Arabia on 11 March.
Yet on his leather sofa, Assad believed his dictatorship would somehow be immune. Unlike his western-allied neighbours that were being toppled, Assad told the Wall Street Journal he was “very closely linked to the beliefs of the people”. While acknowledging Syria’s economic difficulties, stating, “we do not have many of the basic needs for the people”, he remained confident that his anti-US ‘Resistance Axis’ foreign policy was so in tune with popular opinion that it would compensate for shortcomings elsewhere. This confidence proved to be misplaced. On 6 March a group of teenagers were arrested in the southern Syrian town of Deraa for scrawling anti-regime graffiti, echoing the slogans shouted in Tahrir Square the previous month. It would prove to be Syria’s own Mohamed Bouazizi moment.
By the end of the month Syrians too would be out on the street demanding change and, it would seem, Assad’s boasts of Syria’s difference were wrong. But were they? The question of Syria’s similarity or difference to other states in the Arab Spring greatly impacted national and international reactions to the emerging unrest there. Initially foreign governments shared Assad’s mistaken belief that Syria was different, and adopted a cautious line. Months later, many went too far the other way, believing Syria to be so similar to Tunisia and Egypt that the regime would soon collapse. While the thinking behind those miscalculations will be discussed later, this chapter examines Syria’s eruption into revolt to assess how similar or different it truly was. As shall be seen, Assad would tragically prove to be only half wrong. Below the façade of a modernising young ruler leading populist foreign polices, the same economic disparity, political disenfranchisement and social resentment existed as in other protesting Arab states. However, the structure of its ruling regime and the complexities of its relationship with society would mean that Syria would not mimic Tunisia and Egypt in the swift exit of their leaders. Assad was correct when he told his parliament on 30 March, “Syria is not isolated from what is happening in the Arab world … but at the same time we are not a copy of other countries.” It was similar enough to be caught up in events, but different enough to have quite different, far bloodier, outcomes.
Syria’s Troubles
The image: Assad’s Syria
Like many autocratic states, on the surface Syria appeared stable. Assad apparently enjoyed a degree of genuine popularity prior to 2011, although the wall of fear ever present in dictatorships such as Syria made it difficult to truly assess. His brief spell studying in London and marriage to a glamorous British-raised Syrian, Asma Akhras, added to this modern, approachable image compared to his stern father. Many restaurants in the old cities of Damascus, Aleppo and Homs boasted pictures of Assad eating there when he had ‘dropped in’ unannounced. Hafez al-Assad’s brash Soviet-style personality cult was replaced by an initially softer cult, with officials insisting that the pictures of Assad and family on cycling holidays plastered on market stalls and car windows indicated spontaneous adoration and was not officially ‘encouraged’.3 Even disgruntled elements in Syrian society tended to distinguish between Assad and his regime: the President was seen as held back in his desire to reform Syria by remnants of his father’s era – the ‘Old Guard’. While he won an absurdly inflated 97% victory margin in unopposed re-election in 2007, many commentators believed he would have won a genuinely democratic poll had he allowed it.4
After he had spoken in surprisingly open terms in his inaugural presidential address in 2000, even criticising the old ways of his father, hopes of reform were raised both at home and abroad. Political reform was mooted but sidestepped and transforming the economy was prioritised. Socialism had been slowly abandoned under Hafez, but the economy remained heavily state-dominated and sluggish. Oil exports were diminishing, having previously provided vital foreign currency in the 1990s after the Soviet Union collapsed, bringing an end to its economic support. Meanwhile the forced withdrawal from Lebanon in 2005, which had been a useful source of black market income, and the sanctions inflicted by the George W. Bush White House, prompted an accelerated move towards a ‘social market economy’. Under the leadership of Nibras al-Fadel and Abdullah Dardari, a Deputy Prime Minister (2005–11), a 10th ‘Five Year Plan’ was launched in 2006.5 Private banks and a stock exchange opened. A marked increase in foreign direct investment, especially from the Gulf, prompted growth in luxury construction and tourism – the latter providing 12% of GDP in 2010 – while trade flourished, particularly with post-Saddam Iraq.6 GDP more than doubled in five years, from $27.9bn in 2005 to $60.1bn in 2010.7
The new tourists, mostly from the Gulf and Turkey, plus some westerners, would see this positive visage of Assad’s Syria. Parts of central Damascus and Aleppo were transformed: modern shopping centres and western coffee shop chains appeared, old cities were smartened with new boutique hotels and Ottoman courtyard restaurants. Syria’s ‘mosaic’ of diverse religious and sect communities peacefully coexisted, with large churches standing beside mosques – a sharp contrast to the persecution of Christians in neighbouring Iraq. Syrians were celebrated for their friendliness to visitors. They also seemingly approved of the regime’s anti-US, anti-Israel ‘resistance’ foreign policy and rhetoric, and of Assad himself. Flanked by his popular glamorous wife, labelled by Vogue as ‘the rose in the desert’, Assad’s confidence that Syria would be immune to the Arab Spring did not seem misplaced.
Beneath Assad’s glamour: the murkier reality
Yet problems existed below the surface. Just like the protesters on the streets of Egypt and Tunisia demanding ‘Freedom, Bread and Dignity’, Syrians also had deep political, economic and social complaints. Politically, as in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world, power remained concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite. According to Raymond Hinnebusch, the autocracy built by his father and inherited by Assad was a hybrid of Leninism and Gaullist constitutionalism.8 The 1973 constitution declared the Ba’ath Party the ‘leader in state and society’, and guaranteed it the majority of seats in parliament, the unicameral People’s Assembly. Hafez packed allies and lieutenants into the party’s two executive bodies, the National Command and the Regional Command, from which he would then appoint key administrative positions, including Prime Minister, cabinet and regional governors. At the same time, a parallel, informal power structure kept the regime secure. Hafez ensured that key security, military and intelligence institutions were packed with loyalists, dominated by members of his Alawi sect, the protectors of his regime and the holders of true power.
After coming to power, Bashar al-Assad gradually made changes to this ageing autocratic structure, what Hinnebusch calls ‘authoritarian upgrading’. His efforts consolidated his own power, but they also narrowed his support base, excluding key constituencies. He retired old regime hands, notably Mustafa Tlass (Defence Minister 1972–2004), Abdul Halim Khaddam (Foreign Minister 1970–84 and Vice President 1984–2005) and, on his ascent to power, Hikmat al-Shihabi (Army Chief of Staff until 1998 when forcibly retired to prevent opposition to Assad’s succession) – the ‘Old Guard’ seen by many as holding back reform. Yet these old hands had long established networks of supporters that were now also excluded.9 Their replacements, moreover, were an even narrower clique of technocrats and Bashar loyalists, cynically labelled the ‘New Guard’ by some observers.10 Assad promoted family members to prominent positions in the security structure, notably his brother Maher, brother-in-law Assif Shawkat, and cousin Hafez Makhlouf. He gave even more key security positions to members of the Alawi community than his father had, who had sought to promote prominent Sunni Arabs (the majority sect) like Khaddam and Tlass. Assad’s attempts to shake up the Ba’ath Party largely failed. Though elections were opened up to attract young members and rejuvenate it, he simultaneously relegated the party’s importance. After 2003 government appointments were no longer exclusively drawn from the party, with Dardari a high-profile non-Ba’athist, while funding was cut and the party’s relevance declined. In rural areas local tribal and religious leaders emerged as power brokers in the way that local party bosses once had. The party ceased to be the tool of patronage and (relative) social advancement it had been under Hafez and, despite still counting 12% of the population as members in 2010, was no longer the glue binding both society and political allies to the regime.11
Yet no wider political opening was pursued. One more loyalist party, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, was permitted to join the Ba’ath Party-dominated National Progressive Front in parliament, and loyalist independent ‘non-partisans’ were allowed to stand for election to the powerless body, but that was the extent of political reform in ten years. All independent opposition remained forbidden. Membership of the Muslim Brotherhood remained punishable by death. Calls from liberals for Assad to lead reform were crushed, first the ‘Damascus Spring’ of 2000–1, and then the 2005 ‘Damascus Declaration’ that followed uncertainty after the withdrawal from Lebanon. Many of the liberal leaders of these initiatives, such as Michel Kilo, Riad Seif and Samir Nashar ended up in prison.12
Such arrests typified a darker undertone that Assad showed little sign of curtailing. Syrians are known for their black humour and a popular joke even before 2011 was that life was so much better under Bashar than Hafez, because if you insulted the President, you disappeared. This was preferable to life under Hafez where the same offence would lead to you, your family, and every one of your friends disappearing. Emergency law (officially Decree No. 51) had been in place since 1963, ostensibly due to the continued state of war with Israel but in reality utilised to arbitrarily detain, try and sentence on the grounds of ‘protecting the state’.13 The regime’s tool in this was the Mukhabarat, a ruthless set of intelligence agencies, comprising 50,000–70,000 security officers willing to utilise fear, torture and intimidation routinely. East Germany’s notorious Stasi had originally provided much of the training of the Mukhabarat, including its many interrogation and torture techniques.14 These agents went beyond repression, becoming a fixture of everyday life via widespread corruption.15 Their visible presence increased under Assad, partly because the more benevolent arms of the state, such as peasant and worker unions, shrank from view after economic reforms cut their funding. This meant that in some areas the security services became the principal arm of the regime people interacted with. Also, the withdrawal from Lebanon in 2005 sent a swathe of agents that had previously spent their days harassing and fleecing the Lebanese back home.16 When Syrians, like other Arab protesters, demanded ‘dignity’ the Mukhabarat was the primary target of their anger.
As in much of the Arab world, Assad’s superficial economic successes masked the failure of benefits to be felt across Syrian society. These problems were partly structural, but also the result of policy. Changing demographics put the economy under severe strain. The population exploded under the Assads’ rule, from 3.3m in 1950 to 21m in 2011.17 Much of this came between the 1970s and 1990s, a combination of improved living conditions and a pro-natalist government policy, leading to a sizeable youth bulge: in 2010, 55% of the population were under 24.18 Compounding this was a growth in education, part of Hafez’ socialist legacy. Up to a quarter of youths attended state-funded universities, but, like Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia, found no jobs suitable for their qualifications, falling back frustrated on menial employment or none at all. The regime acknowledged in 2006 that annual economic growth of 6–7% minimum was necessary to find jobs for its increasing population, but the average growth of only 4.9% in 2006–10 proved insufficient. The result was persistent unemployment and under-employment – officially averaging 10.1% in 2003–11, but estimated to be closer to 20% in reality, and much higher among youth.19
Unfortunately for Assad, his proscribed treatment proved worse than the illness. The shift to a social market economy prompted limited successes but it came at significant cost to society. The logic was to gradually adopt market-led economics without the brutal abandonment of the welfare state seen elsewhere. Yet, as David Lesch argues, the result was an ad hoc marketisation that didn’t go far enough to actually produce the jobs needed but still “diminished the social safety net to which many Syrians have become accustomed”.20 There weren’t massive lay-offs from state employment, which continued to employ 20–30% of the population, although some manufacturing, especially in Aleppo, was hit by the availability of Turkish goods under the new free trade agreement. Long-standing subsidies were suddenly removed. The cost of diesel fuel, for example, more than tripled overnight in May 2008 from SYP7.3 ($0.15) to SYP25 ($0.53).21 This, along with the loss of subsidies on fertilisers, hit the peasantry particularly hard, as they relied on fuel for heating, transporting produce and powering water pumps. Rural areas, previously a bastion of regime support, were already suffering from neglect as Assad directed investment in infrastructure towards the cities, and new land laws that took ownership and usage rights away from cooperative models of the past.22
This rural decline was greatly exacerbated by the drought that hit in 2006–10. Water resources had been mismanaged for over fifty years by successive Syrian governments, so when the drought hit it was not surprising that the regime did little to contain the impact. The north-eastern region (governorates of Aleppo, Deir ez-Zor, Hasakah, Idlib and Raqqa) was the worst hit, already home to 58.1% of Syria’s poor. The conjunction of the drought, the lack of regime response made worse by the endemic corruption of officials, and the economic impact of the social market reforms prompted a humanitarian crisis, ultimately leading to massive internal migration. The number working in agriculture dropped from 30% in 2001 to 13.2% in 2010.23 Between 1.2 and 1.5 million migrated, settling in unofficial camps and shanty towns in Aleppo and Damascus, but also in smaller cities like Deraa or Suweida.24 It was estimated that up to 20% of Syrians lived in some sort of rural–urban migration slum by the late 2000s.25 Indeed, the tent camp of Mzeirieb near Deraa swelled with drought victims from the north-east from 2008, adding to the pressures on the local economy and resentment of the regime in the city where Syria’s uprising began. Many of the areas that would join elsewhere had also been impacted by the drought.26
Though it had been slower than Egypt to abandon socialism, Syria was beginning to mirror the largest Arab state in terms of wealth disparity. By 2010, 30% of Syrians lived below the poverty line, 11% below the subsistence level.27 Yet as the slums of Aleppo and Damascus multiplied, the city centres thrived. Luxury housing and hotels boomed as provision of social housing proved wholly inadequate for the needs of the masses.28 According to Bassem Haddad, Hafez had already transformed Syria in the 1990s, “from a semi-socialist state into a crony capitalist state par excellence”, enriching a select number of families tied to the regime.29 However, under Assad and his reforms, the level of wealth accumulated by these families became much more visible. The Assads themselves, but also the Shalish, al-Hassan, Najib, Hamsho, Hambouba, Shawkat and al-As’ad families all gained large stakes in the economy. The most notorious was Rami Makhlouf, Assad’s cousin. Known as ‘Mr 10 Per Cent’, he owned controlling stakes in oil companies, duty-free trade zones, the largest mobile telephone network, Syriatel, and Cham Holding, a controlling company that was granted government monopolies and forced most businessmen to tie themselves to its fortunes to obtain any state contracts or licences.30 Corruption and nepotism had long been rife in Syria, but never quite so blatant.
Closely related to the political and economic troubles were Syria’s social divisions. Again, as with Egypt, Tunisia and other Arab Spring states, Syria had far deeper social divisions than its public narrative of a united ‘mosaic’ nation would suggest. Syria’s diverse sect and ethnic make-up added further complexity to the usual dividing lines of class, geography and kinship found in most other affected Arab states. Both Assads privileged members of the Alawi sect (12% of the population), which had historically been persecuted by rulers from the Sunni Arab majority (65%). A sizeable section of this group improved their economic and social standing as a result of regime patronage, although there remained poor rural Alawi communities. Nevertheless, a combination of material benefit and fear of the alternative successfully bound most Alawis to the fate of the regime. Some Sunnis resented this perceived privilege and many, especially in Hama and Aleppo, supported the Muslim Brotherhood revolt of 1976–82, which deployed anti-Alawi sectarian rhetoric. While enough Sunnis backed Hafez for him to defeat the revolt, Sunni–Alawi tension remained and was exacerbated at times. Assad’s sidelining of key Sunnis such as Tlass and Khaddam didn’t help, nor did the visible wealth of prominent Alawis such as Makhlouf – even though there were many wealthy Sunni and Christian regime-cronies as well. This privilege was extended at a local level in some areas too. In Homs, for example, while the mostly Sunni peasantry were suffering in shanty towns hit by the drought, recent Alawi migrants were rewarded with government jobs.31 A growth in the 2000s of conservative Salafism32 among Sunnis exacerbated matters in some areas, facilitated by the increased provision of social services by Islamic charities as state services were cut.33 While few Salafi sheikhs dared be either anti-Alawi or sectarian, the growth of religiosity and public observation created a more visible wedge between some Sunnis and other Syrians than existed before.
That said, the Alawi–Sunni division should not be overstated. While sectarian resentment existed among some Sunnis towards some Alawis, and some Alawis reciprocated, it would be inaccurate to say these feelings were widespread and prominent across both communities. As ever, in a closed state like Syria where such issues were deliberately repressed, the extent and depth of such divisions are difficult to assess but the lack of sectarian slogans in early protests suggests this wasn’t initially the main source of frustration. The significance of the sect should not be diminished: clearly the Alawi–Sunni tension in particular played an important role in fuelling anti-Assad protest and directing the development of the civil war and its international dimension thereafter. However, neither should Syria’s many problems prior to 2011 be reduced to simply one of long-festering sectarian resentment. Not all Alawis sided with the regime, not all Sunnis sided with the opposition, and not all Syrians were motivated by ethno-sectarian concerns. As shall be discussed, variations over space and time were considerable, and political, economic, geographical, tribal, ethnic and local motivations were to prove as divisive as sect.
Unrest begins
Despite these long- and short-term problems, it is quite possible that Syrians would have remained largely passive were it not for the trigger of the Arab Spring, which served as both an inspiration and a guide. Syrians had been encouraged to feel a sense of Arab identity for decades and so empathised far more with the 2011 protests than recent equivalents in Iran (2009), Ukraine (2005) and Georgia (2004).34 The shared conditions of political, economic and social dispossession and such slogans as ‘the people want the fall of the regime’ resonated more when screamed in their own language. Technology helped facilitate protest. The proliferation of the Internet and satellite television, particularly the popular al-Jazeera, meant that Syrians were now informed of events immediately. It took days and weeks for Syrians and the world to learn about the Hama massacre in 1982, but in 2011 technology allowed instant information. Smartphones were now widespread and social media such as YouTube, Twitter, Skype and Facebook allowed populations to interact largely under the radar of repressive regimes – something recognised by the US before 2011 when it exempted Skype from sanctions against Syria.35 Syrians could now observe and mimic foreign protesters, and communicate with them to share techniques. The regime did not help itself in this regard. It had welcomed al-Jazeera’s anti-US stories in the 2000s, and encouraged a wide viewership. Moreover, having previously recognised its subversive potential and blocked Facebook and YouTube in 2008, on 9 February 2011 these bans were rescinded. This might have been to make online monitoring by the Mukhabarat easier, or because Assad was convinced it posed no threat. Either way this seems a strange and ultimately damaging decision, given the evolving regional climate.
In early March a group of teenagers from Deraa had been arrested for scrawling on their school wall ‘doctor, your turn next’ – referring to Assad – and, ‘down with the regime’ – a phrase no doubt learned from watching Egypt’s protests on al-Jazeera. They were taken to Damascus and tortured.36 Such cruelty was not abnormal, but their families’ response was. Having had all pleas for their children’s release ignored, on 15 March they and hundreds of others protested outside Deraa’s central Omari mosque. Security forces opened fire, killing four. The next day, at the funerals of those killed, thousands more took to the street, chanting anti-regime slogans and smashing up regime symbols: the offices of the Ba’ath Party and Rami Makhlouf’s Syriatel. As protests continued, by 23 March security forces had launched a harsher crackdown and surrounded the city, cutting off electricity, water and mobile phone networks. But technology had already allowed the news to spread; Deraa was not to be another Hama.
The Deraa protests were not the first inspired by the Arab Spring. Online opposition groups had failed to get a significant turnout for a ‘day of rage’ on 4 February, while a spontaneous protest in Damascus’ old city on 17 February had been dispersed after a personal appeal by the Minister of the Interior. Deraa itself saw minor protests on the same day.37 On 12 March Kurds protested in Qamishli and Hasakah, while on 15–16 March, at the same time as the first Deraa unrest, several hundred liberals and human rights activists gathered in central Damascus only to be violently broken up. However, the Deraa unrest was different. Firstly, opposition was more united and concentrated. Deraa could identify with almost all of the grievances described above. It was poor and agrarian, having suffered from the effects of the drought and Assad’s ‘social market’ reforms. It was homogenous, being mostly Sunni and tribal, while its Mukhabarat commander was an outsider, Assad’s brutal cousin Atef Najib, an Alawi. When protesters were killed, tribal and family ties drew in even more protesters against what seemed like an outside, parasitic force. This contrasts to divided Qamishli and Hasakah, where only Kurds protested, and not Arabs, or cosmopolitan Damascus, where the protesters might have been seen as a liberal elite that struggled to connect to the masses. Secondly, the regime killed. Protesters were arrested in Damascus and Qamishli, but they were murdered in Deraa. An interesting contrast is what happened in neighbouring Jordan, which initially saw more protests than Syria in January and February. Despite some violence, the autocratic monarchy wished to avoid escalation, so ordered police to distribute water and juice cartons to protesters, giving the impression that it was benevolent and open to criticism. Whilst this ultimately proved false, it pacified some and halted the protesters’ momentum.
The reverse was true in Syria. Once news spread about the murders in Deraa, so did protest. The 18th of March saw peaceful protests spread to Homs, Banias and parts of Damascus. By 8 April Latakia, Tartous, Idlib, Qamishli, Deir-ez-Zor, Raqqa and Hama had been added to that list. Protesters shared outrage at events in Deraa, inspiration from the Arab Spring, and long-standing economic and political disenfranchisement. Yet from the beginning some motivations behind unrest were localised, with grievances specific to each area. In the conservative coastal Sunni town of Banias, recent secularising government laws that forbade niqab (face veils) on female teachers – a backlash against increased Salafism among Sunnis – drew ire, while in Homs it was the perceived privilege of Alawi migrants. In the Damascus suburbs, neighbourhoods dominated by recent arrivals from other centres of protest rose up, such as Kafr Susa and Shaghur – which hosted many from Deraa – while other areas remained quiet.38
These differences would prove key in determining the future shape of Syria’s uprising and civil war. French anthropologist Fabrice Balanche has demonstrated that the regime had long treated Syria’s regions in different ways for different political ends.39 The protests were paradoxical from the beginning in sharing a sense of national outrage at the regime, but based on different local grievances. These local and national differences also contributed to the flip side of Syria’s uprising – the fact that a very large number did not join the protests. To understand why this was, the Syrian regime and its support base requires greater analysis. Indeed, as shall be seen, it is the structure and behaviour of the regime that made Assad’s comments about Syrian uniqueness half right. Syria did share the same social, economic and political misery as Egypt, Tunisia and other Arab Spring states, but its regime was a very different animal than those that quickly crumbled.
Buy-ins and coup-proofing
In 2004, when drawing comparisons with the regime of Saddam Hussein, the International Crisis Group remarked, “ironically, the Syrian regime has become far more embedded in the nation’s social fabric than was its Iraqi counterpart because of its comparative limitations and weakness”. Unlike Saddam’s regime, that ruled either through the financial largesse of its oil wealth, or the brutality of its security forces, the Assads’ poorer regime had to deploy a more nuanced strategy to stay in power.40 Certainly fear and brutality were ever-present, the Hama massacre serving as a lesson to all, but like contemporary dictatorships the regime constructed an autocratic bargain with its populace. Such bargains usually included economic growth and political stability. Yet the Assads’ bargain was more complex than Saddam’s or even those of Egypt and Tunisia. As seen by the sizeable chunk of Syrians that did not protest in 2011, one of the factors that made the Assad regime different was the multitude of reasons, or ‘buy-ins’, it had constructed for continuing support.
One buy-in was economic benefit. For all the impact on the working class and peasantry, middle-class Syrians benefited from Assad’s reforms. Damascus’ merchants had long backed the regime, but the more sceptical Aleppo bourgeoisie was consciously courted by Assad. These mostly Sunni merchants were partly wooed by both Assad and his brother Maher marrying into established Sunni families, but more by the economic benefits of infrastructural projects, greater trade and new private schools and universities for their children. Central Damascus and Aleppo were consequently relatively passive in 2011. Syria’s many government workers similarly had reason to remain loyal, and if there was any doubt, the government announced a pay increase on 1 April. A related buy-in was patronage. In Syria’s tribal east, political alignment during the uprising tended to be decided by whether the regime had backed the tribe in the past. Traditional tribes such as the Ageidat, Hadidiyin, and Beni Khalid were marginalised under Assad and transferred their support to the opposition, while the Baggara, who thrived under his rule, continued to back their patron.41 Another buy-in was ideology. Even if Assad was wrong to assume that all Syrians were content because of the regime’s foreign policy, a number were probably convinced by ideas of western and Israeli-led conspiracies after decades of reinforcing propaganda.42 Moreover, some no doubt clung to the fiction that Assad truly was a reformer, even after a decade of failure.
Sect was another source of buy-in. Some, but by no means all, Alawis had enjoyed material benefit from regime patronage, and a larger number were worried that after Assad might come a Sunni-led government determined to exact revenge. Other minorities, the Christians (8% of the population), Druze (3%), Ismailis (1%) and other Shia sects (1%) also feared what might follow. For all its brutality, the avowed secularism of the regime provided a degree of religious freedom not seen in many neighbouring countries, notably Iraq where the fall of Saddam in 2003 had seen the Christian population reduce from 3% to 1%.43 Many secular Sunnis were also drawn in for this reason, seeing Assad as a bulwark against Islamism and Jihadism. Finally was the appeal of stability. Older Syrians may have remembered the unstable pre-Hafez years, while younger ones would have been reminded by regime propaganda of the recent chaos in Iraq and Lebanon. These multiple buy-ins, partly based on Syria’s pre-existing diversity, but also due to the regime’s skilful manipulation and support building over many years, were enough to give many Syrians a reason not to join the opposition in 2011. This may not have amounted to supporting the regime, but neutrality was sufficient to prevent the massive waves of protest that engulfed central Cairo and Tunis, keeping early protests in the periphery and away from the centres of power.44
Another difference between the Syrian regime and those that fell in Egypt and Tunisia was the extent of coup-proofing.45 Many Arab autocrats ‘coup-proofed’ their regimes to prevent their military or security services from toppling the regime. Ben Ali and Mubarak clearly failed on this front. Similarly, while Libyan dictator Mu’ammer Gaddafi’s military didn’t turn on him in the palace, whole battalions defected to the opposition. This did not occur in Syria. Soldiers and officers later deserted individually, but not in whole units, and the military as an institution remained loyal. In Egypt the military proved too independent, developing economic interests which they needed to sacrifice Hosni Mubarak to retain; and extensive ties to the US meant they listened when the Obama administration urged the President’s ouster. No such independence existed in Syria. The officer corps had been packed with loyalists over the years, mostly Alawis, who were linked to or indebted to the Assads.46 This was particularly the case in the elite divisions: the Republican Guard, the Third Corps and the Fourth Armoured Division. The latter was de facto commanded by Maher al-Assad and estimated to be 80% Alawi. While much of the military actually was allowed to decline in the 2000s, when Assad invested instead in hi-tech defences, the best equipment and training was reserved for these elite units, deployed in strategic locations to protect the regime.
A further component of Hafez’ coup-proofing was his use of the Mukhabarat within the regime. Rather than being a single body that might accumulate independent power, Hafez’ Mukhabarat was composed of multiple different agencies, fifteen by 2011, that spied on each other and members of the regime as well as the population. The most important of these were Military Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, General Intelligence and Political Security. Any regime insiders who might have been plotting against Assad therefore feared discovery. In the past high-ranking regime officials had been mysteriously killed, notably Interior Minister Ghazi Kanaan, found dead in 2005, with many speculating he was disposed of to prevent his exposing Assad’s link to the Hariri assassination.47 On numerous occasions after 2011, key officials would similarly disappear from public sight, suddenly retire, or be killed in suspicious circumstances. Though many ‘disappearances’ were rumour or exaggeration, they illustrated that Hafez and his son had constructed a climate of fear that existed within the regime as well. Mukhabarat threats extended to ordinary soldiers and security forces too. In the early days of the protests there were numerous reports of Mukhabarat officers assigned to security and army units to shoot soldiers if they refused to fire on civilians. The opposition body-count website, the Violations Documentation Center in Syria, attests that hundreds of regime soldiers were executed in this manner.48 However it was achieved, the result was that while Egypt’s soldiers in February 2011 refused to fire on protesters, precipitating the swift fall of Mubarak, Assad’s coup-proofing ensured he could call on troops that showed no such reservations a month later.
Regime violence
As protests spread the regime claimed that peaceful demonstrators were, instead, ‘armed gangs’, to justify using force. In most cases, however, the only armed elements were regime agents provocateurs deliberately shooting at soldiers. Security forces and then loyal military units were deployed and casualties mounted, reaching a short-term peak on 22 April, when 109 people were killed in one day. A pattern emerged: demonstrators protested about earlier deaths, more were then killed, initiating larger protests the next day. One such example was on 18 April, when an estimated 10,000 gathered in the Clock Square of Homs, Syria’s third city, to protest about the murder of protesters the day before. After tear gas failed to disperse them, security forces opening fire, killing seventeen people, as recorded by several activists on mobile phone YouTube footage and then sent around the country. Not surprisingly, Homs soon became an early centre of the ‘revolution’, as protesters began calling the anti-Assad movement.
The military and security forces’ violence was supplemented by the Shabiha and Mukhabarat. The Shabiha were gangs of irregular thugs that had previously run smuggling rings and protection rackets – their name deriving either from the Arabic word for ‘ghost’ or alternatively from the distinctive Mercedes S600 they frequently drove, known as Shabah. Though characterised as poor Alawis from the coastal region, often fanatically pro-Assad and anti-Sunni, they drew from a range of poor unemployed, marginalised and urban subaltern young men from different backgrounds.49 These groups performed a number of roles from intimidation through to alleged massacres and systematic rapes in opposition strongholds.50 They operated with a degree of autonomy and were often privately funded by pro-regime individuals, giving the regime some plausible deniability.51 The Mukhabarat arrested thousands in the early months of the uprising. Sometimes known opposition leaders were targeted, but often the arrests were deliberately arbitrary, to intimidate the population. The veteran New York Times journalist Anthony Shadid reported an example in May 2011, when 286 were rounded up in Saqba near Damascus, mostly men aged between 18 and 50.52 Gratuitous torture in custody was widespread, such as the gruesome case of Hamza Ali al-Khateeb, a 13-year-old from Deraa whose body was returned to his family burned, shot and castrated – a clear message to deter potential protesters.
However, there was more to the regime’s response than blunt thuggery. In what would prove a common theme of the uprising and civil war, there was considerable regional variation. While Deraa and Homs were hit hard, Hama and others were initially dealt with more lightly. Sometimes this was the personal choice of local commanders, governors and officials, sometimes an apparent tactical decision. The authorities were keen to avoid a Tahrir Square-style centre for protesters in Damascus, for example.53 Though shopkeepers hoping to join strikes in solidarity with the opposition had their shutters forced open and there were plenty of detentions, there was no arbitrary gunning down in the street, which avoided beginning the pattern seen elsewhere. Importantly, the regime also responded in non-violent ways. It reached out to tribal leaders in the Houran and Suwaida, while it met with religious leaders and key businessmen as well.54 There was an effort to appease conservative Muslims by repealing the ban on niqab for teachers, closing a controversial casino and allowing Syria’s first Islamic television channel, Nour ash-Sham.55 The price of mazout gas oil was lowered. Efforts were made to dissuade the long-oppressed Kurds from joining the unrest by offering citizenship to 200,000 ‘bidoon’ who had been left stateless by previous policies and inviting leaders of their political parties to Damascus for the first time; however, this was refused.56
One high-ranking former official, who later defected, remarked how this behaviour seemed schizophrenic.57 Why was Assad meeting with the families of the arrested teenagers and tribal leaders from Deraa at the same time as his tanks surrounded the city? There are several explanations. The first is that the regime was attempting to divide and rule. This was a tactic deployed successfully by Hafez during the Muslim Brotherhood revolt of 1976–82. In 2011 Assad tried this by tapping into the various buy-ins discussed above. On 30 March he made an underwhelming speech to the People’s Assembly, where he fell back on nationalism. He blamed the unrest on foreign conspiracy, led by satellite TV stations, the United States and Israel. “Deraa is on the frontline with the Israeli enemy!” he railed. This theme repeatedly appeared in regime propaganda thereafter. The fears of minorities and secularists were similarly manipulated, as the regime began to portray the rebellion as Sunni Jihadist. On 18 April, the Interior Ministry announced that it was facing an ‘armed insurrection under the motto of Jihad to set up a Salafist state’.58 Similarly, regime agents travelled to Alawi villages delivering sandbags, and falsely reported that neighbouring Sunnis were planning to attack, while signs appeared in Damascus warning citizens of sectarian strife.59
Assad also made some superficial concessions: the events in Deraa were to be investigated; several political prisoners were released; the long-serving government of Prime Minister Naji al-Otari was dissolved and, when a new cabinet was formed on 16 April, Assad announced that the emergency law was to be lifted. To Assad’s opponents this was either disingenuous or too little too late, and his speech on 30 March prompted even more unrest. The repeal of the emergency law, for example, meant little when security forces remained immune from prosecution, and new laws to ‘protect national security’ granted them similar powers. However, for those still clinging to the notion of Assad the frustrated reformer, this sliver of reforms was enough – especially when the opposition offered little alternative. Indeed, these tended to resonate more with the older generation and there were instances of a generational divide within the middle classes: youth heading out to protests against the wishes of their loyalist parents. Assad’s divide and rule practice was not as successful as his father’s, excluding far too large a portion of the population. However, he did show sufficient adaptability to successfully tap into the buy-ins of his regime in March–April 2011 to retain enough key supporters.60 Pro-regime counter-demonstrations involving tens of thousands were arranged in Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, Hama and Hasakah on 29 March to illustrate this.
The second reason for this early ‘schizophrenia’ was internal divisions within the regime hierarchy. The inner workings of the regime are notoriously opaque, so getting a clear sense of what took place is difficult. However, a combination of regime experts and high-level defectors, who obviously benefit from presenting a certain picture, have suggested shock and uncertainty from the regime. Assad’s flawed character was an important dimension; he lacked the ruthless decisiveness of his father. One of his biographers, David Lesch, paints the Syrian President as someone who courted opinions from multiple sources.61 Others noted how he frequently changed his mind, ‘20 times a day’.62 Indeed, some insiders later suggested that Assad was hours away from delivering a reform-minded speech on 30 March, only to switch to his nationalist rant at the last minute.63
Assad was more ‘chairman of the board’ than the one-man dictatorship of his father, and the differences of opinion within his inner circle alongside his indecisiveness help explain the contradictions.64 Reports suggest that from the beginning some were arguing for an even harder line. Assad’s influential mother, Anisa Makhlouf, his sister Bushra, brother Maher, and cousin, Hafez Makhlouf, led those urging him to repeat Hafez’s brutality in Hama, smashing the demonstrators with overwhelming force. Manaf Tlass, the former Defence Minister’s son and friend of Bashar, who defected in 2012, says he and others urged greater compromise. As a Republican Guard General, Manaf Tlass initially reached local accommodations in the Damascus suburbs of Douma and Harasta to allow limited protests, but was soon overruled by hardliners.65 Within the inner circle some urged Assad to address the nation and appeal for calm, while others advised the opposite.66 Assad’s close ally Iran, whose role will be discussed in the following chapters, urged a more nuanced approach, recommending replicating the Islamic Republic’s own crackdown of 2009, targeting ringleaders with extreme violence but without unnecessary collateral damage that might alienate the wider population.
Events elsewhere in the Arab Spring also impacted regime thinking. Officials later noted that the quick fall of Ben Ali and Mubarak taught the regime not to respond immediately to demands for change, as the raft of concessions given emboldened protesters to demand more.67 Indeed, when Assad made concessions in his speech of 30 March he claimed this was long planned and not a reaction to unrest. Lessons were no doubt learned from elsewhere too. On 14 March, the day before the Deraa protests, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates sent tanks into neighbouring Bahrain to crush protests there. International response was muted. Damascus was possibly alerted firstly that force can work to crush dissent and secondly that the international community could be selective in its outrage. This contrasts with events in Libya. On 17 March the United Nations approved Resolution 1973 to mandate NATO to intervene to protect anti-regime demonstrators that Gaddafi had threatened to crush. We cannot know, but this may have had a chastening effect on the hardliners, as Assad and others saw that all-out brutal force and threats to wipe out a population might prompt international intervention. Indeed, throughout the first year of the crisis the regime did not deploy all its forces at once but rather incrementally increased its levels of brutality. British diplomats reported back to London that the regime was engaging in a ‘calculated escalation of violence’.68
Finally, the regime’s mixed response can be explained by a degree of incompetence. Whether they favoured a hard line or compromise, it is clear that Assad and his inner circle underestimated both the receptiveness of Syrians to the Arab Spring, and the resilience of their protests. Those that knew Assad claim he genuinely believed what he said to the Wall Street Journal – that Syria would be immune. Even once the unrest began, Assad repeatedly misread or was in denial of what was happening.69 It did not help that he was surrounded by sycophants who told him what he wanted to hear. Yet even the hardliners misread things. One western diplomat based in Damascus at the time expressed amazement that the regime only rarely cut off the nation’s Internet and phone networks, which were doing it so much damage.
The only option?
Could Assad have done things differently? Arguably there were two options open to him: those recommended by the hardliners and by the compromisers in his inner circle. In Morocco and Jordan, in the face of similar protests, the ruling monarchs offered limited reforms, more so in Morocco, and took a degree of ownership of the Arab Spring in their states. Could Assad have done something similar: a reform-lite? It would have been difficult. Even more sympathetic biographers such as Lesch acknowledge that Assad lacked the skill and vision to transform Syria from the autocracy he inherited.70 Even if he had vague intentions to do so, ten years in power assimilated him into the dictatorial system. Many have questioned, moreover, whether he had any intention to do so in the first place.71 Emile Hokayem adds that the regime’s structure as a security state that saw repression as the first solution to any problem made it highly unlikely any other route would have been taken, regardless of Assad’s personality.72
If that was the case, then why did Assad not go the other route and deploy even more lethal force? Circumstances were quite different to Hafez’ crushing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama. Assad was not as decisive as his father, and there were divisions within his inner circle. Events in Deraa happened very quickly, unlike the Hama massacre, which was the culmination of a six–year campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood. In that time the population had been readied by anti-Brotherhood propaganda to the extent that enough seemed willing to accept events in Hama as a necessary evil. In contrast, such brutality in Deraa would have seemed disproportionate and might have alienated even more Syrians. Additionally, technology meant that containing news of such a massacre would be difficult both at home and abroad, and within days of the Deraa protests news had already spread beyond an easily containable area. The international dimension was also crucial. While events in Tunisia, Egypt and Bahrain may have shown the value of repression over compromise, the UN reaction to Libya also suggested that unrestricted violence would not go unpunished. How much the regime believed the UN or US alone would authorise such a strike will be discussed later, but it further limited repressive options for the regime. Launching the kind of air assaults and use of chemical weapons it showed itself willing to use later on was not an option in March 2011.
Syria’s uprising therefore fell between three stools. Despite Assad’s claims to the contrary, Syria actually shared many of the same political, economic and social problems as other states that rose up during the Arab Spring, and so the outburst of unrest in March 2011 was not that surprising. However, the regime was structured quite differently from those of Egypt and Tunisia that fell quickly. Through a combination of brutality, ethnic solidarity, economic benefit and ideology enough of the population had a buy-in to the regime’s survival to remain neutral when parts of the periphery rose up. Moreover, the military and security forces had been sufficiently ‘coup-proofed’ not to turn on the regime or refuse orders to slaughter civilians. Yet the uprising was widespread enough not to be as easily contained by force as the uprising in Bahrain, and indecision by the regime hierarchy and fears of international intervention further deterred an immediate hard-line option. Finally, the Morocco or Jordan option of reform in the face of protest never seemed likely, given the weakness of Assad’s character and the security orientation of his regime.
With hindsight what emerged by the end of April 2011 already looked like a civil war in the making. The Assad regime had not been able to re-erect the wall of fear, and protest had spread beyond a containable extent. However, it had deployed enough signposts to its buy-ins to retain the loyalty, or at least neutrality, of a large segment of the population. Undoubtedly the incredible levels of violence deployed by the regime were the primary factor in lighting a fire that would lead to civil war in Syria. However, as shall be discussed, a significant amount of oxygen was provided by the reaction of external actors to the events taking place in Syria within a region already undergoing profound systemic changes.