IN BAHRAIN, Yemen, and Syria, with rifts between Sunnis and various Shiite sects, Alawites or Zaydis, the rebel forces failed to overthrow the powers in place. In the past, this sort of fracturing would have had little political significance, as in Yemen, or would have wound up diluted by pan-Arabist ideology, as in Baathist Syria. But the increased Islamization of mindsets and the bidding war that broke out in 1979 between the Saudi Arabia-led Sunni side and the Shiites lined up behind Iran were game-changers. This aggravation of religious antagonism made into an instrument of geopolitical confrontation reached new heights with Iran’s ascendancy in Baghdad. Iraq had been ruled by a Sunni minority during the Saddam Hussein era. But the American invasion followed by the occupation from 2003 to 2011 tipped the country into the hands of the Shiite parties who represented the majority confession. In Bahrain, the trauma manifested itself when the March 2011 uprising was aborted by the Gulf Cooperation Council, having been stigmatized from the start as Shiite and manipulated by Iran. For the GCC, the sectarian reading of the event reinforced by Arabs pitted against Persians overrode any other consideration.
With the Sunni order restored in Manama, this same split conditioned the response to the Syrian uprising against Bashar al-Assad. Only now the frontlines were flipped, since the minority Alawites held power and most rebels came from the Sunni population. But the support for the insurgents and for the regime fit into this logic of sectarian alignment: Sunni powers backed the former and Iran and its allies the latter. The Yemeni uprising initially split along tribal and regional lines. It was not gripped by this sectarian antagonism until three years later when, in 2014, the pro-Shiite Houthis took Sanaʽa, triggering an intervention by a Saudi-led Sunni coalition.
In contrast to the outcomes on the southern shores of the Mediterranean, these challenged regimes were not toppled. Sectarian solidarities—mainly in Bahrain and Syria—protected them and kept the uprising from spreading. Moreover, there was no grand “moment of enthusiasm” in either country that could have transcended the religious fractures. Against the odds, Ali Abdullah Saleh, the former Yemeni president who had gradually relinquished power in the year following the revolt, returned to Sanaʽa. He did so by ditching old alliances and coming to terms with the Houthis. That is, until he tried one more flip-flop that would have brought him closer to Riyadh. It would turn out to be his last—the Houthis had him killed for it in December 2017.
The easternmost nations involved in the Arab Spring thus had different outcomes. The quick restoration of the ruling power in Bahrain degraded the rebellion of February-March 2011 into continuous Shiite restiveness that the regime’s police repressed in a framework of “normalization.” In Yemen, the conflict was regionalized but not truly globalized. The Western powers intervened only indirectly against the international jihadists based there.
In Syria, however, the civil war heavily involved the neighboring states, foremost being Iraq, itself a victim of the many-sided confrontation between Shiites and Sunni, Arabs and Kurds. But it also drew in Lebanon, Iran, Turkey, and Jordan; the oil monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula; Russia; and NATO’s most operationally ready members led by the United States. When ISIS started escalating their executions of Western hostages, then coordinating terrorist attacks in Europe from its territory, this internationalization expanded. It intensified following June 2014’s proclamation of the “caliphate” in Mosul until the fall of its capital, Raqqa, in October 2017. The jihadists’ military defeat brought down with it the Syrian rebellion, which, in the eyes of the world, ISIS had succeeded in taking hostage. Bashar al-Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies claimed victory—but it was shakier than they made it appear. As we will see in Part III, the fall of the “Islamic State” translated into a much more complex reshuffling of the Middle East deck of cards. It also led to changes in how the region related to the rest of the world in a context of falling hydrocarbon prices, which impacted it profoundly.
The Sunni Abort Bahrain’s Uprising
On February 14, 2011, tens of thousands of protesters converged on Manama, Bahrain’s capital. Three days had passed since the news of Mubarak’s removal from office. In Libya, protesters were preparing to march the next day in Benghazi, where they had their own version of Cairo’s Tahrir Square. The Manama demonstrators also modeled their protests on the Cairo uprising by occupying Pearl Square in the heart of the capital. Its name derived from the pearls harvested from oysters that had made the Gulf rich before the petroleum era.
The population of Bahrain, with a landmass equaling 295 square miles, is the smallest of any Arab state. At the time, it counted 1.3 million inhabitants, including 700,000 citizens, most of them Shiites. However, the ruling Al Khalifa family, whose ancestors had taken the country over in the eighteenth century, was Sunni, like the rest of the dynasties in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) except for Ibadite Oman. The Council comprises Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Saudi Arabia. These six oil monarchies came together in May 1981 to stem Iranian expansion after the victorious Khomeini proclaimed the Islamic Republic in 1979. A mutual assistance pact shields the Council members in case of aggression (by Teheran).
Situated on the opposite shore of the Gulf, which some call the Arab Gulf and others the Persian Gulf, the Iranian giant in 2011 had seventy-five million inhabitants. That was not enough for Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who wanted to double Iran’s population as part of an overt policy of seeking regional predominance. Despite this, the Islamic Republic had seen its birthrate stall thanks to an emerging middle class. Much to the annoyance of the ayatollahs, Iranian women were having less than two children each. Meanwhile, the birth rate in the neighboring Arab countries continued its sustained growth.
Because of Bahrain’s denominational distribution, sociologically speaking most of the demonstrators in Pearl Square were Shiite. Their slogans, however, had a universal character and called for respect for both human rights and social justice. The state did have democratic institutions, in fact, including an elected parliament and a judicial system inherited from British colonial days (which ended in 1971). However, the real power resided in the dynasty. A drawn-out insurrectionary conflict that its instigators called an Intifada, like the Palestinian revolt, had pitted the Shiite population against the previous monarch, who had governed by repression, imprisonments, and exiling people.
When King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa ascended to the throne in 1999 with promises of reform and amnesty, he got a political breather. But a disillusioned new generation of opponents spawned the 2011 uprising to protest the return to authoritarian rule, an eroding standard of living for the Shiite masses, and a feeling of alienation from their own country. Indeed, with dwindling oil reserves, luxury real-estate development along the coast—that mimicked such areas in Dubai or Qatar—cut the fishermen living in impoverished traditional villages off from the sea and ruined the palm groves. Immigrants took the unskilled and service jobs, and—the last straw—eased citizenship requirements for Sunni Arab foreign residents stoked a fortress mentality in Shiite circles. It rekindled historical memories of the sukhra—forced labor—imposed by the Al Khalifa dynasty after it had conquered the island.
This was the situation when the uprising of February 2011 started. It readily picked up the universal “Revolution 2.0” lingo that originated on Tahrir Square and spread via social media. It helped that young Bahrainis of all denominations were products of a good educational system in which the use of the English language was widespread. The demonstrators demanded true democracy and redistribution of wealth among all citizens. As in Tunisia and Egypt, the disproportionately large contingent of dissatisfied graduates—as Shiites, they felt they were being discriminated against in hiring—among the demonstrators played a large role in the sloganeering. Here, too, a number of activists had been trained in nonviolent protest techniques in Balkan think tanks linked to the billionaire philanthropist George Soros. After many clashes with the police, the demonstrators occupied Pearl Square on February 19, and they would not leave it until March 16.
The power made a few concessions, influenced by a reformist tendency embodied by the crown prince. He was anxious to renew a political consensus more congenial to the majority of the population. There was talk of an inclusive national dialogue. Opponents were allowed to return from exile, among them the head of Al- Haq (“The Truth”) the most radical party. When he demanded the establishment of a republic, it was like waving the proverbial red cloth in front of a bull—in this case, the prime minister, who was also the king’s uncle. The PM favored a hard line out of regional considerations as much as Bahraini ones, and so he was a natural mouthpiece for the Saudi position on the issues of the day.
First, the overthrow of one of the Arabian Peninsula’s dynasties would have created an extremely prejudicial precedent for the political system prevailing in the GCC. Already there had been incidents in Kuwait as early as December 2010, where pro-democracy elements among the merchant middle class had pressed the parliamentary opposition to harass the monarchy. Even Saudi Arabia was not immune to challenges inspired by Tahrir Square. Unemployment among its citizens was rising steadily in the face of a population growth rate of over 2 percent while income redistribution stagnated. Besides these internal political considerations—which six years later would see even the Saudi system initiate a major reform of its economic and social model—the prime GCC motivator in repressing the Bahraini revolt was the specter of Iranian hegemony.
During my visit to Manama in October 2012, my contacts among the government or Sunni activists invariably insisted that the uprising was controlled from Teheran. Further, they were convinced that its sole objective was to turn the island into a satellite of Teheran Islamic Republic. I had noticed, in March 2011, that Al Jazeera hardly broadcasted any images from the Manama upheaval. It had set up an entire studio on Tahrir Square during crucial weeks to report on the Cairo events. It had also covered Gaddafi’s overthrow in direct broadcasts from Benghazi. The following month, I saw on Cairo’s Midan Tahrir how unwelcome Bahrainis were who had come to support the Egyptians. They were accused of Shiite “sedition” (fitna) or having an Iranian orientation.
Lastly, during my interviews in Qatar in October 2012 with Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the celebrity Egyptian Muslim Brother who was also Al Jazeera’s chief television preacher, he assured me that “in Bahrain, it is not a revolution by all the people.” He went on to say that it was a revolt by one denomination against another, “the Shiites against the Sunni.” He concluded emphatically with: “Bahrain is an Arab Gulf country, it cannot be allowed to leave it for Iran!” Everyone I spoke with was obsessed by the trials Iraq was going through, the American troops having abandoned it to Shiite domination and Iranian influence when they departed from the region in 2011.
On the other hand, members of the Shiite parties and journalists, academics, and activists from that sect were unanimous in calling Bahrain’s regime autocratic. They saw the uprising as challenging the ruling power in the name of equality and human rights, and denied that Teheran had any influence on it. Still, in the international community many voices were calling for democratizing the other Arab Spring countries. Some among them—namely, the oil- and gas-importing OECD countries—worried about Bahrain becoming a stand-in for Iran and possibly even threatening the loading of their tankers. And, for the United States, with its Fifth Fleet based in Manama, being under the thumb of a hostile power in these vital port facilities was unthinkable.
It came as no surprise then, when on Monday, March 14, a few thousand Saudi troops with tanks crossed the sixteen-mile King Fahd Causeway connecting Bahrain with Saudi Arabia. They were flanked by Emirati police and Qatari troops belonging to the “Shield of the Peninsula” force of the GCC. The leaders of the opposition parties were arrested, Pearl Place was evacuated starting on March 16, and the monument in its center was pulled down two days later to erase the last vestiges of the uprising. The grounds, soon encircled by razor wire, would be transformed into the Al Farooq (“the Just”) Traffic Circle. This is the moniker of Omar, the second caliph (634–644) and successor of Abu Bakr, whom the Sunni idolize for his great conquests but the Shiites (and Iran in particular, for the ravages he visited on their country) curse for having sidelined Imam Ali.
Seven days before the start of the real spring, the “Bahraini Spring” ended with the erasure of its symbolic happening. However, the challenge to the regime continued to echo in the marginalized Shiite villages, as I can testify from having been caught up in Baluchi (Sunni) and Yemeni contingents of the anti-riot police in October 2012 as they put down a village demonstration. There were strict limitations on how any kind of opposition could express itself, while the rest of the island slowly returned to normal. Most notable was the restart of the Formula 1 Grand Prix race in 2012 that had been suspended since the uprising.
Besides being a turning point in the modern history of Bahrain, the forcible stifling by the GCC of a revolt condemned as Shiite and Iran-loving took on a decisive meaning for the fate of the three easternmost Arab Springs. It reflected the essential facts that would differentiate this trio of uprisings from those in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya on the African coast. All of the latter occurred in majority Sunni states where the national dynamic held together to topple their respective despots in the end. It was not until later that the rivalry between the oil monarchies—primarily Qatar and the United Arab Emirates—intervened to support or stymie takeovers in them by the Muslim Brotherhood.
In Bahrain, on the other hand, the regional stakes almost immediately swept away any domestic considerations. Once again, it started as a denominational conflict that wound up being aggravated by the confrontation between Arabs and Iranians. The GCC tanks rumbled into an economic situation strained by the random hazards of hydrocarbon production in the Gulf and exports to the world market. Oil prices were trending downward, which only served to embitter the conflict over these resources. Starting on the Bahraini stage, the drama would move on to two other venues. One was located on the southern end of the peninsula, in Yemen, where the insurrection initially took on a tribal and cultural character. Soon, it too would get caught up in the tug of war between the Iran-Shiite and Arab-Sunni camps. But to the north, in Shām—the Levant—the drama would intensify as the curtain rose first on the Syrian uprising, then on the next act in a dysfunctional Iraq, only to climax with the creation of the ISIS caliphate.
From Yemeni Tribalism to Sectarian Clash
The removal and exile on January 14, 2011 of Tunisia’s dictator Ben Ali after a quarter-century’s reign was greeted in Sanaʽa, Yemen’s capital, with the slogan “Ali! Join your pal Ben Ali!” It was addressed to President of Yemen Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had held power for thirty-three years. The announcement that Saleh’s son Ahmad would eventually take over from him had angered even Saleh’s supporters. It mirrored what happened in Cairo, where the prospects of a hereditary successor to Mubarak had alienated the “Mameluke” General Staff and paved the way for the uprising.
Yemen’s regime, unlike the autocracies that ruled Tunisia, Egypt, or Libya, rested on a complex consensus between tribal and local politicians. Under Ali Saleh’s guidance, North Yemen and the Marxist-Leninist Republic of South Yemen had unified in 1990. In 1994, a secession movement had to be put down in the South, while Zaydi (a local sect of Shia persuasion, though close to the Sunni mainstream) protests spread in the northern mountains. To keep it all together, Ali Saleh’s Machiavellian scheming had achieved a shaky equilibrium based on overarming the tribes, and cemented by the daily social chewing of khat. Chewing the leaves of this shrub, a ritual which usually starts at midday, induces a mildly narcotic, mood-elevating high. It tamps down tensions among the participants in sessions where opposing parties amicably script how to confront each other in a calculated manner the next morning.
Throughout his term, Ali Saleh was a master at co-opting different political forces by constantly switching alliances. Still, a profound split persisted in Yemeni society. On one side were members of the political-tribal system of parties—presidential or oppositional, secular or Islamist—who benefited from clientelism and generalized corruption. (Yemen’s level of corruption placed it among the world’s thirty worst offenders.) On the other side was everyone else excluded from this system. Among the latter, the urban youth and students made up large contingents in a population suffering malnutrition rates that were some of the highest on the planet. Half of them lived below the poverty threshold, 65 percent were under the age of twenty-five, and more than a third were officially unemployed.
The events in Tunis and then Cairo broadcast by Al Jazeera reverberated most in this group of recent graduates, nourished on illusory promises by the educational system. They celebrated Ben Ali’s fall with a march through Sanaʽa on February 3, 2011. But it was especially the news of Mubarak’s ousting on the eleventh that set up the first sizable demonstration on Friday the eighteenth as the mosques emptied. Protests in other parts of the country broke out on the twenty-fifth. More so than distant Tunisia, Egypt had always been the major reference for Yemen: Nasser had sent an expeditionary corps between 1962 and 1967 in support of a republican coup led by military officers against the royalists supported by Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, a large part of the Yemeni elite was educated in Egypt, back in the 1950s when its faculties were the most famed in the Arab world.
But now Sanaʽa had its own university. It was on the square in front of it that the local version of the uprising on Tahrir Square played out. Expecting to oust the president in a few weeks as their counterparts in Cairo had done, the demonstrators rebaptized the place sahat al-taghyir (“Change Square”). The capital had an officially named Liberation (Tahrir) Traffic Circle, but it had been occupied earlier by crowds close to Ali Saleh. These now called on their clients in the neighboring mountains to come set up camp on the roundabout to express their support for Saleh. From the outset, however, this revolutionary momentum had difficulty fitting into a national context in which there was no homogeneous “people” that was supposed to “want the fall of the regime.” In its stead existed an improbable mix of ethnic and regional factions, each of which could mobilize competing troops as demanded by shifting coalitions. And, unlike in Tunisia and Egypt, the General Staff was in no position to kick out the president: Ali Saleh could manipulate tribes whose firepower was a match for anything the regular army could bring.
A Mosaic of Tribes as a Substitute for Democracy
During the occupation of Change Square in front of the university, a stream of students, recognizable by their modern way of dressing in pants and short-sleeved shirts, made up slightly less than half of the crowd. Joining them were tribesmen clad in the traditional white robe, with the jambiya (a curved dagger in a scabbard of brown leather) stuck in the belt and a Kalashnikov within reach. (Every inhabitant of Yemen is said to own three firearms.) Also in evidence were activists from a pro-Shiite sect in the North, carrying red and green signs that read, “Allah Akbar! Death to America! Death to Israel! Cursed be the Jews! Victory to Allah!” These were opponents of Ali Saleh, against whom he had fought six wars and had still be unable to defeat them for good.
These “Followers of God” (Ansar Allah), dubbed “Houthis” after their leaders’ family name, would play a considerable role in the uprising’s interdenominational escalation. Instead of lasting just eighteen days like the uprising in Cairo, the demonstrations in Sanaʽa seemed to go on forever. The tribes came down to the capital with their tents and could stay as long as they wanted as they applied necessary pressures. This was an Arab tradition well established ever since Ibn Khaldun first described it in the fourteenth century.
When I passed through Sanaʽa in January 2012, nearly one year after the occupation of Change Square had started, the site had been transformed into a well-laid-out encampment with sleeping quarters, eating facilities, and a variety of debate forums. In fact, I was invited to address one of them in Arabic. The audience members, kept from traveling abroad by poverty, were infinitely eager for stories and eyewitness accounts of the Arab Spring. They projected their hopes and dreams on the events in Cairo and, to a lesser degree, Tunis, but not on Libya, where I had also been. Although Libya’s tribal structure resembled their own, the Yemenis I met generally wanted no part of the chaos prevailing there.
Faithful supporters and sworn opponents of the president thus divided Sanaʽa and occasionally exchanged proportional bombardments with mortars between areas where each were entrenched, without trying to wipe the other out. In this way, they abided by their traditional codes of war, interspersed with parleys and consultations around khat-chewing get-togethers. I paid a visit to Sheikh Sadiq al-Ahmar, a former ally turned sworn enemy of Ali Saleh, in his palace that had been half-destroyed by rockets. But he received me with all the pomp befitting the dignitary of the Hached tribal confederation that he was. Ceremoniously munching khat, surrounded by his peacocks, he proceeded to lay out the future of the opposition coalition of which he was a mainstay. Named the Joint Meeting Parties (JMP), the coalition was an unlikely amalgam. It contained the Muslim Brotherhood by way of the Islah (“reform”) party co-led by a sheikh, the secular Hirak Janubi or “Movement of the South” that demanded autonomy or full independence for Aden and its region, and finally the great tribes that had broken with Ali Saleh. The JMP saw the student uprising as an opportunity for weakening the president as well extorting more emoluments from him—or else replacing him with someone more receptive to the coalition’s unyielding demands. The president, for his part, headed up the General People’s Congress (GPC). Despite some defections, he could rely on the well-pampered and especially loyal elite troops, the air force, and the intelligence apparatus.
These two leagues contending for power tried to control or channel the events in the square, but their members remained on the fringes. As for the students, the middle class, and the urban poor who had started it all, they had no voice in determining the country’s future because they were outgunned. Two heavily armed extremist politico-religious forces, the Houthis and jihadists, would benefit most from the Yemeni Spring by upsetting the traditional equilibriums. They did so in effect by hijacking the movement. The uprising’s escalation and then its descent into civil war gradually made both the Houthis and jihadists the ultimate beneficiaries of the chaos inserting itself into denominational antagonisms throughout a divided Middle East.
Besides being fragmented along tribal lines, Yemen is divided geographically between the northern mountains and the southern and coastal plains. As elsewhere in the Arab world, altitude offered refuge to heresies and allowed pre-Islamic religions to survive. By contrast, the flatlands fostered the spread of orthodoxy. This north-south split, which more or less tallies with the respective territories of the former states of North and South Yemen, also opposed the heights that surround Sanaʽa (topping out at roughly 7,400 feet), where Zaydism, a moderate branch of Shiism, is prevalent, to Aden and the coastal provinces of Hadhramaut, or Abyan, crisscrossed by caravan trails, where the Chafeite rite of Sunnism—its most tolerant version—has the upper hand.
Zaydism takes its name from Zayd ibn Ali (712–740), venerated by his followers as the fifth and last legitimate Imam (while the Shiite Twelvers substitute the Imam Muhammad al-Baqir [712–743] for him). Zaydism exhibits traits that make it comparable to Sunnism, which accounts for the two sects having coexisted over fourteen centuries. It was the doctrine of the Imamat regime based in Saada, the northern city that today is still a bastion of this belief, followed by Sanaʽa. In 1962, when Arab nationalist officers overthrew the Imam, a civil war broke out between monarchists aided by Saudi Arabia, the West, and Israel, and dissidents supported by Nasser and his sponsor, the Soviet Union. Despite having stalemated the Egyptian expeditionary corps, in the end Riyadh recognized the Republic of Yemen in 1970. With the Imamat’s disappearance, Zaydism lost its political dimension as the state ideology.
Radicalizing Sects
At that juncture, Muqbil bin Hadi (1933–2001), a preacher from a Zaydi background who had converted to radical Salafism in Saudi Arabia, condemned his former fellow believers as heretics. Linked to the Mecca jihadists of 1979, he was imprisoned before being expelled to his native country. There he started a madrasa at Dammaj near Saada. He named it Dar al-Hadith (“the house of the sayings and deeds of the Prophet”) and dedicated it to the most strident kind of indoctrination. His reputation and plentiful resources helped him attract students from around the world, especially Europeans, but also Indians, Pakistanis, Indonesians, and Africans. However, his main targets were young Zaydis whom he talked into excommunicating their parents.
The reaction to his excesses and those of his disciples in this setting came in the form of a movement, the “Believing Youth” (al-shabab al-muʾmin), led by a family of activists named the Houthis. The Believing Youth adopted Teheran’s revolutionary theology as an antidote to Muqbil’s fanatical salafist sectarianism. It was a logical move, in a context where Zaydi doctrine was deprived of a political vehicle, while Iranian Shiism, thanks to the establishment of the Islamic Republic, boasted a theocracy. The slogans chanted at all Believing Youth meetings were obsessively anti-American and anti-Semitic, doubling down on “death to Israel!” with “cursed be the Jews!”. But, oddly enough, they were aimed at Saudi Arabia and Salafism—accused of being henchmen of the United States and the Jewish state (in this it followed the Iranian propaganda line).
The Houthis also fed on the ancient antagonism toward a Jewish community that had flourished under the Zaydite Imamat before all of its 50,000 members emigrated to Israel in 1949, leaving only a few hundred individuals behind. In 2009, the Houthis threatened to exterminate the remaining Jews in the village of Salem, near Saada, accusing them of Zionist activities. They had to flee to the capital under presidential protection. Besides, the “curse” (laʿana in Arabic), a Koranic term attached to Jews (Sura 5, verses 13 and 64), is also used in the Shiite body of works against the Caliph Omar, an uncompromising, fanatical figure in Sunnism that the Shiites condemn for having persecuted their Imam Ali. The “curse” still lives today as a jingle in popular piety repeated by his followers.
The Houthis nursed a violent hatred for the president (though a Zaydi himself) for several reasons. For one, they suspected Ali Saleh of giving free rein to Muqbil al-Wadiʿi and his disciples to conduct their aggressive salafist proselytizing because the Saudis were paying him off. For another, Saleh had launched military attacks against them six times in the years between 2004 and 2011, one of them costing the Houthi founder his life. His brothers took over the clan’s leadership. Finally, the conflict in Saada was also taken hostage by the regional denominational contest between Shiites and Sunni. The Houthis had the backing of Teheran, which they minimized and their enemies exaggerated, while Ali Saleh’s side received strong support from the Saudis and Emiratis. In geopolitical terms, Ansar Allah (“Followers of Allah”)—the Houthi party’s official name—relates to the Wahhabite kingdom and Yemen the way Hezbollah does to the Jewish state and Lebanon. The former harassed the Saudi frontier, the latter fired Scuds or rockets into Israel; the Houthis took control of Sanaʽa, while Hezbollah took over Beirut. Seen in that light, both cities constituted a kind of staging area for Iranian hegemony. In that spirit, the Houthis sent detachments into the capital from their Saada stronghold when the uprising started in 2011. Profiting from the weakened regime, they blended with the demonstration in the tent city on Change Square, and so gained a foothold in Sanaʽa. This positioned them to take it over completely three years later.
Paralleling radicalized Zaydis drawing closer to Teheran in the north, Yemeni Sunnism cultivated a relationship with jihadists in the south. A distinctive element favoring such a tie was that the bin Laden family had originated in Hadhramaut. Osama’s father, born in this region known for its sumptuous structures built with clay bricks, emigrated to Saudi Arabia to become the most prominent public works contractor there. Having the ear of the king, he was put in charge of the expansion of the Great Mosque of Mecca.
Besides its connection with al-Qaeda’s founder, South Yemen also facilitated the spread of jihadism through the presence of a large contingent of Sunni veterans from the 1980s Afghan war. Many had fled South Yemen when it still had a Marxist regime that repressed the local Islamists. These former fighters, duly indoctrinated and with military training, had returned home in the early 1990s to a nation reunified under President Saleh. To reduce the influence of southern socialists in the coalition government, Saleh had allied himself with the Islah Islamist party. A mix of the Muslim Brotherhood and tribal chiefs, it welcomed the “Afghan Arabs” returning from the battlefield into its inner circle.
These veteran jihadists then went after southern leaders in a campaign of assassinations. When the South tried to secede in 1994, the jihadists redoubled the violence with the ruling power’s assistance, imposing Salafist order on the erstwhile secularized Aden. Measures ranged from trashing the last brewery to the dynamiting of Sufi tombs to compelling women to wear the niqab (face veil). During the second half of the decade, the jihadists stood up to “the Islamic Army of Aden-Abyan.” The name referenced the Prophet’s hadith which reads, “12,000 men came out of Aden-Abyan, giving victory to Allah and His messenger.” The group was based in the region and served as staging post for al-Qaeda’s attack in October 2000 on the American USS Cole refueling in Aden’s harbor. A suicide bomber rammed a dinghy laden with explosives into the ship’s side, killing seventeen sailors. The main suspect in the attack had been ignored by the local security services.
The bitter irony is that Yemen, considered a frontline state against al-Qaeda after 9/11, received American military aid by the tens and then by the hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars to hunt down the jihadists on its soil. The vulnerability of its tribal structure to terrorist penetration, facilitated by Salafism flourishing in the south after the 1994 raid, helped Yemen’s presidential circle qualify for a stipend paid by Washington in the name of the “War on Terror.”
In 2003, the invasion of Iraq by the United States and its allies set off a new wave of departures for the battlefield and intensified anti-Western radicalization. Simultaneously, the high-value prisoners held in Sanaʽa’s maximum security prison escaped in February 2006 with a good deal of inside help. Among the escapees were the founders of Al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which in 2009 brought together Yemeni and Saudi followers of bin Laden. They were joined by nationals of Gulf countries and foreigners looking for military training and indoctrination. One of the Kuachi brothers, the assassins responsible for the massacre of the Charlie Hebdo team, received his terrorism training from AQAP to which he swore allegiance.
When the uprising started in February 2011, AQAP took advantage of the resulting lag in the security apparatus. It emulated Tunisia’s Abu Ayyad al-Tunisi, who capitalized on the opening of his country’s jails and turned to proselytizing in the impoverished neighborhoods. AQAP also took its cue from the Libyan jihadists who prospered by exploiting tribal divisions. Under similar circumstances, AQAP created a popular movement to unite its followers that blended radical doctrine with concern for social issues. Like their two models, they called it Ansar al-Shariʿa (“Followers of Sharia”). The movement took over the town of Abyan and its Indian Ocean coastline in May 2011, three months after the uprising started. Like a mirror image of the Houthis, who imposed Shiite morality in the northern areas they controlled, Ansar al-Shariʿa oppressed Abyan and its surrounding region for more than a year. In this, it more or less replicated how its Libyan sister organization treated the port of Derna in Cyrenaica. Meanwhile, the group also threatened Aden, where I visited in January 2012 and found its residents panicked at the thought of their city falling into the hands of jihadists. They were a mere twenty miles away, applying sharia in an orgy of whippings, amputations, and beheadings.
In February 2012, mediation started by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) the previous November resulted in Ali Saleh stepping down under a grant of personal immunity. It spared him (for the time being) from the unenviable fate of his peers Ben Ali, Mubarak, and Gaddafi. His vice president, Marshal Abdel Rabbu Mansour Hadi, a southerner from Abyan (who would retake the city of his birth the following May) replaced him. However, Ali Saleh’s influence over Yemeni politics with its permanently shifting alliances was undiminished. Dashing the hopes of the international community, Saleh’s successor did not manage to reassert the state’s authority because he was hostage to different tribal and regional actors caught up in permanent conflict.
Among the measures Hadi took, a realignment of Yemen into six provinces deprived Saada of access to the Red Sea and of profits from harbor contraband. By worsening their lot, Hadi’s actions antagonized the local population of economically marginalized Zaydis and strengthened the Houthi’s social and anti-establishment dimensions. The movement then added to the ranks of its militias to reinforce its absolute power to control the border with Saudi Arabia before launching a raid on the capital. Its force entered it in September 2014, aided by troops and tribes still loyal to Ali Saleh. Retaliation came two months later, with the massacre of 140 Houthis in a blast in one of their mosques as they chanted, “Death to America! Death to Israel! Cursed be the Jews!”
ISIS claimed responsibility for the killings, marking its debut in a country whose jihadist scene was still dominated by groups more or less closely affiliated with al-Qaeda, namely AQAP and Ansar al-Shariʿa. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, when he proclaimed himself caliph in Mosul on June 29 of that year, accepted the pledge of allegiance by the Yemeni branch of ISIS. But the organization played second fiddle in Yemen because it failed to penetrate the tribal networks, while its rivals excelled at it. This was vastly different from the situation in Syria and Iraq, where ISIS prevailed.
In February 2015, President Hadi, a virtual prisoner in his Sanaʽa palace and fearing for his life, fled to Aden. The following month, the new Saudi minister of defense, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, took command of a GCC military coalition. It had the support of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, with several Sunni states, Morocco among them, also taking part. Coalition planes bombed the Houthi-dominated areas north of the Yemeni capital, with the objective of reinstalling Marshal Hadi in the palace. The Houthis retaliated, launching a lightning offensive toward the south and capturing Aden, forcing the president to flee again, this time to Riyadh. Emirati troops would not retake Aden until July, after four months of house-to-house fighting.
Taking advantage of the confused situation, in April AQAP occupied Mukalla, the main port of Hadhramaut Province on the Indian Ocean. It took the Emirati troops a year to evict them, and even then the jihadists remained in control of the backcountry. The local population, in fact, viewed the Houthi offensive in the south as a Shiite invasion of lands that were traditionally Sunni. Therefore, since their fellow believers of AQAP were defending them, the residents of Hadhramaut temporarily acquiesced to that group taking over, even if they didn’t necessarily want any part of their ideology. A comparable phenomenon emerged in Iraq, albeit on a much larger scale, in which Sunni areas that rejected Shiite domination paved the way for ISIS taking over Mosul in June 2014.
The widening religious divide thus aided the most radical elements in each camp, pro-Iranian Houthis on one side and fanatically Sunni jihadists on the other. Each remolded sectarian entities by sharpening their mutual antagonisms so both could base their respective authority on their own sect. A similar intensification threatened the traditional coexistence between Zaydis and Chafeitis—one of the keys to Yemeni identity and balances. Nevertheless, the grip in which both groups held the population was mainly dictated by the ebb and flow of the civil war: neither succeeded in grinding down the tribal structure—a potential platform for national reconciliation.
Perhaps it was the still-premature hope for a reconciliation that in the end proved fatal for the former president, Ali Saleh. He had survived all the reversals during the time of permanently shifting alliances in his more than three-decade long political career. The demonstrators in 2011 had called in vain for him to step down, and finally on December 4, 2017, he was killed in Sanaʽa after one last attempt at switching sides. The leaders of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, caught up in a military offensive with uncertain prospects, had contacted him again. Little wonder, because the human and financial tolls of the two years of hostilities were mounting. An estimated 10,000 were dead. with 50,000 injured; seven million Yemenis were malnourished and one million had come down with cholera. The GCC leaders wanted to promote Saleh’s son Ahmad, living in Abu Dhabi, as a prop for reconciliation.
Ali Saleh began criticizing his Houthi allies in the summer of 2017, calling them “simple militias” that did not represent the Zaydis. He also announced his willingness to cooperate on a GCC peace plan in early December. But in both instances he overestimated his strength and maneuvering room: the Houthis condemned him for “treason” and killed him when he visited a tribal area he thought he had won over. The assassins staged his end so that it looked like he had been killed in a barrage while trying to flee the capital. Videos streamed over social networks showed his corpse being desecrated by a furious crowd. The idea may have been to evoke Gaddafi’s final agony, to conflate the two former strongmen with the same public disgrace. In the end, Ali Saleh was actually still far more popular than the Libyan dictator.
The six years elapsed since the beginning of a Yemen Spring had fragmented a people supposedly seeking the regime’s fall. It remained a society held hostage by the heightened conflict that intersected with the fault line dividing Shiites and Sunni. The shameful passing from the scene of Ali Saleh, who had embodied three decades of governing by compromise, did not change that. The war in Yemen ground on as part of the fight for regional dominance that Riyadh and Teheran were waging, of which the war for control of the Levant—the Shām—constitutes the culmination.
But in 2018, while Saudi planes were bombing Houthis in their mountain hideouts, the United Arab Emirates, projecting air and naval forces, controlled the entire Indian Ocean coast in the south. All the while, Abu Dhabi troops were encouraging the separatist instincts harbored by those nostalgic for the old South Yemen state whose flags still fluttered everywhere. Based on the continent at Muqalla and at Aden, they occupied the island of Socotra, which controls the straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, the gateway to the Red Sea. Next, they negotiated ports and installations as far as the autonomous areas of Somaliland and Puntland in Somalia, as well as Eritrea.
The negotiating power of Abu Dhabi of course overwhelmed that of the failed, destitute states on the Horn of Africa. For the fabulously wealthy petromonarchy, the Yemen conflict was an excuse to seize control of a vast maritime expanse through which one of the world’s major tanker sea lanes passes, and to become a major regional player. But in Yemen, it remains to be seen if this fragmentation introduced from abroad will be permanent. Or will the flux of Yemeni identities and their way of doing business, symbolized by the khat sessions, bring the adversaries together? Perhaps therein lies hope for the country freeing itself of the sectarian chokehold.
From the Syrian Uprising to Jihad in the Levant
The war in the Levant brought into focus all the dramas and tensions released by the Arab uprisings. It fashioned them into an incredible horror show symbolic of the early twenty-first century. This war combined the most archaic, poisonous ethnic and sectarian throwbacks in a novel way with the most advanced communication technologies. It splashed religious extremism onto Facebook walls, Twitter feeds, and encrypted messaging apps. Apocalyptic fanaticism and cruelty thus rose to a crescendo in the virtual world, in the process luring a global audience with voyeuristic staging and social media tools. Starting with a democratic revolt against the arbitrary Syrian regime, the movement in a few months evolved into an armed insurrection that set the Levant ablaze. But once again it was rapidly hijacked by the regional conflict between the Salafist-dominated Sunnis and the Shiites, which would soon pull in all of the surrounding powers.
Blending with the preexisting Sunni rebellion in Iraq, the Syrian uprising ended up in the proclamation on June 29, 2014 of the ISIS caliphate, which erased the border between the two countries in the name of the Umma, the worldwide community of Muslim believers. The caliphate then turned into the epicenter of third-stage international jihadism. Propelled by the ideology of the two Abu Musabs—al-Suri and al-Zarqawi—it would plunge the planet into mourning, from Paris to Nice, from Berlin to Brussels and their disenfranchised banlieues, from the Mediterranean sea to the Euphrates valley. In their push to make a clean sweep of all non Islamic civilization, ISIS even tore down the remnants of the ancient cities of Nineveh and Palmyra. On their rubble, ISIS planned to have global Islam triumph on this earth, in a vision its followers gleaned from a Salafist reading in the Sunni version of the Holy Scriptures.
The conflict also drew in the great powers of the United States, Russia, and Europe, which projected their forces into the Syria-Iraq space. There they linked up with the regional powers—Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. A number of local militias also joined the conflict, some of which fought on the side of the armed insurrection. Others supported the regime—Shiites from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, or Lebanon, and the Kurds pursuing their own national interests. The mushrooming of these parastatal military actors is one of the conflict’s most prominent features. It also represents one of the major obstacles to reestablishing peace in the Levant.
The most ominously symbolic obstacle among them was ISIS. The caliphate it proclaimed on a vast territory lasted from 2014 to 2017, during which it stepped up terrorist acts throughout the world. Its capital of Raqqa fell on October 17, 2017, to an improbable ad hoc coalition of otherwise mutually hostile forces that had united against ISIS and its outrages. As it became the West’s priority objective, the eradication of ISIS and assorted other jihadists was a game-changer. It let the West avoid the issue of Bashar al-Assad’s overthrow, a perspective that had prevailed at the start of the Syrian uprising. But the West largely failed also in drawing the necessary lessons from the bankruptcy of its initial strategy. The regime, in fact, rebounded with Russian and Iranian help. The three years it took to wipe out the Islamic State and its territory caused massive damages that transformed the Levant into a field of ruins. At least 500,000 people were killed during seven years of fighting, and ten million were displaced. Of these, more than a million found refuge in Europe. There, the migrant flood set in motion the electoral rise of the extreme right. It particularly weakened the political model of the Federal Republic of Germany—the biggest EU member state—where the bulk of the Syrian refugees settled.
Because of its global reach, the conflict in the Levant could be said to constitute a kind of post-modern world war in which alliances are made, dissolved, and remade with unprecedented frequency. Putting it all in perspective is the indispensable key to understanding the lines of force running through both the confrontation but also any initiatives for emerging from the crisis and reconstructing the region. Should that happen, it will take place in a new context of weakening oil prices affecting how the Middle East, with shrinking resources and influence, will fit into the international system.
Six years elapsed between the flowering of the Arab Spring in Syria on March 18, 2011 in Daraa, and the fall of Raqqa on October 17, 2017. Those years saw a set of democratic demands by civil society turn into a war of religions, both within Islam and against the West. It was coupled with conflicts between ethnicities that profoundly upset fragile equilibriums. Syria never experienced the moment of enthusiasm in which the middle classes joined with the working classes as was the case in Tunisia and, to some extent, in Egypt and Libya. Instead, as in Bahrain and then Yemen, the sectarian fragmentation quickly stymied the formation of a movement that might have isolated and toppled the powers-that-be. The Assad regime had the loyalty of the Alawite minority from which the ruling family came, and it was supported by the Christians, the Druze, and the Ismaelis or Shiites minorities—totaling about a fifth of the population. Part of the secularized Sunni urban bourgeoisie that had benefited from the president’s economic liberalization policy also took its chances by siding with the government.
The first peaceful demonstrations, accompanied by certain Alawite and Christian intellectuals, appeared unified, but were basically made up of poor Sunni Arab youth. This circumstance was accurately documented by the geographer Fabrice Balanche (who drew the maps for this book) in his Sectarianism in Syria’s Civil War (2018). It reflected the prolonged demographic explosion stalking the countryside, villages, and urban peripheries swollen by a rural exodus. Between 1960 and 2010, Syria grew from 4.5 to twenty-one million inhabitants. During the war years from 2011 to 2018, the population probably shrank by four to five million people, a number that combines deaths, the drop in births, and emigration. The population as of 2019 is estimated at sixteen million, and refugees at seven million.
This past half-century of exponential demographic growth especially affected the rural and tribal environments as well as the poor outskirts of Damascus, Aleppo, and Raqqa. This abundance of people were massively Sunni. Their percentage of the population grew at the expense of minorities, most notably the Alawites, many of whom were settled in Damascus by the ruling power as a sort of sectarian Praetorian guard. Their formerly heady birth rate fell as a result: the Alawite community shrank from 15 percent to 10 percent of the population in the twenty-five years leading up to the 2011 revolt. Among the Sunni, it is also important to distinguish the Arabs from the Kurds, as their political allegiances would diverge during the civil war; 65 percent of all Syrians are Sunni Arabs, while the Kurds account for 15 percent.
The Baathist regime of Hafez al-Assad had secularized the country during the three decades he was president (1971-2000), even if it was done “with a cudgel,” as the late Michel Seurat put it. This contrasts with the ten years before the uprising, with his son Bashar in power, which saw Islamization spread and radicalize. In part an underground phenomenon, it presented a contradiction for those who blinkered themselves by admiring the cosmopolitan lifestyle of Syria’s liberal elite. To them, young President Bashar al-Assad (who succeeded his father aged 34) seemed its personification as the new millennium dawned. Little wonder: here he was, an ophthalmologist recently returned from London with his elegant wife Asma, herself an investment banker from a Sunni bourgeoisie family from Homs.
As Thomas Pierret in his book Religion and State in Syria: The Sunni Ulema from Coup to Revolution (2013) showed, the rural population practiced a popular religion influenced by Sufi brotherhoods before they were uprooted and moved to the metropolis. Such networks had no function in their new, immense, informal settlements on the chaotic urban fringes. Instead, the migrants oriented themselves en masse to a rigorous Salafism, which delivered hope for salvation in the beyond through rigid, literal practice of Koranic commandments that brought some orderly views for this world and the hereafter. But for the here and now, it also preached cultural rupture with impious secularists and condemned as heretics the Alawites whose lock on power and wealth disinherited good Muslims. The regime tolerated this Salafist breeding ground so long as there was no call to violence and order was maintained, however religiously based. But jihadism took root in these downtrodden banlieues and flourished when the Americans invaded Iraq in March 2003, to occupy it until 2011.
In fact, the Syrian intelligence services secretly helped thousands of fighters rushing to join the anti-American Sunni insurrection in Iraq cross the border (where ten years later the heart of the ISIS caliphate would be located). Many jihadists came from abroad as well as from inside Syria. In hindsight, it would seem a wrongheaded policy, considering these fighters ended up massacring Iraqi Shiites supported by Iran, a reliable ally and future key supporter of Damascus, in the countryside along the border. But the “deep state” of the mukharabat, the secret services hiding within the power, had an understanding with Teheran: anything that weakened the American occupying army, bloodied by terrorism in Iraq, would eventually favor Iran in getting a grip on Mesopotamia.
Also at play here was the Assad regime’s desire to get rid of activists by giving them the opportunity to die in combat. The same rationale had motivated the Egyptian and Algerian regimes when they boosted the Afghan jihad in the 1980s, freeing jailed activists and putting them on a plane to Peshawar. Damascus, which had infiltrated the Salafist circles—their silent partners, their mosque networks, and more—identified the most radical local faithful and helped spirit them away to the battlefield. This arrangement received little publicity at the time. Relations with Washington still seemed good enough then, thanks to the “War on Terror” in the wake of 9/11, for any Syrian jihadists caught by the American military in Afghanistan or Pakistan to be turned over to Damascus. They were held and interrogated in the specialized prison at Sednaya, near the capital. One of the most famous of these convicts was no less than the key ideologue of third-generation jihadism, Aleppo-born Abu Musab al-Suri. Some sources claimed he was still behind bars as late as 2015. Then there was his disciple Abu Khalid al-Suri, an al-Qaeda veteran who would be freed in the fall 2011 a few months after the start of the Syrian uprising. He was destined to play a crucial role in the rebellion’s jihadization.
As a quid pro quo, Bashar al-Assad would turn over to Paris any Frenchmen caught en route to Iraq. One such catch was the chief theoretician of jihad in France, Thomas Barnouin, intercepted in the company of his disciple Sabri Essid, at the Syria-Iraq border on December 12, 2006. Both men would play a pivotal role in waging terrorism in France. After serving their time in French jails, one by one they would make their way back to Syria during the civil war. The latter became infamous for a 2015 video in which he made his twelve-year-old stepson execute on the ISIS “caliphate” land an Israeli Arab accused of spying. Barnouin would be recaptured by Kurds after Raqqa fell in December 2017. Manipulating the jihadists in such a fashion during the years leading up to the insurrection would come back to haunt the Assad regime. Algeria and Egypt had found out in 1992 that their Afghanistan veterans, now fully trained and indoctrinated, came back home ready to wage jihad in their motherland. And the Syrian government’s turning a blind eye to Salafism spreading among its poor youth, from Aleppo’s informal settlements to the deprived banlieues of the Damascene Ghouta, also made them more seasoned activists—until the regime switched to brutal repression and the protesters took up arms.
The spark that set off the Syrian uprising came from Daraa, the administrative center of the Hauran region in the southwest near Jabal Druze and the Jordanian border. It was a Sunni town packed with some 120,000 souls after the population explosion. In the surrounding countryside, the 500 inhabitants per square mile could not grow enough grain to feed themselves. Too many wells had exhausted the ground water reserves, and residents were unable to raise cash crops, resulting in high rural unemployment. Fewer people were emigrating to work in Lebanon, since the Syrian military had withdrawn from there in 2005 and because Lebanese salaries were too low, and this added to the ranks of the unemployed.
The uprising began innocently enough on March 6. Fifteen high school students between ten and fifteen years of age were caught daubing, “the people want the fall of the regime,” on a wall. It was the slogan Al Jazeera had flashed across all television screens in the Arab world after Ben Ali’s and Mubarak’s ousting. The local Alawite security services arrested the boys. Around March 15 and 16, the first protest rallies of a few hundred people formed in Damascus, Aleppo, and the major towns. In Daraa, a delegation of chiefs from the boys’ tribe met with the local head of the police, who was a distant relative of President al-Assad and notoriously incompetent. Just as in the case of the policewoman slapping Mohamed Bouazizi the previous December in Tunisia’s Sidi Bouzid, what happened next during the interview is fuzzy. The version that got the most traction involved the police chief telling the petitioners to forget about their children, just breed more, and—if they failed—to bring their wives to the mukhabarat (intelligence officers) who would impregnate them.
This transpired on March 18. Touching the innermost depths of male honor, and particularly unbearable in the tribal manly culture, the insult immediately set off a demonstration in front of the governor’s palace. Security forces broke it up, killing four people. The episode stirred up intense emotions throughout the country: Bashar al-Assad had to send a delegation of high party and government officials, all Daraa natives, to the town. They sacked the local authorities and had the students freed. But when several of the boys were found with evidence of torture, another demonstration ensued. It was crushed with weapons of war, even inside the mosque that served as protest headquarters, whose blood-spattered walls were broadcast on television. Compounding the sacrilege was the fact that Alawite soldiers’ boots defiled the Sunni place of worship. The Syrian uprising—the sixth uprising of the Arab Spring—thus began with the violence that symbolized the country’s own contradictions. But no one could have expected the catastrophe that it would trigger, which would envelop the entire Levant and set off global repercussions. Its scale would far exceed that of the other five uprisings.
During the first weeks of spring 2011, the Assad regime seemed unsure of how to deal with the Friday upheavals. They had learned from the Egyptian experience that they would swell when the mosques emptied after prayers that day. The demonstrators chose the slogan of the week in a prior poll on a Facebook page titled “Syrian Revolution.” This illustrates how involved the young people from the cosmopolitan urban middle classes were in the process from the start—just as they had been in Cairo or Tunis. Bashar al-Assad now took some conciliatory steps. On assuming power as a 34-year-old in July 2000, he had marked the occasion with a few months of political and cultural liberalization. At the time, it was called “the Damascus spring,” a bittersweet expression in hindsight. However, the mukhabarat controlled by his father’s old comrades-in-arms wasted little time in closing that window again in the summer of 2001.
Now, a decade later, Assad lifted the state of emergency, legalized membership in the Muslim Brotherhood (it had been subject to the death penalty since 1980), and authorized the wearing of the niqab (face veil) by civil servants. He raised government salaries by 30 percent, promised a multiparty system and freedom of the press, and announced some amnesties. For the most part, these measures were out of step with the accelerating demonstrations, or they had little impact beyond the initial effects of the announcement, or they were too long in coming into effect, if indeed they came at all. For a time, the changes did succeed in feeding the rumor that Bashar al-Assad was trying to assert an “open” line, like he had during the first months of his presidency against the wishes of Alawite diehards. It raised speculation that accommodation was at hand. In any event, the facts on the ground would promptly close off this option as antagonisms grew and violence spiraled.
The amnesty benefited members of Islamist groups—Muslim Brotherhood, Salafists, and jihadists, including some individuals turned over by the Americans under their “rendition” policy. A favorite theory had Syrian intelligence, the men in the shadows who were always suspected of widespread manipulations, anticipating a quick takeover of the uprising by its most radical elements. This would make it easier for the regime to demonize the opposition. By raising the specter of extremism for the rest of the people, the regime would regain their support, among them a goodly number of Sunni.
This was precisely the strategy of the Egyptian General Staff at the time. As confirmed to me personally by one of its members in December 2011 (see p. 135), the plan was to let the Muslim Brotherhood walk away with the elections, but only to better expose its fatuousness and thus torpedo President Morsi before ousting him in July 2013. But Egypt was not as fragmented as Syria along sectarian lines, and its ruling power was not identified with a religious minority against which the Sunni majority could mount an armed insurrection. Stigmatizing the Syrian rebellion would be a drawn-out, complex process. Its full impact would only be felt after ISIS emerged and started its all-out terrorism campaign in 2014.
In August 2011, the daily demonstrations during the month of Ramadan failed to force the regime to give in. It had already stifled any attempt to create the equivalent of a Tahrir Square anywhere in Damascus. More than a thousand civilians had been killed in the repression, along with some members of the security forces. The fighting increasingly shifted to areas densely populated by the Sunni or parts of the Mediterranean coast they shared with Alawites. These included most notably Lattakia or Banias, but also Homs, a city characterized by its sectarian mix that sat at the crossroads between the coast and Damascus. The first great battle of the war would be fought here in the autumn of 2011.
The opposition’s militarization began in July, with appeals to Sunni officers and soldiers who refused to fire on the demonstrators to desert. One of these officers announced the creation of the Free Syrian Army. At first, the communiqués circulated as online videos showed captains or lieutenant colonels, careful of their appearance, freshly shaved and mustachioed, voicing nationalist sentiments denouncing the repression and the dictatorship. They would form the backbone of a Syrian opposition on which rested all the hopes of the “Friends of Syria,” a global coalition that France and the United States set about organizing. Its first meeting in Tunis on February 23, 2012 brought together 114 states eager to support a democratic transition from the Bashar al-Assad regime—before that coalition fell apart.
In October 2012, I met two officers who had deserted, one in Istanbul, the other in Antioch. I then secretly crossed the Turkish-Syrian border to visit the village of Khirbet al-Joz, from which the Syrian army had been driven two days earlier. The two military men, one of whom was the Free Syrian Army commander for the Aleppo sector controlled by the rebels since the previous July 19, professed their non-sectarian faith in democracy while criticizing the regime’s despotism. The villagers I interviewed that day echoed these sentiments. However, the videos of the village’s liberation streaming on the web showed Salafist groups in the attack. There was no trace of them in the daily life of the countryside during my stay. But within months, first the Islamists and then the jihadist dimension took over. They marginalized the secular forces supported by Western democrats still attached to the notion of freedom when, in fact, the Arab Spring was already obsolescing. At least, the West clung to the fleeting ideal of a democratic uprising until the proclamation of the Islamic State in June 2014, followed by three years of the ISIS caliphate. Before its destruction in 2017, it would capture the image of the uprising and transform it into a global terror of apocalyptic proportions.
The Iraqi Factory of Syria’s Jihadism
In August 2011, the month of the Ramadan fast—a time of heightened public displays of piety and of mobilizing the community of the faithful—the situation in Syria by global jihadism standards looked promising. So much so, in fact, that the head of the “Islamic State of Iraq” (ISI), Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the future “caliph” of ISIS who was still an unknown then, sent a mission into Syria to scout the terrain for setting up a branch. The researcher Charles Lister in his book The Syrian Jihad (2015) documented in detailed fashion that the mission was led by Abu Mohammad al-Julani, until then the ISI “emir of Nineveh province” in northern Iraq.
This mysterious Syrian, whose nom de guerre and demonym (Julani) referred to the Golan, would not reveal his identity until July 2016, when he appeared on-screen with his face uncovered for the first time. He was born in 1984 as Ahmed Hussein al-Shara in Daraa, the town located at the foot of the Golan that triggered the Syrian uprising in March 2011. He would crisscross Syria on his scouting trip, setting up a network of contacts and recruits. This would precede the future development of jihad in that country and its interaction with neighboring Iraq. Further, it foreshadowed the rupture of the international Islamist movement between al-Qaeda, directed from the Afghan-Pakistan border region by Ayman al-Zawahiri (Osama bin Laden having just been killed, on May 2, 2011 in Abbottabad, Pakistan), and ISIS under the Iraqi leadership of al-Baghdadi.
The special nature of contemporary jihadism in Iraq had a decisive effect on the evolution of its Syrian equivalent: it would set its cross-border dimension, attracting tens of thousands of foreign fighters with its dark messianism. It was born of the Sunni resistance to the American invasion of March 2003, eight years of occupation, and, finally, the passing of political power in Baghdad to the Shiite majority supported by Iran. As discussed above, the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a veteran of Afghanistan, had founded a group named Jam’at al-Tawhid wal Jihad (Group of Unity and Jihad—or JTJ) in Iraq. The first term in its name echoed the heart of Salafist doctrine: the concept of divine unity understood as an uncompromising monotheism opposed to all popular devotions, to Shiism, and to Christianity.
The group quickly became known for spectacular suicide attacks against American forces, their local collaborators, and international institutions. One after the other, JTJ targeted the Jordanian embassy (August 7, 2003), despite Jordan’s king having pardoned an imprisoned al-Zarqawi in 1999; the UN’s offices (August 12), killing the Special Representative Sergio Vieira di Mello; and then the Imam Ali mosque (August 29) in the holy city of Najaf, killing ninety-five people including the Ayatollah Baqir al-Hakim. In al-Zarqawi’s declarations and acts, hatred of the Shiites had taken on an overriding importance. It would be the distinctive marker for all the organizations which followed in JTJ’s wake until ISIS. The following year, in May 2004, al-Zarqawi became infamous around the world for the first online beheading video of an American hostage, Nicholas Berg, whom his killers dressed in an orange overall like the detainees at Guantanamo. This operating mode would be pushed to an awful climax ten years later, as ISIS spread its reach from Raqqa to Mosul.
This new-found notoriety led al-Zarqawi’s local group to merge with bin Laden’s multinational one, even though al-Qaeda did not have the same anti-Shiite obsession. When al-Zarqawi swore allegiance to bin Laden in September 2004, “Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia” was born. The merger only added to the fame of both the subsidiary and the parent. However, the indiscriminate massacres of Shiites to foment a civil war from which the jihadists would emerge victorious did not fit bin Laden’s and al-Zawahiri’s strategy. They were more interested in targeted, explicitly political attacks on governments. This would become a major bone of contention between the second-generation jihadism of al-Qaeda and the third-generation jihadism of ISIS. The latter would be represented both by its Iraq-Levant incarnation under the leadership of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and in the export of terrorism to Europe inspired by Abu Musab al-Suri’s Call to Global Islamic Resistance. In 2005, al-Zawahiri reprimanded al-Zarqawi in a letter that was intercepted and made public. Al-Zarqawi ignored the reproach, feeling safe in his powerful role.
In January 2006, al-Zarqawi merged five other armed Iraqi groups into his movement. Their rosters included recycled Baathist officers who brought military skills and intelligence with them. The new grouping was named Majliss Shoura al-Moujahidin (Mujahideen Shura Council) with no mention of al-Qaeda in its name, even though the relationship had not yet been severed officially. The following June 7, al-Zarqawi was killed in an American strike, but by then he had expanded his sway over large parts of Sunni Iraq.
In October, his successor Abu Ayyub al-Masri announced yet another name change to the Islamic State in Iraq (Al-Dawla al-Islamiyya fi Iraq). This was the first use of the term “state” (dawla) to designate a jihadist organization. As the Arabist researcher William McCants points out in his book The ISIS Apocalypse (2015), the word has a double meaning in archaic Arabic. Originally, it meant “revolution,” as used by the Abbasids in the mid-eighth century when they established their caliphate in Baghdad. It referred to the politico-religious uprising that they started in Iraq, with the aim of toppling the Ummayad dynasty in Damascus in the name of a purified Islam. Eventually, dawla came to define the state that emerged from this revolution, which is the accepted meaning of the word in modern Arabic.
But for the jihadists with their keen interest in an ideological reading of Muslim history, the term is charged with both meanings. Hence, in 2006, in videos imitating a television newscast, the masked presenters would announce the names of the ministers of the “Islamic State in Iraq,” as well as the organization’s territorial ambitions. They intended to spread their reach all the way to Palestine by annihilating the Israeli “Zionist entity,” to the Levant by wiping out all the states created by the colonial British and French League of Nations mandates—Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan—and then on to the Arabian Peninsula, where they would destroy the “cardboard states” of the Gulf Cooperation Council subservient to the United States. These declarations in effect mingled the ancient spirit of the Abbasid Revolution and its territorial conquests with today’s geography.
This first caliphal project, which no one took seriously at the time, but which ISIS would realize in 2014, presupposed the crowning of a “commander of believers.” This mantle fell on the shoulders of Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, an unremarkable Iraqi ex-gendarme and computer technician. But he came from the tribal lineage of the Qurayshis to which the Prophet belonged, and so Abu Ayyub al-Masri (himself an Egyptian commoner) swore allegiance to him. The honorific demonym (laqab) “al-Baghdadi” (“the one from Baghdad”)—which his successor Abu Bakr would keep—obviously refers to the capital of modern Iraq, which the jihadists wanted to free from American occupation and Shiite domination. But it can also mean the city in Abbasid times, saying in effect that the fundamentalist dogma founded there was coming into its own again. To highlight this inspiration, the dawla chose as its emblem the black flag of the Abbasid dynasty stamped with the Prophet’s seal and with the Islamic profession of faith emblazoned on it in white Kufic script. This is the most ancient form of Arabic calligraphy, and it symbolizes the original purity of the message. A hadith found in the collection of the traditionist Imam al-Tirmidhi (824–892) moreover requires that “the black banners will come from Khorasan [a region that included today’s Afghanistan], nothing will make them turn back until they are planted in Jerusalem.” This hadith is abundantly cited in jihadist literature as a portent of Israel’s impending destruction.
The Salafist extremist vision of this “revolution-state” would apply sharia in its full rigor in the territories under its control. This meant massacring Shiites and Yazidis and imposing the head tax (jiziya) on Christians. It alienated a certain number of Iraqi Sunni tribes whose sons were also killed if they refused to swear allegiance. As we saw earlier (p. 90), the American generals David Petraeus and John R. Allen seized this opportunity to foment a vast collaborationist movement among the tribes. They called it the Sahwa (“Awakening”), and it was financed by the United States. Bin Laden severely criticized Abu Ayyub for his poor politico-military management of the dawla. He thought that Abu Ayyub and the “commander of the faithful” were wrong in their irresponsible excesses—or Kharijism—and were damaging the jihadist cause.
By 2009, the territory of “the state” had contracted to the northern province of Nineveh and its administrative center Mosul, a massively Sunni city. Still, powerful terrorist attacks in the form of suicide bombings on government or Shiite targets in Baghdad continued. On October 10, 2010, the “commander of the faithful”—Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, along with his vizier Abu Ayyub al-Masri—was killed in an American raid. Most cadres of the “Islamic State of Iraq” were captured and imprisoned at Camp Bucca—which they used as a management workshop to help bind the organization together.
It was from this prison population that Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri, a.k.a. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was chosen as Abu Omar’s successor. Born in July 1971 in Samarra, a former student of sharia and a Salafist preacher, he was described as unremarkable, if not colorless, by those who knew him. He joined the Sunni rebellion after the American invasion of March 2003, only to be arrested in January 2004. He spent ten months in Camp Bucca before being released as a “low-level threat.” He then became integrated in al-Zarqawi’s group through the course of its successive mutations, until on May 16, 2010 he became its leader. He would stay in the job for a decade, until an American raid killed him in Syria’s Idlib province, near the Turkish border, on October 26, 2019 at the age of 48. The dawla’s éminence grise, Haji Bakr, formerly a colonel in Saddam Hussein’s secret services, promoted him to this post.
Salafization of the Revolt and Western Blindness
The propagation of the Syrian jihad that would end in ISIS thus was born of the Iraqi transplant grafted on by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Its unfolding is a complex story, because Abu Bakr’s scout in August 2011, the Syrian Abu Mohammad al-Julani, would declare independence from his mentor once he was implanted in his native country. All the while, the international contest for dominance between al-Zawahiri and al-Baghdadi continued. In late summer 2011, as the Syrian uprising swung into armed insurrection, its Western supporters were willfully blind to these growing Salafist and jihadist aspects. They clung to transhistoric comparisons instead—clichés like, “Syria is our Spanish Civil War.” A similar reading would dominate the analysis of the rebellion in Washington under Barack Obama’s presidency as much as in Paris under François Hollande’s. This lapse goes to the heart of a much wider debate on blanking out the dynamics of Islamism.
Influenced by the researcher Olivier Roy, Hollande gave precedence to “the Islamization of radicality” instead of “the radicalization of Islam.” In other words, jihadism came to be considered a contingent and superficial phenomenon. However, this principled position fails in its misunderstanding the political and religious sociology of contemporary Islam. This is due to its principal academic champions knowing neither the Arabic language nor Arab culture. The blind spot was that the war in Syria, having mutated into the jihad of Shām, resulted in intense infighting over who would dominate Islam, locally and internationally. This conflict of an unheard-of violence within Sunnism compounded the growth in power and mutual competition between the Muslim Brotherhood, Salafists, and jihadists. Thanks to the heightened confrontation with Shiism, the process ended up marginalizing the Brothers because they were more disposed to accommodate this doctrine, to the benefit of Salafists-jihadists unwilling to compromise with it. But it was the latters’ extremism that would eventually overextend the messianic and apocalyptic ISIS caliphate that existed from 2014 to 2017, precipitating its end.
Nevertheless, the Western leaders—and the experts who advised them—simply did not want to see what was in play in the quest for dominating global Islam. That is, not until the attacks by ISIS in Europe forced the West to take the fight to Islamic State’s territory. Not only did they fail to analyze the transformations of the Muslim world, but they were unprepared for the onslaught on their home ground that left European societies vulnerable to jihadist violence. Unintentionally, the West also reinforced the strategy of the Syrian president whose downfall they wanted to see. Al-Assad would instead emerge strengthened from the war in 2017, aided by his Russian and Iranian allies—and with his Western adversaries throwing in the towel.
The rebellion was in fact split from the beginning by ideological struggles among a broad spectrum of players ranging from democrats to jihadists. In-country, the democrats put themselves under the leadership of the Free Syrian Army, and abroad they referenced diverse bodies composed of exiles, starting with the not-very-influential Istanbul-based Syrian National Council. On November 11, 2012, in Doha, Qatar, the Friends of Syria convinced it to merge into a “National Coalition.” It rapidly fell prey to internal squabbles over who would call the shots for the coalition, pitting Qatar and Turkey, which backed the Muslim Brotherhood, against Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates who were hostile toward it.
In the other Arab countries going through uprisings, the Islamist movements of various stripes turned insurrectional dynamics to their own advantage. This held for Syria as well, where in 2012 the armed groups’ needle started moving toward the Salafists and jihadists, buttressed by huge funding coming from rich like-minded Sunni individuals in the Arabian peninsula, aided by spillover from the al-Zarqawi-inspired Sunni insurgency in Iraq. Simultaneously, the estrangement of fighters on the ground from the authorities in exile grew, fed by the resentment that men risking their lives naturally harbored toward negotiators safe in the ballrooms of grand international hotels. Lastly, the role played by foreign support for the rebellion made it evolve in line with the financial flows from the Arabian Peninsula. Most observers estimate the total at over a billion dollars per year. On the one hand, some foreign supporters favored groups that more or less closely lined up behind the Muslim Brotherhood, all the way to the brigades inspired by al-Qaeda. Those benefited especially from Qatar’s largesse and a privileged status on the Al Jazeera network.
On the other hand, the more explicitly Salafist groups were regarded as a bulwark against the Shiite expansion into the Levant. The enormous funds showered on them, in stark contrast to the poverty of the Free Syrian Army, resulted in the most seasoned FSA fighters defecting starting in 2012 because the Salafists paid more and provided better weapons. Finally, reinforcements of their regime enemies from Shia Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and—from 2013 on—from Lebanese Hezbollah especially, radicalized the conflict even more in sectarian terms. Damascus, in the end, would turn this to its advantage.
The battle for Homs lasted from the fall of 2011 until spring 2012 and ended with government forces retaking Baba Amr, the main insurgent district. The battle augured the turn the war would take over the next five years. Syria’s third-largest city, Homs, sat on the road connecting Damascus and the Alawite coast, the Assad family’s heartland and original base of support. Known as Emesa in antiquity, this strategic crossroads city also commanded the north–south axis between Damascus and Aleppo. It had a majority Sunni population, but large parts of the outskirts were inhabited by Alawites. Located close to Lebanon’s Sunni-populated border area of Akkar, in the early days of the insurgency Homs was one of its major resupply channels for arms bought in Central Europe or the Balkans from stockpiles of the former Warsaw Pact. The Al Farooq main rebel brigade—named in honor of Caliph Omar, a Sunni hero, despised by the Shiites (as we saw earlier in Bahrain)—was commanded by officer-deserters.
The brigade’s first video broadcast dwelled on its democratic uprising against a dictatorial regime. This also emerges from the story told by the writer Jonathan Littell, recipient of the 2006 Goncourt Prize, in his work Syrian Notebooks: Inside the Homs Uprising, published in English in 2015. Littell lived in one of the rebel districts during the battle for Homs. However, over time, it was possible to detect from the contents of his reporting and the allegiances of the fighters (whose beards kept getting longer) the shift into a more Salafist register. It blended disappointment with the West—for failing to provide hoped-for air strikes to support the insurrection à la Libya—with massive Salafist financial support, particularly from Kuwait.
The first suicide bombing was carried out on December 23, 2011 against a building in Damascus housing the intelligence services. It was claimed the following January 23 by the Al-Nusra Front. This was the armed jihadist group formed in October 2011 by Abu Mohammad al-Julani after his August scouting mission to Syria. With this attack, he imported action methods from Iraq to the Syrian conflict. The complete name of the group “Front of support (nusra) for the people of Shām by the fighters (mujahideen) of Shām in the land of jihad” reveals its origins, if nothing else by being redundant: “the Islamic State in Iraq” of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. As part of expanding his project to the Levant, al-Baghdadi lent his “support” to the rebellion in Syria so that it might tilt the region as a whole into the “land of jihad.”
The Arabic title of the Front’s online site, al-manara al-bayda, stems from the prophetic tales of the coming of Jesus as Muslim messiah via that “white minaret” of the Grand Mosque in Damascus. From there, he will lead the final attack against evil, ending with the planet submitting to the true religion. It therefore captured the centrality that Syria and its capital (which, in Arabic, are both called al-Shām, by substitution, as is the Levant as a whole) represent for global jihad. Here we have the first significant instance of this apocalyptic theme being applied to the Syrian battlefield. It would be a powerful lure for tens of thousands of jihadists from the world over. The video of January 23, 2012 also sets the objective of establishing an Islamic State in Syria, using the standard terminology employed by al-Qaeda, to which the Al-Nusra Front owes its allegiance, just like Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and ISI did before the split the following year. In addition, a growing number of Salafist brigades combined local implantation and social networking in a frantic competition for the money pouring in from the Arabian Peninsula. One of them even took the name of a famous Kuwaiti sheikh with similar leanings in gratitude for his generosity.
2012 saw the growing Salafization of the rebellion and its gradual absorption into a regional logic. Starting from the lines of conflict in Iraq, it became part and parcel of the confrontation between the Shiite and Sunni axes. At first, the exile organizations were in a state of denial about the trend. They feared alienating Western supporters and handing the Damascus regime potent propaganda fodder for demonizing its enemies. But on the ground, the flood of money from the Gulf as much as the Salafists’ and jihadist fighters’ religious zeal for martyrdom combined to darken the military picture for the Assad regime. Meanwhile, desertions from the infantry manned by Sunni conscripts and officers escalated, and the fighting power of the Damascus forces began to melt away. On July 19, the rebellion, dominating the disenfranchised districts, took Aleppo East, a major urban center and economic capital filled with rural migrants. And the poor outskirts of Damascus, shabby with makeshift dwellings and rebar rising from what was once the storied oasis of Ghouta, celebrated in classic Arab poetry as a vision of paradise on earth, also fell to the insurrection. In the pivotal years 2012 and 2013, in the face of the regime’s setbacks, Hezbollah units began arriving from Lebanon for support on the ground. Its planners concealed the flow until the funerals of combat casualties, celebrated as martyrs, exposed it to public view in the spring of 2013.
But even this was not enough to turn the tide in favor of Bashar al-Assad, as the rebels kept ratcheting up the pressure on the capital. However, there would soon be a major turning point in the conflict. On August 12, 2013, regime forces released sarin gas over several Ghouta locations, claiming at least a thousand victims, many of them civilians, including children. This atrocity defied President Obama’s warning on July 12 that the regime would cross a “red line” if it used chemical weapons. Their punishment should have come in the form of Western air strikes.
Six days after the sarin attack, François Hollande was ready to send in the French air force. However, the British parliament turned down Prime Minister David Cameron’s pleas for authorizing air strikes. The lies about WMDs in Iraq, supposedly stockpiled by Saddam Hussein, told by the previous prime minister Tony Blair to justify British intervention in Iraq were still present in Westminster’s memory. Adding to Parliament’s mistrust of Cameron’s intentions was the debacle in the aftermath of bombing Libya in 2011, which saw the country descend into murderous anarchy after the tyrant’s demise.
As for President Obama, he reneged on his “red line” warning, punting the issue to a reluctant Congress on September 9. The upshot: no action taken. It was a clear Western retreat that isolated France diplomatically after it had been in the front lines urging the immediate overthrow of Bashar al-Assad. Russia lost no time stepping up to take full advantage of this Western foot dragging. On that same September 9, Russia offered to work jointly with the Syrian regime under UN auspices to destroy its chemical weapons arsenal. Given the military deadlock, the international community had little choice but to line up behind the Russian proposal. It was ratified by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and American Secretary of State John Kerry in an agreement signed on September 14 in Geneva. With that, Russia took the initiative for good in the Syrian civil war.
It was a clear diplomatic success for the Kremlin, the first of many. Its decision-making process was based on analyses by Russian Oriental-studies scholars who knew the Levant better than the self styled experts the European and American leaders relied on. In the fall of 2014, in Moscow, I had the opportunity to meet Yevgeny Primakov, formerly the director of Moscow’s Institute of Oriental Studies. Later he went on to head the intelligence service and then served a brief stint as prime minister in 1998–1999. Primakov who, until his death in June 2015, had Vladimir Putin’s ear, told me that the strategy was one of defending Russian credibility. They aimed to do so by taking a role in restoring international legitimacy to its ally Syria by dismantling the chemical weapons under a UN mandate. This would eliminate any risk of the West intervening militarily and putting a thumb on the scale on the side of the rebellious democratic forces.
This insight helped to bring the conflict into sharp relief: the insurgents, taken hostage by global jihadism, would be the object of rising Western suspicion. A Russian-Iranian axis could take the gloves off in Syria—precisely what Moscow did starting in September 2015. As for the fate of President al-Assad, it would be subordinated to Mr. Putin’s interests.
This was the context for the accelerating growth of jihadism. It manifested in the massive influx of foreign fighters, particularly a European contingent intent on making up for their respective countries’ failure to step up in aid of the opposition. This new stage was also marked by jihadism’s ultimate radicalization. Nothing illustrates it better than the split between the Al-Nusra Front and its ISI mentor. It widened with the proclamation on April 8, 2013 of the “Islamic State in Iraq and Shām (Levant)”—called Daesh after its Arabic acronym, but known as ISIS or ISIL in English-speaking countries. ISIS achieved media supremacy over the rest of the rebellion when it trotted out its “caliphate” in Mosul on June 29, 2014. For the next three years, until the fall of its capital Raqqa on October 17, 2017, it would control a vast territory, from which it would spread terrorism to Europe. It was against ISIS that Western military intervention would finally be directed from the summer of 2015 onwards—not against the regime in Damascus, as François Hollande had wanted in August 2013.
The Rupture in Jihad’s Core
The split in the jihadist camp can be dated to April 2013. The Al-Nusra Front had never officially acknowledged that it was a creation of the Islamic State in Iraq. That way it could blend more easily with the Syrian insurrectional fabric that it had in fact become very deeply entwined with. It fought many battles in coalition with other Salafist and jihadist brigades of various shades, but also with ones that still claimed to adhere to the Free Syrian Army. Rebel fighters at the time were divided among some 1,500 more or less autonomous units.
Al-Julani had prioritized the shared fight against the Assad regime over ideological differences. His allegiance to al-Qaeda and its chief Ayman al-Zawahiri did not raise many objections in the rest of the rebellion. This might have been because the multinational jihadist organization, since its leader bin Laden’s elimination two years earlier, had atrophied. Its Syrian branch was lying low primarily out of local strategic considerations. It made itself popular by providing municipal services structured on sharia in areas under its control, from garbage pickup to public transport. Al-Julani gave some interviews on Al Jazeera to two journalists close to the Muslim Brotherhood and not very critical of him—the Syrian-Spanish Tayseer Allouni in December 2013 and the Egyptian Ahmed Mansour on May 27, 2015.
On April 7, 2013, al-Zawahiri addressed a message of encouragement to the Al-Nusra Front, assuring it that “its sacred fight ends with a jihadist Islamic State establishing the divine sharia.” This message can be construed as an attempt by the aging Egyptian al-Qaeda chief and Bin Laden successor to assert his continuing global authority from his mountainous hideout in the region between Afghanistan and Pakistan. On April 8, as if in response, his young rival Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi let it be known in a discourse that Al-Nusra was simply an extension of ISI, and that both had been authorized to merge into a single organization named “Islamic State in Iraq and in the Shām” (Al-Dawla al-Islamiyya fīl Iraq wash Shām).
The acronym “Daesh,” calling to mind with its distinctively unharmonious sound the Arabic word daes, which means “to trample,” immediately went viral and became the Arabic signifier for this world-shaking group. The name stuck even after Islamic State mandated the use of its official title once the caliphate was up and running. Its followers refused to use “Daesh” because it struck them as limiting, if not pejorative. They preferred the single word “State” (Dawla) with its revolutionary connotations harking back to Abbasid days. Analysts of the ISIS phenomenon, however, would continue to use Daesh (in Arabic or French) and ISIS/ISIL (in English) to highlight its singular nature. Meanwhile, al-Julani in Syria rejected the merger and dropping of the “Al-Nusra Front” name, which he expressed in a recording that was broadcast on April 10. In it, he solemnly repledged his allegiance to al-Zawahiri, a connection that had become less burdensome than Baghdadi’s aggressive tutelage, which complicated al-Julani’s relations with the other factions of the Syrian rebellion.
But the emergence of ISIS coincided with an itch for excess that had built up in one part of the Syrian Salafist-jihadist side, and a large number of fighters joined the new organization, inflicting some drastic manpower cuts on the Al-Nusra Front. Among the foreigners, who cared little about the local power balances, this was especially the case with the Chechens, known for their bloody extremism. They were joined by most of the European jihadists, who came to Shām in search of a kind of messianic utopianism marked by fanatical attachment to an ideology. They were indifferent to the realities of the Syrian territory and populace.
ISIS initially manifested itself in Raqqa, the first prefecture to fall into the hands of the rebellion on March 6, 2013, chosen for its symbolic value. Its brigades started a reign of terror there on May 14, when the first video bearing the ISIS logo was disseminated. It showed the public execution of three men on the town’s main traffic circle on Naim Square, each shot in the head. That set the tone for a repetitive series of horrific images that would follow for four years, making up the group’s distinct signature. By mid-January 2014, it had gained full control of the Raqqa urban center on the Euphrates River by killing or chasing the other groups out. Emptied of their middle-class owners, spacious apartments were redistributed to the foreign fighters who had arrived knowing only cheap public housing in the European banlieues.
For propaganda purposes, Raqqa was hyped as the intersection of jihadism’s virtual as well as earthly utopia. It was painted in the colors of a happy city abiding by sharia, where life went by the rhythm of bathing in the Euphrates river and meting out Koranic punishments to offenders. Crucified corpses and cut-off heads were exhibited on the city square, between raids to massacre nonbelievers and apostates and expand the land of authentic Islam. The attractive power of ISIS’s fanatical sectarianism furnished a heroic outlet better adapted to the mass of international jihad sympathizers than the alliances of the Al-Nusra Front with other Syrian insurgents.
The military and political situation fed the escalating violence and its extremist excesses. When the rebels took Raqqa in March 2013 and ISIS started its executions, the Sunni defense of Al-Qusayr near the Syria-Lebanon borders was about to fall to Hezbollah. It was in besieging this town sitting astride the Damascus-Aleppo highway that Hezbollah’s fighters were seen in broad daylight for the first time in the Syrian conflict. That stimulated vengeful fatwas from key globalized Sunni ulemas. From Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi on Al Jazeera to the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, religious leaders across the region called for global jihad to liberate the Al-Qusayr from “the enemy.” A scant seven years earlier, Al Jazeera had sung the praises of the “party of God” (word for word: Hezb Allah) and its Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah (whose name means “divine victory” in Arabic). This was during the “33-Day War” in the summer of 2006, when Hezbollah defeated the Israeli army in South Lebanon. Now it was being called the “party of Satan” on these same media outlets. Seasoned in combat against the Jewish state’s soldiers, Hezbollah fighters defeated the Sunni rebels, which surrendered Al-Qusayr on June 4, 2013. With the Middle East in full-fledged chaos, the rubble left by the shattering of all certainties furnished an ideal environment for ISIS. By its outrageousness and its simplified vision of good and evil, it would transcend the old ideologies with their incomprehensible reversals.
In the days following the fall of Al-Qusayr, al-Julani and al-Zawahiri exchanged some messages. The al-Qaeda leader reiterated his confidence in the Al-Nusra Front—and the Islamic State in Iraq—but rejected merging the two entities into ISIS. He also named Abu Khalid al-Suri his representative in Shām. After he was liberated from Sednaya prison, where he had been incarcerated with Abu Musab al-Suri, in the summer of 2011, Abu Khalid had rejoined the Ahrar al-Shām (“The freemen of the Shām”) brigade. He helped guide this “free” Salafist group, by now militarily one of the most powerful in the rebellion, to wage jihad on the Afghan model. Abu Khalid would function as the “sage of jihad,” and nip in the bud a devastating fitna (sedition) between “brothers.”
However, at the same time, Hassan Aboud, the leader of Ahrar al-Shām who had welcomed Abu Khalid into his ranks, was the host on Al Jazeera for a big interview. Immediately afterward, in June 2013, the last month that Mohamed Morsi was still president of Egypt, Aboud went to Cairo. He gave a talk in the name of the Syrian insurrection sponsored by an association of ulemas led by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. The sheikh was marshaling his forces to save the Muslim Brother Morsi from the Tamarrod (“rebellion”) movement that had taken to the street to overthrow him with the discreet support of the military top brass.
This signaled the coming together of the Egyptian Brothers, of Qatar via Al Jazeera, of al-Qaradawi, and of a nebulous Syrian “moderate jihadists,” whom the others would promote henceforth around the Al-Nusra Front and the Ahrar al-Shām. But these subtle realignments, which shifted the “moderation” needle toward al-Qaeda, were not enough to dampen the appeal of ISIS. Spellbound recruits coming from all the Islamist brigades kept flocking to it. For them, al-Zawahiri belonged to the past; the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Jazeera were nothing but heretics and henchmen of the West. Abu Khalid was killed on February 23, 2014 by one of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s assassins in a warning to his opponents within the jihadist movement tempted to take a less ultra line.
From the autumn of 2013, ISIS bursting onto the battlefield turned the equation of the conflict on its head. It paralleled the entry into the fight of growing numbers of foreign Shiite paramilitaries that would furnish the bulk of the regime ground offensives needed to retake the areas in insurgent hands. The UN accord on the destruction of Syrian chemical weapons in September had signaled the West’s unwillingness to move militarily against Damascus. As for the “traditional rebels,” from the survivors of the Free Syrian Army to the Salafists, and the “moderate jihadists” of Al-Nusra, they would henceforth have to fight on two fronts: against Damascus, but also against ISIS, which was committed to annihilating its rivals.
The United States and its allies among the oil monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula tried hard to strengthen the opponents of ISIS. Of course, all the while they would have to worry about American weaponry falling into the hands of ISIS, either by defections or by the “good rebels” being defeated. The feeble belligerence between the regime and ISIS also raised numerous questions. In northeast Syria, ISIS grabbed all the oil wells, colluding with most of the local tribes, and trucked the oil to neighboring Turkey for sale at an attractive price that assured comfortable royalties.
Although Bashar al-Assad’s air force ruled the skies, these convoys were never bombed. As seen from Damascus, ISIS in effect offered the prospect of fighting a fratricidal war against the other rebels, dividing the insurrection deeply. It recalls the strategy employed by the Algerian generals, also advised by Russian intelligence officers during the 1990s. The ruling power in Algiers took advantage of reciprocal massacres between the Islamic Salvation Army (AIS) and the Armed Islamic Group (GIA). The beheadings and multiple atrocities committed by both sides had made them bogeymen, making the military brass look respectable by comparison. This same dynamic worked even better for the Syrian regime; thanks to the immense publicity generated by the execution videos ISIS disseminated over social media, which had been nonexistent twenty years earlier in Algeria, international attention focused on crimes against humanity committed by the jihadist organization, rather than by the Assad men.
On 7 January 2014, the new spokesman for ISIS in Syria, Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, born 1977 in the Idlib area and trained by al-Zarqawi in Iraq, called takfir—or excommunication—against the members of other rebel groups that were not overtly jihadist. It made spilling their blood “licit” without need for any sort of trial. The violence between insurgents reached its high point in northwest Syria in the early months of this year. After internecine fighting that left thousands dead, ISIS was run out of many localities where rival brigades were equipped with American weapons. The jihadist forces regrouped along the border with Turkey, which was a crucial crossing point for foreigners joining the fight, and in the Euphrates valley between Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor toward the Iraqi border.
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In both sectors, ISIS hurled itself against an enemy strongly supported by the West but also by Russia: the YPG militias (“People’s Protection Units”), the military arm of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD). They had been formed in July 2011 in the Rojava region (or South Kurdistan) located in northern Syria and abandoned by the Damascus troops. The PYD was the Syrian offshoot of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) of Turkey, an independence movement with a Marxist tinge whose founder, Abdullah Öcalan, the Turks had imprisoned on Imrali Island in the Sea of Marmara since 1999. The PYD thus was both anti-Ankara and anti-jihadist. With several dozen thousand fighters, including the women’s brigades (YPJ or “Women’s Protection Units”), the YPG militias boosted their standing by defeating the Al-Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Shām. In 2014, it was the main force blocking ISIS from expanding into northern Syria, with its resupply routes bringing men and material from Turkey. The Kurds’ impregnable strategic position continuously stymied the Islamic State from the time it formed the caliphate in June 2014.
Proclaiming the Caliphate
The fighting during the first half of 2014 led up to the proclamation of the ISIS caliphate. It was the most spectacular event in the history of international jihadism since the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington. On June 10, 2014, ISIS forces took Mosul. The organization had sunk deep roots there during the al-Zarqawi era, and government troops fled without a fight. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi inherited the weapons stockpiles left behind by the United States, allowing him to launch a veritable blitzkrieg toward Baghdad by way of Tikrit and Samarra, a majority Sunni area.
ISIS exploited the immense resentment the Samarra population harbored toward the policies of the Shiite prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. He had marginalized the Sunni, making it easier for them to sympathize with any movement, however extreme, that fought in the name of their sect. Shiite soldiers who had fled from ISIS forces were captured and butchered by the thousands. A lightning advance into Nineveh toward Erbil, capital of the Iraqi Kurd autonomous region, forced an exodus of Christians and Yazidis. Condemned as kuffar (nonbelievers), the Yazidi men were killed, their women and children sold into slavery. Finally, some of the enormous inventory of American military hardware recovered in Mosul was transported to the Syrian front. There it helped ISIS conquer a vast territory along the Euphrates, save for a few pockets held on to by al-Assad’s army. On June 11, ISIS formally took over the Turkish consulate general in Mosul, captured its diplomats, hauled down the Turkish flag, and replaced it with the ominous ISIS banner. With that, everything was set for a new caliphate to succeed the Ottoman caliphate, abolished ninety years earlier in 1924 by Turkish President Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
The actual proclamation came on June 29, a symbolic date marking the start of Ramadan that year. A first ISIS video broadcast over social media, titled “The end of Sykes-Picot,” showed a Palestinian jihadist from Chile demolishing a checkpoint on the Syria-Iraq border. Addressing all the world’s Muslims—even those on South America’s Pacific coast—ISIS proclaimed itself the true champion of the fight against the prior century’s European colonialism. However, part of its mission was battling the nationalist Arab regimes that had retained the “illegitimate” borders drawn in London and Paris on May 19, 1916, known as the Sykes-Picot agreement between British Foreign Secretary Sir Mark Sykes and his French colleague Georges Picot to break up the Community of the Faithful. ISIS now controlled a territory stretching nearly 435 miles from east to west on both sides of the former Syria-Iraq frontier line. With a population of eight to ten million at its peak, it would objectify the goal set in 2006 by the “Islamic State in Iraq” (ISI) for Sunni domination of the Shām. With that, the prophecy that a Sunni caliphate would start the conquest of the world and subject all of it to Islam would be fulfilled.
That same day, Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, the ISIS spokesman, announced in a recording that “the sun of jihad has risen” over the earth. This meant that the organization had proclaimed the caliphate with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi at its head, to whom the planet’s Muslims owed the oath of allegiance (bayʾa). With that, the old name of “Islamic State in Iraq and the Shām (Levant)” was replaced by “Islamic State” full stop, manifesting the worldwide ambitions of the new entity. Five days later, on Friday, July 4, al-Baghdadi, dressed in black in the tradition of the Abbasid dynasty in Baghdad (but with a Rolex on his wrist), was filmed giving a sermon in Mosul’s al-Nuri mosque. It had been built in 1172 by the Emir Nour al-Din al-Zenki, the unifier of Syria and a merciless jihadist against the Crusaders. Referred to as “Caliph Ibrahim” (both al-Baghdadi’s birth name and that of Ibrahim Ibn Muhammad, a descendant of the Prophet’s uncle in whose stead the original Abbasid revolution was fought), al-Baghdadi inscribed himself in a historical continuity whose symbols he scrupulously manipulated. Nour al-Din al-Zenki, whose name a Syrian Islamist brigade had taken, was one of the main heroes of jihadist genealogy, especially revered by al-Zarqawi. As for al-Baghdadi’s kunia (nom de guerre), Abu Bakr, it derived from the first caliph of Islam Abu Bakr as-Siddiq (573–634 A.D.).
The next day, ISIS published the first issue of Dabiq, its English-language online magazine. It was titled after a village on the Syrian-Turkish border from which, according to the Prophet Mohammed, the Christian army would be defeated forever and the Muslims would conquer the world. It looked like a glossy fashion magazine, richly illustrated, alternating between terrifying images of apostates and nonbelievers being executed and romanticized jihadist fighter clichés. It was translated into other languages, for instance, as Dar al-Islam (“the abode of Islam”) in French. Its mission was to let the thunderclap of the proclaimed new caliphate reverberate everywhere and help make ISIS a prime-time global phenomenon. It also served as a propaganda tool in recruiting young Westerners.
The magazine would be highly effective in this role, judging by the steadily rising number of Europeans leaving for Shām. This exodus was made up of the offspring of Muslim immigrants and converts, a prelude to the attacks that ISIS would coordinate to plunge Europe into mourning the following year and beyond. ISIS overran the village of Dabiq a month later, on August 13, 2014, taking heavy losses. It was not even a strategic target, but simply a reminder of how the organization fixated on making prophecy and reality coincide. Dabiq would remain in ISIS hands for two years, serving as the backdrop for videos threatening the West with endless black flags and decapitations. It was there in November that same year that the British jihadist Mohammed Emwazi, dubbed “Jihadi John,” held up the severed head of the American hostage Peter Abdul Rahman Kassig, an ex-U.S. army ranger, political science student, and humanitarian worker. “Here we are about to bury the first American crusader in Dabiq, and we are waiting impatiently for your other soldiers to have their throats cut and be buried here,” Emwazi shouted to the camera. Kassig’s conversion to Islam had not earned him a reprieve, although it did earn al-Baghdadi a reprimand from Ayman al-Zawahiri.
ISIS started engineering its serial assassinations in the fall of 2014. Disseminating unbearable images of themselves was part of the campaign to tilt the strategic balance of power in their favor. The mayhem would escalate in 2015 with a series of attacks in Europe. The international coalition formed to destroy ISIS responded with stepped-up bombing. The first major battle in which all the different forces lined up took place in Kobane, a town on the Syrian-Turkish border and also a junction of two Kurdish Rojava provinces. The YPG Kurdish militias had to hold this ground to keep their territory in one piece. ISIS wanted the town so they could control a vital access route to Turkey over which flowed foreign volunteers and supplies.
The Islamic State committed many contingents of fighters to defeating the YPG, which it had never managed before. Some 8,000 jihadists and a force of fifty tanks attacked the town on September 13, 2014. They were superbly equipped, thanks to the weapons stockpiles captured in Mosul. The Islamic State took several of the town’s districts, within binocular and camera range of the international media amassed on the other side of the border. The anti-ISIS coalition led by the United States resupplied the Kurdish fighters with airdrops of weapons and munitions. The intense pounding the jihadists took from the air would not break them until January 26, 2015. The border area was finally liberated on June 14, when the town of Tel Abyad, the main ISIS crossing point into Turkey, was taken. It was the first significant military defeat for the Islamic State, costing it almost 1,500 fighters killed.
During the battle for Kobane, a Jordanian pilot Muadh al-Kasasbeh was captured by ISIS when his F-16 taking part in coalition airstrikes was shot down on December 13, 2014. Dressed in the infamous orange overall, he was burned alive in a cage, probably on January 3. The video of his ordeal wasn’t posted until a month later. ISIS justified the atrocity as just punishment of apostates. However, the manner of al-Kasasbeh’s execution horrified many potential sympathizers, in view of the Islamic prohibition on burning a condemned Muslim alive. On January 7, the Kuachi brothers in Paris massacred the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo and assassinated an “apostate” policeman of North African heritage. On January 9, Amedy Coulibali killed a French Caribbean policewoman and slaughtered Jewish customers he had taken hostage in a Hypercacher supermarket. From then on, the Shām was projected on the very heart of French territory—although President Hollande had taken the lead in condemning the Syrian regime and in supporting the rebellion.
But ISIS and its followers in Europe invoked the specifically Syrian logic of the attacks as part of a global confrontation between good and evil. During a debate I engaged in with jihadists detained in Villepinte prison in Seine Saint-Denis—north of Paris—in the spring of 2016, one of them challenged me by comparing the number of victims of jihad in France with the Western bombing of “the caliphate’s Muslim children.” He posed this rhetorical question: “Who kills more? Is it you or us?”
On January 4, 2015, three days before the Charlie Hebdo killings and the day after al-Kasasbeh’s execution, a Frenchman from Normandy named Maxime Hauchard, infamous for taking part in ISIS slaughtering of Syrian pilots broadcast on social networks, posted this taunt on Twitter: “I stay informed about the economic, political, and social situation in France to better prepare the counterattack…The French state should do well to realize that the war will not always be fought in Muslim countries…Therefore, one day you better be ready for the Islamic army marching into France. And it will have been well deserved!”
Russia Intervenes, and Aleppo Is Retaken
The year 2015, when the Shām jihad was visited on France and Europe, also marked the direct military intervention by Russia on Syrian territory. This was the first time Moscow projected military force outside the borders of the former USSR since its misguided invasion of Afghanistan in 1979–1989. One justification for the operation was the growing terrorism reflected by the increased jihadist presence in the ranks of the rebellion since ISIS burst onto the scene. The Kremlin also felt itself righteous in intervening because the international coalition led by the United States, which included European and Arab aircraft, had been entering Syrian airspace to strike ISIS and the Al-Nusra Front.
But, plainly, there was more to it: it was in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s interests to render decisive support to save the Syrian regime. And so, on September 30, he sent a Russian expeditionary force numbering several thousand men and a contingent of thirty Sukhoi fighter-bombers to the Hmeimim air base in Syria, close to the Mediterranean coast, south of the city of Latakia. This was the Alawite heartland, and a mere twelve miles from the al-Assad family’s stronghold in Qardaha. The Russian air strikes initially supported ground operations by the Syrian army and 50,000 foreign Shiite paramilitaries. They helped loosen the rebel hold on the coastal regions and the major towns Damascus, Homs, Hamas, and Aleppo. They also took back important symbolic targets, such as Palmyra, which ISIS had captured on May 21, 2015.
Since Roman times, Palmyra had been a caravan crossroads between Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean. It was the city of Queen Zenobia, celebrated around the world for its majestic ruins and funerary statues. Seizing it let ISIS link its central territory from Raqqa to Mosul and western Syria toward Homs and Damascus. ISIS also staged events in the ancient city to shock its enemies, in tandem with the multiplying attacks in Europe and Tunisia. It dynamited monuments that were relics of “impious” civilizations, just as it did in Iraq the preceding February, when it destroyed the masterpieces in Mosul’s museum and the Assyrian site of Nimrod. Its fighters beheaded Palmyra’s former director of antiquities and hung his corpse from a column, followed by the spectacle of having teenagers execute regime soldiers on the proscenium of the Roman theater. Besides its shock value, the mayhem served to demonstrate the Islamic State’s global power to galvanize its supporters and boost recruitments.
In Syria proper, Palmyra had other, less cultural connotations: under its Arabic name of Tadmor, it was infamous among a large swath of public opinion for its penitentiary. On June 27, 1980, the Defense Brigades under the President’s brother had massacred several hundred Islamists detained there in retaliation for an attempt on the life of Hafez al-Assad the day before. This occurred during a campaign of attacks carried out at the time by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. A young Abu Musab al-Suri had his baptism by fire here. (The killings of the Libyan jihadists held in the Abu Salim prison in Tripoli took place in a comparable context on June 29, 1996.) Thus, knocking down Palmyra, which was such a symbol of despotism for many Syrian Sunnis, could only boost the prestige of the Islamic State in the eyes of potential followers.
Aided by intensive Russian bombing, Damascus forces took back Palmyra between March 7 and 26, 2016, assisted by two foreign Shiite militias, Hezbollah and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. On May 5, on Vladimir Putin’s suggestion, a triumphal concert of Russian and German classical music was performed in the Roman theater where not long before executions had been carried out. With a UNESCO delegation in the audience, the stunt served to showcase Russia’s contribution to civilization’s battle against barbarism. However, this would be a fleeting victory, because the main force of the Damascus troops was withdrawn and redeployed to the battle for Aleppo. Hence ISIS moved anew into Palmyra the following December 11. It was only after Aleppo’s fall on December 22, 2016 that the Syrian army, backed by the same Russian, Iranian, and Shiite irregulars, went on the offensive again from January 14 to March 2, 2017—and won back the site for good.
The fall of Aleppo, whose eastern half with its downtrodden neighborhoods had been under rebel control since July 19, 2012, was the crowning of Moscow’s strategic plan. The victory would now begin to tilt the civil war in favor of its Assad ally in Damascus. The Russians had carried it out methodically ever since August 2013, when the West failed to agree on launching punitive air strikes against Bashar al-Assad for the Ghouta sarin gas attack. For lack of alternatives, the West had been forced to approve the Kremlin’s plan for destroying the Syrian chemical weapons under UN authority.
However, the reconquest of Aleppo was eased not just by deploying the usual foreign Shiite forces on the ground and having the Russians attack the insurgent positions from the air. Ankara also played a role, in one of those about-faces that were common during the Levant war, by stopping the flow of supplies to the besieged rebel forces. A meeting on December 20, 2016 between Russian, Turkish, and Iranian officials minus the United States finalized the ceasefire and evacuation of the fighters the Russians, Turks, and rebels had negotiated earlier that month. This realignment by Turkey’s President Erdoğan, who was gradually dissociating himself from the American-Sunni axis and drawing closer to Vladimir Putin, is explained by the growing strength of the Kurds. The Turks feared that the Kurds would view the Syrian chaos as an opportunity for translating their gains into Kurdish separatism inside Turkey.
The Great Game, Turkish-Style: Neo-Ottoman Projection and National Constraints
The Turkish-Syrian relationship, lukewarm since the days of Atatürk, had warmed thanks to Professor Ahmet Davutoğlu, an Islamist academic, who became foreign minister (2009–2014) and prime minister (2014–2016) under Tayyip Erdoğan. Davutoğlu developed the vision of a “strategic depth” for Turkey ruled by the Islamic-conservative AKP party. It let Turkey revive a neo-Ottoman appetite for its regional environment after eight decades of secular and Western focus. In 2004, Turkey and Syria signed a free-trade agreement in a first step toward establishing a “Levantine Common Market.”
I had the opportunity, as part of a small group of French intellectuals and academics, of meeting Bashar al-Assad in Paris in November 2010, four months before the start of the “Damascus Spring.” At the time, the Syrian president was still regarded as reputable. He met with us as part of a charm offensive, and he went on to sing the praises of relations with Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. He envisioned forming a prosperity zone with them on a par potentially with the European Union. But the Ankara-Damascus friendship could not hold up long under the strains of the uprising in Syria. The Turkish government, careful to place itself on the right side of history, encouraged the rebels. In its global policy toward the Arab Spring, Turkey colluded with Qatar in promoting the Muslim Brotherhood, which the AKP could be said to parallel, to positions of power everywhere. This maneuver agreed with the views of the Obama administration and hardly aroused any objections in the European governments—they were resigned to the elevation of a party that mixed an Islamic ethic with the spirit of capitalism.
Turkey also hosted the headquarters for much of the opposition in exile. It was the preferred meeting venue for many conferences and negotiations for the Friends of Syria. And it was the destination for about half of the seven million refugees from the war, as Turkey shared a 511-mile border with Syria. Most of the border crossing points had been in the hands of the rebels from the start of the insurrection. They were the favored corridors for trucking in food, medicine, arms and ammunition, and more. Most of these transfer points were also used by the international coalition supporting the rebels. However, two flows had become problematic starting in 2013. First, there were the jihadists crossing over to head for the battlefields, or returning from them to commit attacks in Europe. Second, the Al-Nusra Front and ISIS tanker trucks were funneling oil from captured Syrian oil fields through the crossing points. These shipments were estimated in 2015 to be worth 1 to 1.5 million dollars, or about half of the Islamic State’s budget, making it the best-financed terrorist organization in the world. This problem, which led to heated arguments in Turkey, was gradually taken care of by systematic Russian air attacks on the tanker convoys. In contrast, the issue of cross-border flows of jihadists repeatedly led to tensions with the Western states, especially in Europe. This happened especially when sizable attacks were committed by fighters returned from Syria who had traveled through Turkey, as in the case of several of the killers of November 13, 2015 in Paris.
Ankara’s leniency has been ascribed to its anxieties about developments on the southern side of the border, in Rojava. As noted earlier, this is the autonomous area inhabited by Kurds and administered by the YPD (Syrian Kurdish) party, which has links to the Turkish PKK. The concern was that the Kurds in their quest for autonomy in eastern Anatolia might use the YPD’s Turkish connections to the advantage of their cause. Ankara, therefore, would not be unduly upset at the People’s Protection Units (YPG—the YPD militias) being harassed by the Al-Nusra Front and especially ISIS, which had condemned the Kurds as kuffar (nonbelievers). However, for Turkey’s allies in NATO, Ankara turning a blind eye to the enemy of its Kurdish enemy was unacceptable. For the European states suffering terrorism on their own soil, the priority was to wipe out the international jihadists. In fact, the Americans were supplying advanced weaponry to the YPG because it was the most effective—and for a long time the only—fighting force capable of defeating ISIS on the ground. The Turkish authorities and media accused the YPG of diverting some of these arms to the PKK, to use against the national police. In clashes with Kurdish independence fighters that resumed in 2014 after a two-year lull in the town and region of Diyarbakir in the country’s southeast, the Turkish police were unexpectedly outgunned.
With tension building between Ankara and its NATO partners, Turkey gradually drew closer to Russia. Their relationship had been under a cloud since November 24, 2015, when the Turks had shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-24 fighter over the Turkish-Syrian border. This happened two months after the Russians entered Syria and began their bombing sorties against, among others, the rebels supported by Turkey. Never before had a NATO member shot down a Russian or Soviet military aircraft, even during the Cold War. Moscow retaliated with economic sanctions and started a press campaign accusing one of Erdoğan’s sons of having organized oil trafficking with ISIS. It also accused Ankara of being involved in jihadist terrorism. The Russians dusted off the old Communist networks among the Kurdish independentistas (who themselves were crypto-Marxists), delivered some arms, and had their planes bomb convoys carrying oil from ISIS-controlled wells to Turkey.
President Erdoğan expressed his regrets for shooting down the Sukhoi in a letter to his Russian counterpart at the end of June 2016 (mediated by their Kazakh colleague President Nursultan Nazarbayev). The situation turned around spectacularly after the coup attempt against Erdoğan the following July 15. Erdoğan blamed it on Fethullah Gülen, an Islamist preacher living in exile in the United States and erstwhile ally of the AKP in ambition to liquidate the secular heritage of Kemalism in Turkey.
The ferocious repression that followed the failed putsch created serious tensions with the Western chanceries, who criticized it as an attack on democracy. The authoritarian excesses had also included the dismissal of Prime Minister Davutoğlu, regarded by the West as a valued partner. Vladimir Putin, however, immediately reaffirmed his support for his colleague in Ankara, whose governing mode increasingly resembled his own. This sudden coming together manifested itself in a major adjustment of the Turkish position in the Syrian matter. For the West, wiping out ISIS from now on would have priority over getting rid of Bashar al-Assad. The resulting massive support for the Kurdish YPG militia in Syria (born of the Kurdish PKK of Turkey and linked to it) caused deep resentment in Ankara, which viewed it as undermining its vital interests. Erdoğan thus pivoted to fighting the PKK and YPG and away from supporting the Syrian rebels. In doing so, he gave up on eliminating President al-Assad in exchange for an alliance with Moscow and Teheran that he hoped would leave him free to deal with the Kurds as he saw fit.
This complex realignment was tested barely six weeks after the failed coup, in which a number of high-ranking Turkish military officers were implicated and then arrested. Ankara launched the “Euphrates Shield” military operation, which proceeded against heavy opposition from August 26, 2016 to March 29, 2017 on Syrian territory. About 5,000 troops crossed the border, accompanied by thirty brigades of rebels numbering in the tens of thousands loosely affiliated with the Free Syrian Army. They would depend so heavily on Turkish aid that they were in effect reduced to serving the Turks as auxiliaries.
The offensive targeted ISIS and its control of the border checkpoints at al-Rai and Jarabulus, through which jihadists, contraband, and cash flowed. A second objective was the district of al-Bab and the village of Dabiq. But, beyond ISIS, the Turkish force went after the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a coalition made up mainly of Kurds from the YPG militias plus some Arab groups painted with the same anti-terrorist brush as ISIS by the Turks. The SDF was just as determined to be first in dislodging ISIS from the area it occupied between the majority Kurdish provinces of al-Hasakah in the northeast of Syria and Afrin in the northwest. Winning this sprint would give them an area all in one piece under Kurdish control south of the border. For Ankara, this was unacceptable. The Turkish offensive, backed by the FSA irregulars and with American air support, pushed ISIS out of al-Rai and Jarabulus between August 24 and 26, to the applause of the international community.
Then, from August 27 to 30, the Turkish and rebel troops shelled the SDF and YPG Kurds to force them out of the majority-Arab town of Manbij and withdraw east of the Euphrates. Pressure on Ankara from the Americans and even from the Iranians, who had links to the PKK, stopped the barrages. The offensive then carried on with difficulty until March 23 toward al-Bab, an ISIS strongpoint. But they also fought against the SDF-YPG force there, protected by American Special Forces. The Syrian army and the foreign Shiite contingents played their part by flanking al-Bab on the south until they reached the banks of the Euphrates.
These battles forced ISIS to beat a significant retreat that cost it all access to the border. Four distinct adversaries clashed in the fighting: the Turks and their Syrian rebel auxiliary forces, the Syrian Kurds and their own Arab allies, Bashar al-Assad’s “loyalist” troops and Hezbollah fighters, and of course ISIS. The first three pairs skirmished, but within limits, because both the United States and Russia, with their special forces and air support, shielded their protégés against serious harm. Only ISIS was the official mutual enemy, and wiping it out had priority. The “Euphrates Shield” operation already symbolized conflicts that would prolong the Levant war, with interweaved ethnic, sectarian, and ideological issues that brought the actors into conflict on the ground and led to intervention by the two great powers, America and Russia—until the Kremlin finally took the lead.
Moscow as well as Ankara would pay a heavy price in terrorist reprisals for the offensive. A Turkish policeman, an ISIS sympathizer, killed the Russian ambassador to Turkey on December 20. An attack on New Year’s Eve on Istanbul’s trendiest nightclub, the Reina discotheque, resulted in thirty-nine deaths. It was the handiwork of an Uzbek jihadist who had passed through the territory belonging to ISIS. And two Turkish soldiers captured during the al-Bab offensive were burned alive in cages like the Jordanian pilot Muadh al-Kasasbeh. The video of their agony was posted online on December 22 2016, the day that Aleppo fell.
Such was the environment in which the negotiated capitulation by the besieged rebels in Aleppo took place. They paid the price of their Turkish godfather’s partly abandoning them in return for Moscow granting Erdoğan a free hand with the Kurds. It signaled the end of all hope that the rebellion could ever prevail against the Assad regime, now secure in its future. Yet Ankara also regarded the rebel remnants as a potential asset in future negotiations. Hence, it organized the transport of the defeated fighters to Idlib. During 2017, insurgent brigades that were evacuated after surrendering territory would regroup there. This applied even to the Syrian jihadists driven out of the Lebanese Sunni border town of Ersal by the Lebanese army and Hezbollah in August: they were taken in air-conditioned buses to Idlib through areas controlled by Damascus troops under a safe-conduct pass.
Diverse rebel brigades now face each other in Idlib province, the first where a “liberated territory” had been organized in 2012. Among them were the jihadists of the Al-Nusra Front, caught in a pincer between ISIS, whose detestable terrorist reputation it shared despite the two groups being opponents, and groups well-equipped by the United States or Turkey. Each faction took up positions, in this area as well as in the south around Daraa and on the Golan, to negotiate the best possible future for itself, now that Aleppo had fallen and the destruction of ISIS was a possibility.
The Al-Nusra Front’s leader, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, made every effort to dissociate himself from ISIS. A long interview—probably taped in the palace of the just-captured Idlib governor—that he gave Al Jazeera reporter and Muslim Brother Ahmed Mansour on May 27, 2015, got the ball rolling. Here is how the Swedish researcher Aron Lund precisely analyzed it two days later on his authoritative website Syria in Crisis: al-Julani made a statement just by wearing typical Syrian garb and being seated on a Levantine-style chair encrusted with mother-of-pearl. This plus what he said was intended to convey the image of a “moderate jihadist” established in-country, along the line of thinking of Sayyid Qutb, instead of the ultra-Salafism of al-Baghdadi. Thus, al-Julani, encouraged by his obliging interviewer, explained that systematically massacring Christians and Alawites, something ISIS indulged in with its execution videos posted on social media, was beyond the pale. He stated that the former should just pay the head tax (jiziya, the humiliating protection tax), while the latter had only to abandon their heresy and return to true Islam.
2016 brought a straw in the wind of radicalization actually diminishing and the rebellion emerging from the dead-end in which it had been trapped by it. It took the form of debates within the Al-Nusra Front. One topic involved changing a name that overly evoked the original relationship with ISIS, and the other dropping its progressively embarrassing allegiance to al-Qaeda. In late July, Al Jazeera exclusively broadcast al-Julani’s first appearance with his face uncovered. Apparently, the network had taken on the responsibility of promoting him and his communications. Al-Julani announced that his organization was dissolving, separating from al-Zawahiri, and would be adopting the soberly Islamist name of “Front for the Conquest of Shām” (Jabhat Fatah ash Shām—the word fatah literally meaning the opening of a territory to Islam).
However, this caused many divisions in Al-Nusra’s ranks. Even this diluting of its jihadist identity still did not let the rebranded group blend with other rival brigades gathered in the Idlib region. Six months later, al-Julani would try another name change to “Organization for the Liberation of the Shām” (Hayat Tahrir ash Shām) in its ceaseless quest for legitimacy and in an attempt to attract the remaining rebels. Possibly it also testified, after a long, unfruitful war and the loss of Aleppo, to a kind of jihad fatigue as such and to a tactical adjustment. There was nothing very Islamist in the ending word “liberation” (Tahrir), this being standard Arab nationalist vocabulary. As for the word “Shām,” while it had a messianic connotation in the religious texts, it could also be understood in its neutral, geographic sense as simply standing for “Levant.” Splits in local brigades loyal to al-Qaeda led to violence, with imprisonment and executions. It still did not suffice to give the Al-Nusra Front as a whole respectability with the international coalition, despite efforts in this regard by Al Jazeera and by Doha.
The Idlib region was designated as a “deconfliction zone” by the Astana conference, which took place in the Kazakhstan capital in September 2017 to help resolve the military situation in Syria. The perspective was one of a future ceasefire under the auspices of Russia, Iran, and Turkey. In reality, the Russians and Turks did the negotiating on behalf of their respective allies, the Assad regime forces and the rebels. The Russians prevented loyalist Syrian soldiers from attacking the enclave, and the Turks, who, in the spring of 2018, had seven control points inside the zone with several tanks stationed at each, also made sure the insurgents did not fight the Damascus forces. It did not quite turn out that way. Although the Al-Nusra Front was now the Organization for the Liberation of the Shām, its attempts at rebranding had scarcely been convincing. Tainted still by terrorism and jihadism, officially excluded from the truce, the Organization for the Liberation of the Shām prepared an offensive against the town of Hama.
It was, nevertheless, still the dominant force during all of 2017, running the show along the border with Turkey’s Hatay province in particular. Through this area came all the humanitarian aid for the two million refugees and displaced people in Idlib province. Its distribution proved to be a unique lever for forcing allegiances and recruitment in the camps. Thus, while the coalition’s military offensive under Western leadership in east Syria focused on eradicating the Islamic State at Raqqa, in west Syria there survived a major jihadist center, originally inspired by al-Qaeda’s ideology. It was determined to conduct a guerrilla war by expanding its alliances with other rebels, but its power dwindled starting in early 2018. What caused its weakening would be one of the issues in restoring the political landscape after the end of the caliphate.
The Caliphate Falls
Looking back on the year 2017, the main event was the fall of the Islamic State. Its Mosul metropolis in Iraq was captured on July 10, followed by its “capital city” Raqqa on October 17. Erasing ISIS as a geographical entity changed the situation throughout all of Syria, as well as in Western countries that had been hit by international terrorism coordinated from the toppled caliphate. Thus ended a cycle whose ups and downs and complex outcomes none of the actors truly grasped. But it also marked the start of an era for reorganizing the Middle East and the Mediterranean along lines new and old. The outcome will determine the future of the region, its relations with Europe and the World, and its place in the global system. The fall of both symbolic caliphate cities in Iraq and Syria provided a chance to observe power relationships and anticipate how they would evolve.
The offensive against ISIS in Mosul involved soldiers of the Iraqi state, which recovered its sovereignty on its sunni metropolis on that occasion. In contrast, neither Bashar al-Assad’s troops nor the Shiite paramilitaries participated in Raqqa’s liberation, being confined to securing the eastern Syrian desert south of the city. Even with an overmatched enemy holding Mosul, it took an alliance of most of the regional and international actors capable of projecting military force a grueling, nine-month campaign to recapture it. Besides Iraq’s national army and diverse paramilitaries, it included the Peshmerga sent by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Erbil, local brigades from the Nineveh region (Christians and Yazidis) as well as contingents from Turkey and Iran, plus the eight countries in the United States–led coalition, including France and the United Kingdom. While eradicating ISIS was the mutual objective, each partner watched the others to limit any advantage they might try to draw from the expected shared victory. The same model had prevailed in the “Euphrates Shield” operation a few months earlier. But taking back this Sunni bastion, where ISIS had benefited from collusions and the approval of parts of a local population marginalized by the Maleki government, was only the beginning. Baghdad’s forces, trained and equipped by the United States—under the watchful eyes of Iran—had to win hearts and minds too, or they would win the battle but lose the peace.
The complex duopoly exercised over Baghdad by Washington and Teheran required them to get along in Iraq, while everywhere else America and Iran were at loggerheads. It called for holding the Shiite Hachad Chaabi (“Popular Mobilization”) paramilitaries, who had already been guilty of numerous excesses against Sunnis during the advance on Mosul, back from the city. The Hachad Chaabi had formed after an appeal by the Grand Ayatollah of Najaf, Ali al-Sistani, following the Iraqi army’s collapse of Mosul in June 2014, which let the jihadists take the city without a fight and then advance on Baghdad. Trained and officered by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, that militia since that time represented Teheran’s principal stand-ins in Iraq.
In parallel with these forces attacking Mosul from the south, the Peshmergas of the Erbil Kurdistan Regional Government advanced from the northeast. Sunnis for the most part, they benefited from Turkish support, unlike their Turkish PKK rivals. In a post-Ottoman move, Ankara set itself up as a defender of the Sunnis, especially the Turkmen, a Turkish-speaking ethnic minority highly concentrated in the city of Tal Afar on the Syria-Iraq border. This was the nursery for many senior Baathist officers loyal to Saddam Hussein who subsequently were recycled into ISIS as high-ranking commanders. Since President Erdoğan was financing the anti-jihadist militia led by the former governor of Mosul, he wanted to send troops to help retake the city. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi flatly rebuffed him. One Turkish unit participated anyway, as did the Turkish air force. The Arab-Kurdish hostility sidelined the Peshmergas at Mosul, limiting their ability to provide security for the Christians and Yazidis returning to their villages on the Nineveh plain.
To confront the ten thousand jihadist fighters holding Mosul, the coalition had mobilized a force almost ten times larger, in addition to having an edge in the Western air strikes on the besieged city. Nonetheless, seven months would be required, from November to July, to recapture the metropolis. Just taking back the last five square miles of the Old City took two months of intense fighting. On June 21, 2017, the al-Nuri mosque, with its tilted al-Hadba minaret where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, dressed in black Abbasid garb, had delivered his first sermon, was dynamited by the jihadists. The ground once occupied by the mosque is marked out today in squares formed by army barricades that display banners representing the Imam Husayn ibn Ali, the founding figure of Shiite martyrology.
After Mosul, the reconquest of Raqqa launched on June 6, 2017, ending after four months and eleven days in October. The town has about one-fifth of the population of the Iraqi metropolis, which still amounted to 1.5 million people on the eve of the offensive. The disparity in forces was much less here, with perhaps three thousand jihadists pitted against only ten thousand attackers. The ground attack was carried out by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), almost entirely composed of Kurds from the YPG aided by some Arab brigades.
The loyalist Syrian army, the Russians, and the Iranians did not take part in the battles, which progressed under the authority of an international coalition led by the United States, supported by France and the United Kingdom. The Jordanian and Emirati air forces also flew air support missions. When Raqqa fell on October 17, an estimated 1,500 jihadists had been killed, and half that number had been captured. Three hundred men, most of them members of local tribes, were allowed to capitulate and move to the last pocket controlled by ISIS at Deir ez-Zor in exchange for an evacuation of civilians. They would be followed without notice by thousands of jihadists and their families, most of them foreigners, who crammed a small area around the city of Baghouz, on the Euphrates river and close to the Iraqi border—where they would remain until they were defeated and captured by the Kurdish YPG militias in March 2019. On October 18 2017, on Raqqa’s main square al-Naim, where ISIS had held public executions, a woman commander of the Women’s Protection Units (YPG) planted the flag of the Syrian Democratic Forces. The next day, the Kurds unfurled an immense portrait of Abdullah Öcalan, founder and president of the PKK, currently jailed by Turkey on the island prison of Imrali, whose teachings people read throughout Rojava with the sort of faith usually reserved for catechism.
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On December 11, 2017, Vladimir Putin stopped briefly at the Russian military base at Hmeimim during a trip that took him to Egypt and Turkey. In images broadcast by Sputnik and Russia Today Online, Bashar al-Assad, fussing over the Kremlin’s master, looked like his vassal. The Russian president congratulated himself on the success of his troops in the fight against terrorism. He also announced that a significant part of the expeditionary corps would be returning home, their mission accomplished. And yet, the Russian troops remained in place. They played a key role in coordinating and supporting the regime’s offensive launched February–April 2018 against eastern Ghouta, a densely populated suburb of Damascus. With the forty-fifth president of the United States appearing to have little appetite for acting in the Middle East, and with the regional actors deeply divided, a new page for ending the Syrian conflict was turned uncertainly after six years of the process called “destruction of a nation.” The expression was coined by Nikolaos van Dam, a longtime observer of the country and author of one of the best books about the Syrian civil war, Destroying a Nation (Hurst, 2017).
Although the Islamic State is now history, the “destruction of the nation” of Syria, taken to the extreme by ISIS outlining a jihadist state that erased the “impious” border drawn between Iraq and Syria in 1916 by the Sykes-Picot Agreement, nevertheless remains an elastic situation. Syria, which the French League of Nations mandate had originally divided between WWI and WWII into the states of Damascus, Aleppo, the Druze, and a territory of the Alawites, as well as the Sanjak of Alexandretta, was once again divided into zones as 2017 ended. Some were controlled by the Assad regime, others by rebels, others yet again by the Kurds of the PYD. The Turkish army had a presence, and in February–March 2018 it made an incursion into the border canton of Afrin where it was fighting the Kurds—with Shiites irregulars trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard coming to the rescue of the Kurds…
At the same time, Teheran was allied with Ankara under the Astana peace process. The Russian ground troops and air wing engaged in combat, mostly from their base at Hmeimim, and the American Special Forces remained in the east supporting the Kurds. In February 2018, the U.S. soldiers and air force fought off a raiding party of Arab tribesmen and Russian mercenaries at an oil well. It cost the attackers dozens of dead. Like the roving groups of brigands of the European Middle Ages, Shiite paramilitaries lived off the land and set up strongpoints in which Damascus barely had any say. The same held true for various Sunni brigades, ranging from the remains of the Free Syrian Army (now vassals of Ankara) to jihadists of all stripes that exploited the local population, with or without sharia’s stamp of approval. This situation was replicated to a lesser degree in Yemen and—to some extent—also in Libya. But it was in Syria that it peaked: the interactions between parastatal actors and foreign powers created elements of the chaos that symbolizes par excellence the most extreme challenge confronting all of the Mediterranean Middle East. The following pages will attempt to define the issues and contextualize them, in light of the global changes the Middle East would endure as Moscow tightened its grip and Washington under Donald Trump gradually pulled out of the region.