3

CONFRONTATION BETWEEN THE MILITARY OF THE REGIME AND THE OPPOSITION

THE MILITARY OPPOSITION

Within two months of the start of the peaceful demonstrations in 2011, the Syrian army and security forces started to suffer from defections.¹ Some military and security forces reportedly fled after refusing to shoot at demonstrators. Some of those who refused orders were shot.² Some defectors fled abroad, the most prominent among them being General Manaf Talas of the Republican Guard, in 2012. He played no further role thereafter, but his departure was taken very seriously by the regime, because he had been so close to Bashar al-Asad. There were very few Alawi military who defected for fear of severe repercussions for their families. One of the exceptions was female Alawi Colonel Zubaydah al-Maqiti from the Golan, who defected in October 2012.³ There was a very little-known small Alawi military opposition group called Harakat Ahrar al-‘Alawiyin (‘Movement of the Free Alawis’), reportedly active in the regions of Latakia and Tartus for some time, but they apparently decreased or stopped their activities.⁴

In general, not much Alawi dissension was visible, however, although several prominent opposition personalities were Alawis, and were clearly visible in the civilian opposition both outside the country (like Mundhir Makhus, and others), and inside Syria (like Lu’ayy Husayn, ‘Arif Dalilah and others).

Most military defectors stayed inside Syria and at first started to regroup under a loose umbrella organisation called the Free Officers’ Movement. In July 2011, they officially announced the formation of the Free Syrian Army (FSA). The FSA developed into one of the most well-known military opposition organisations, but did not become the most powerful nor the most effective one. Western countries recognised the FSA as a moderate – and initially also secular – organisation with which they were prepared to cooperate against the regime, and at a later stage against the Islamic State. The FSA leadership resided in southern Turkey, not inside Syria itself, which turned out to be a weak point, as far as both efficiency and legitimacy were concerned. The FSA depended to a great extent on the help of various supporting countries that themselves did not, however, effectively coordinate their military support, and did not always provide the FSA with the military supplies necessary to be able to capably defend themselves, let alone to defeat the regime. FSA lack of unity or fragmentation had therefore to a certain extent its origins in the lack of coordination and cooperation between the supporting countries themselves.

Had the United States and other Western countries given more support to the FSA in the earlier stages of its existence, the chances might have been better for it to develop into a more important military actor.⁵

Various donor countries gave priority to what they considered to be their regional interests and policies over ending the conflict. Numerous military groups were operating under the umbrella of the FSA, but its organisational structure and capabilities remained relatively weak. Attempts to establish and operationalise a Supreme Military Council, provincial military councils and a ministry of defence within the Syrian Interim Government in exile in Gaziantep did not really contribute to success on the ground inside Syria.⁶ The Syrian Interim Government wanted all funds and aid to be channelled through its own institutions, but donors were generally hesitant, and preferred to provide aid directly to the groups involved. This in turn undermined the legitimacy of the Syrian Interim Government.

Military command centres were established in both southern Turkey and Jordan, to channel military support to armed opposition groups in northern and southern Syria respectively. In Turkey, it was the MOM (Müşterek Operasyon Merkezi – Turkish for Joint Operations Centre) and in Jordan (Amman) the Military Operations Center (MOC). The various members of the MOC and MOM (including Turkey and Jordan as host countries, the United States, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Great Britain, France and others) channelled their respective military aid to various opposition groups, but there was no clear overall coordination among them which could have helped strengthen the involved military opposition groups as a whole. Each country acted more or less independently from the others and followed its own priorities. This lack of concerted action not only contributed to a proliferation of insurgent factions, but also to the FSA’s incapacity to present a genuine threat to the Syrian regime.⁷ Western criticism of the military opposition, concerning a lack of coordination, was therefore unjustified insofar as this was a result of a lack of Western military coordination.

Thomas Pierret, on the other hand, has concluded that ‘whatever financial resources state sponsors pour into their insurgent partners, they cannot make a rebel faction successful when its leadership is dysfunctional, nor can they lastingly impose unity on rebel groups against their inherent centripetal dynamics’.⁸

Patrick Cockburn has noted that, according to one of his informants, meetings of the FSA Military Council were invariably attended by representatives of Saudi Arabian, UAE, Jordanian and Qatari intelligence services, as well as intelligence officers from the United States, Great Britain and France:

At one such meeting the Saudi Deputy Defence Minister, Prince Salman bin Sultan addressed them all and asked Syrian leaders of the armed opposition ‘who have plans to attack Assad positions to present their need for arms, ammo and money’.

According to Cockburn, one gets the impression ‘of a movement wholly controlled by Arab and Western intelligence agencies’.⁹

Donor countries (like the United States and Turkey) sometimes simultaneously gave contradictory instructions to Syrian military commanders in battles with the Islamic State, threatening to stop their military aid if their instructions were not followed up. Syrian commanders also complained about the lack of relevant military intelligence, which could have been provided in time by their foreign supporters, and about lack of sufficient ammunition (which they occasionally described as a kind of ‘drip-feeding’). Opposition commanders sometimes felt betrayed.

Also important were the salaries paid to the opposition military involved. Some FSA soldiers went over to Jabhat al-Nusrah or the Islamic State, simply because they received better pay, which they needed to maintain their families.¹⁰

The influence of ‘state backers’ in southern Syria was smaller than in the north because of the stringent border controls by the Jordanian authorities. Next to the MOM and MOC, illegal private finance channels played a role, mainly originating in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and other Arab Gulf states.

As well as the FSA, other insurgent movements started to emerge. Among the most important military opposition organisations next to the FSA, with more effective organisational structures, were: Islamist organisations like Ahrar al-Sham and Jaysh al-Islam; the Jihadist Jabhat al-Nusrah (linked to al-Qa’idah and al-Qa’idah Iraq); and the Kurdish YPG (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel or People’s Protection Units). The Islamist organisations tended to be better organised and enjoyed more sustained and reliable sources of support from outside than did the FSA, in particular from Qatar. Turkey and Jordan influenced the way in which certain groups could obtain more support than others, because of their control over the borders.

In April 2013, another powerful group emerged in Syria under the name of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) (al-Dawlah al-Islamiyah fi al-’Iraq wa al-Sham). Since 2006, it had already been active in Iraq under the name of the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI). It attracted many foreign Jihadists. In July 2014, it gave itself the shorter name of the Islamic State (IS), implying a much wider framework, supposed to be for all Muslims without geographic limitation. Al-Raqqah was declared to be its capital. Its (Iraqi) leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed himself as the new Caliph. He announced the incorporation of Jabhat al-Nusrah into IS (with which organisational links had originally existed via al-Qa’idah in Iraq), without informing it beforehand. Jabhat al-Nusrah refused, however, and in 2014 both organisations effectively declared war on one another.¹¹

ISIS, and later IS, was given by outsiders the name of Da’ish, which is meant to be derogatory (and strongly disliked by IS), although it is no more than the acronym of the Arabic name for ISIS.¹² The word Da’ish was previously unknown in Arabic but can be associated with the verb Da’asa, which means ‘to trample down’.

IS became infamous for its excessive use of horrifying violence and executions. Minorities, like the Alawis, Druzes and Yazidis, were considered as infidels and heretics whom it was permitted to kill on religious grounds. The fourteenth-century Hanbali jurist Ibn Taymiyah was quoted by radical Islamists as having issued a fatwa saying that it was considered legitimate to kill Alawis. The fatwa concerned had also been used before by the Muslim Brotherhood Mujahidin as a ‘justification’ for assassinating Alawis in the late 1970s and early 1980s. That Ibn Taymiyah’s fatwas were not all that clear about the Alawis (and that he appeared to be not that well informed about Alawis, if only because he confused Alawis with Isma’ilis) was not important to those who used him as a justification.¹³ Their perception of it was more important than historic reality and precision.

IS submitted Christians and others to severe rules that were supposed to be fundamentally Islamic, and Sunni Muslims were forced to follow the harsh practices as prescribed by IS. In education at schools in areas under IS control, children were exposed to intensive indoctrination according to the IS curriculum, which, in itself, could have a profound long-term effect. IS challenged the legitimacy of al-Qa’idah as the leading authority within the global Jihad by presenting itself as its rightful replacement.¹⁴

IS was considered a threat to Western countries because of terrorist attacks in the West. As a result, Western countries shifted their priorities and started to focus more on battles against IS than on the fight against the al-Asad regime. Several Syrian military opposition groups were requested to shift their policies accordingly, but for many the fight against the Syrian regime was at least as important, if not more, than the fight against IS.

Some argued that without al-Asad’s regime there would not have been any IS in Syria, but IS emanated from Iraq and al-Qa’idah after the fall of President Saddam Hussein (following the US–British occupation of Iraq in 2003), and would probably also have tried to expand into Syria without al-Asad. The Syrian War made it easier for IS, however, to penetrate the country. Those who wanted the struggle against al-Asad to be given priority also argued that the numbers of victims caused by IS was much lower than those caused by the al-Asad regime. But the lower death toll of IS should not be confused with lower degrees of brutality, because IS committed extreme human rights violations, including mass executions, regularly filmed beheadings and public executions. According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, the al-Asad regime was considered to be responsible for about 90 per cent of all civilian casualties in the Syrian War.¹⁵

Christopher Phillips has noted that IS had ‘many parents’, and that if the Asad regime bore responsibility for IS, so did his many international enemies. ‘Through a mixture of bungling, short-termism, indirect and intentional policies, the west, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia all played a role.’ IS would not have had a chance if the Iraqi regime of President Saddam Hussein had not been toppled after the US–British invasion in 2003. Because of the relatively premature US military withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 a weak and unprepared Iraqi army was left behind, that could be easily overrun by IS in Mosul in 2014, enabling them to capture huge amounts of weapons. Because of the empowerment of a Shi’i, sectarian-dominated, government in Baghdad, the Sunni population was put at a disadvantage, creating fertile ground for IS. Turkey’s open border enabled foreign fighters drawn to IS to pass into Syria relatively easy. The Syrian regime initially saw advantages in the rise of IS as a counterweight to other enemies.¹⁶ Concerning the role of Saudi Arabia, IS ideology draws heavily on Saudi Wahhabism, forming a link between decades of Saudi-funded religious propaganda and the appeal of radicalism in the Muslim world.¹⁷

In some cases the United States started military training programmes for the Syrian opposition that were intended exclusively to fight IS. The so-called Train & Equip Programme was an example. Syrian opposition military who took part in it were requested to commit themselves exclusively to the fight against IS. Weapons provided to them were not allowed to be used in battles against the regime. As a result, the Train & Equip Programme utterly failed. The Syrian military opposition wanted to decide on its own priorities instead of having them prescribed by foreign powers.

In 2015, at least 150,000 insurgents with as many as 1,500 organisationally distinct armed groups were reportedly involved in different levels of fighting across Syria, some under broader umbrellas and fronts and others existing entirely independently.¹⁸ As a result it was obvious that Syria could not be geographically divided schematically into territories with clear military frontlines.¹⁹

Thomas van Linge published a diagram in 2016, titled The Syrian Rebellion,²⁰ in which he schematically divides the military opposition groups into ‘Rebels’, including the Free Syrian Army and many others; ‘Islamist rebels’, including Ahrar al-Sham and Jaysh al-Islam; ‘Jihadists’, including Jabhat al-Nusrah; and finally ‘Rojava’²¹ in the mainly Kurdish region in the north, including the Kurdish YPG and other organisations fighting in this region under the umbrella of the ‘Syrian Democratic Forces’.

Some of the ‘rebel’, ‘Islamist rebel’ and ‘Jihadist’ organisations cooperated under the umbrella of ‘Jaysh al-Fath’, mainly in Idlib Province; others cooperated under the umbrella of ‘Fath Halab’, mainly in the Aleppo region. Some of these organisations were active in both Jaysh al-Fath and Fath Halab, like Ahrar al-Sham, whereas some of the Jihadist organisations, like Jabhat al-Nusrah, were only active in Jaysh al-Fath.

The cooperation of Jihadists like Jabhat al-Nusrah with moderate forces like the Free Syrian Army under the same umbrella, was criticised by Western countries, because they considered Jabhat al-Nusrah to be a terrorist organisation because of its links with al-Qa’idah. In July 2016, Jabhat al-Nusrah’s leader Abu Muhammad al-Jawlani officially declared that his organisation had no longer any ‘affiliation to any external or foreign entity’, and from then on continued under the name of ‘Jabhat Fath al-Sham’ (‘The Front for Conquering al-Sham or Greater Syria – the Levant’). He kept praising the al-Qa’idah leadership, however, and did not say explicitly that his relations with al-Qa’idah had been broken off. Whatever the case, Western countries kept considering al-Jawlani’s group as a terrorist organisation, as it was before, whatever its name.

The military opposition groups sometimes operated in the same region, and sometimes felt obliged to cooperate for practical reasons under the same umbrella, temporarily or in the longer term, irrespective of ideological differences. This occasionally affected the willingness of Western countries to offer military support to the relevant groups, particularly if more moderate groups fought alongside and coordinated closely with Jabhat al-Nusrah. But for the military, including the FSA, the realities on the ground were decisive. For them it could be a battle for life and death, in which they did not have the luxury to critically draw sharp lines, according to ideological and organisational criteria. From the perspective of a member of the opposition this was clearly explained as follows: ‘You are left alone dying and somebody offers you a hand – would you refuse it in order to please the ones who left you alone?’²²

Due to lack of sufficient Western aid to the more moderate military opposition, the Jihadists were indirectly given the space to emerge as the dominant players in Syria. Charles Lister has made the sombre prediction in this respect in 2015 that

Syria will continue to represent the centre of the world for Jihadist militancy for many years to come, and the consequences for such policy shortsightedness will not only fall upon Syria and Syrians, but will affect the world at large.²³

THE MILITARY FORCES OF THE REGIME

Various scenarios have been suggested about what might have happened in Syria after the start of the Syrian Revolution. One of the theoretical options was a military coup from within by Alawi officers, who were very critical of the regime’s behaviour, in cooperation with dissident military from other communities. It would have been extremely risky, however, because of the enormous dangers involved. Anyone even contemplating such an idea and sharing it with others would seriously run the risk of immediate execution. And the Syrian regime already had decades of experience in how to prevent a military coup. Whatever the case, the regime’s hard core stayed tightly together.²⁴

Hicham Bou Nassif has made a study of the discontent of defected Sunni army officers who complained about the preferential treatment received by their Alawi colleagues. They expressed their deep resentment of what they perceived to be systematic anti-Sunni discrimination in the military institutions, making a prominent military career for them very difficult, if not impossible. The interviewed officers maintained that

Sunni officers suffered from more discrimination in the military under Bashar al-Asad than under his father. The officers maintain that Hafiz al-Asad’s grip over his generals was stronger than Bashar’s. Whereas Hafiz al-Asad was able to rein in the military elite in order to keep at least a veneer of inclusiveness in the Syrian officer corps, Bashar was not able to do so. The regime became more decentralized under Bashar, with several powerful military barons jockeying for power and competing to place their Alawi followers throughout the different sectors of the armed forces. Consequently, Sunnis’ share of prominent appointments in the military shrunk even more over the last decade.²⁵

Bou Nassif provides detailed tables of military commanders by sectarian affiliation in which he demonstrates that under the rule of Bashar al-Asad until the eve of the Syrian Revolution (2000–11), by far most have been Alawis. This, in itself, is not surprising, as the Alawi officers’ component had almost continuously grown for almost half a century, but the way it has been documented provides new detailed precision to this issue. All directors of Syrian intelligence agencies in charge of controlling the armed forces were Alawis, just like all the commanders of the Republican Guard, of the 4th Armoured Division, and all subcommanders of the Special Forces.²⁶ Statistically, 86 per cent of the involved officers were Alawi and only 14 per cent Sunni.

Since the early 1980s, Alawis have, according to Bou Nassif ’s study, made up 80–85 per cent of every new cohort graduating from the Military Academy.²⁷

If there were ever to be a political solution to the Syria conflict, it would be inevitable to bring the over-represention of Alawis in the armed forces to some more ‘normal’ proportions (not necessarily an exact reflection of their numbers in Syrian society, but something closer to it).

Almost all of Bou Nassif ’s 24 interviewed officers agreed that the combat preparedness of the Syrian armed forces had been in steady decline, at least since the early 1990s, and that it reached abysmal lows on the eve of the 2011 uprisings. ‘The neglect of the armed forces was made even more problematic in light of the preferential treatment lavished on the all-Alawi special combat units.’ Other officers stressed that ‘the Republican Guard and the 4th Armoured Division are in charge of the regime’s security, whereas national defence per se is incumbent on the armed forces at large’. They noted that the ‘ “All in the family” tactics did not change when Hafiz al-Asad passed away’. The non-exhaustive list of family members appointed in senior positions under Bashar al-Asad included his brother Mahir, the de facto commander of the 4th Armoured Division; his cousin, Dhu al-Himmah Shalish, in charge of units responsible for the safety of the president and his family; another cousin, Hafiz Makhluf, who headed unit 251 in the General Intelligence and was widely considered to be the real commander of that service; yet another cousin, Hilal al-Asad, who was commander of the Military Police in the 4th Armoured Division; and al-Asad’s brother-in-law, Asif Shawkat, the strong man in the intelligence apparatus until his death in 2012.²⁸

Any suspected dissidence from the regime was severely punished, and several prominent members of the regime died under suspicious circumstances, including General Ghazi Kan’an, Minister of Interior and former Head of Security of the Syrian troops in Lebanon (1982–2002) and Head of Political Security in Syria, who reportedly committed suicide under doubtful circumstances in October 2005.²⁹ General Mustafa Ghazalah [Head of Syria’s Political Security Directorate (Sunni)], who died on 24 April 2015, after having been hospitalised with severe injuries, also died under suspicious circumstances.³⁰

On 18 July 2012, a bomb blast at the National Security Office killed its director, Lieutenant General Hisham Ikhtiyar, in addition to Bashar al-Asad’s brother-in-law, then deputy Defence Minister General Asif Shawkat, as well as the Defence Minister General Dawud Rajihah, and Rajihah’s predecessor, General Hasan Turkmani. The attack was claimed by opposition forces, but this appeared to be doubtful at the time, if only because it was almost impossible for any force to penetrate so deeply into the heart of the regime. It was later reported to have been a paid inside job.³¹

As Aron Lund has described, the Syrian regime under Bashar al-Asad remained as secretive as that of his father: ‘an impenetrable black box of family, clan, business, and intelligence elites’, virtually impenetrable to outsiders within Syria, let alone from outside Syria.³² Although it was a severe blow, the core of the regime was not really shaken, and the regime simply rearranged some of its most senior officers.

According to some estimates, the Syrian army had about 220,000 soldiers in 2011, of whom the regime had only been able to rely on approximately 65,000 troops.³³ In battles with the military opposition the regime preferred to use the units it considered to be the most reliable. Almost by definition these had a high proportion of Alawis, as a result of which the death rates among Alawi military were also relatively high. This was a very sensitive issue for the regime, because of the high number of funerals in the Alawi villages, which must have had profound social consequences.

On 26 July 2015 President al-Asad, in a public speech for the first time, admitted to a shortage of soldiers and military setbacks. The power balance threatened to turn to his disadvantage, and in September 2015 Russia started to intervene militarily on his behalf on a large scale, changing the situation in the regime’s favour. Military forces from Iran and Hizballah had already had a lengthy and strong military presence inside Syria in support of Damascus. The repeated claim of the opposition that without all this outside help the regime would already long have collapsed before is probably an exaggeration, but the regime was clearly in a difficult position as far as manpower was concerned. Offensive operations of the Syrian army were, after the beginning of the Russian intervention of 2015, generally supported by Russian warplanes and helicopters. Troops from Iran and Hizballah also played an important supportive, and sometimes even leading, role in offensives.

Being a conscript army, the Syrian armed forces are, by composition and to a great extent, a reflection of Syrian society where its soldiers are concerned, and therefore Sunni by majority. Many Sunni military defected, even though the regime had made defection very dangerous, not only because defectors were shot when discovered, but also because their relatives came under serious threat, and had to bear the consequences. The defection of Sunni officers reflected their alienation from the regime, combined with their refusal to slaughter civilians – mostly fellow Sunnis. In effect, defection remained mainly a Sunni phenomenon.³⁴

There was no strong coordination among the military opposition forces, and numerous parallel battles were fought simultaneously in the most diverse regions of Syria. It was not a relatively simple and clear frontline of less than a hundred kilometres like, for instance, in the Golan Heights – there was a multitude of fronts all over the country, with altogether enormous distances for which the Syrian regular army was not well prepared.

Various well-equipped Special Forces of the Syrian army played an important supplementary role in suppressing military opposition activities in various regions, notably the Tiger Forces (Quwwat al-Nimr), under the command of the prominent Alawi General Suhayl Hasan, who was popular in his own circles.³⁵ They were trained to be an offensive unit, able to swiftly intervene in battles all over Syria. Almost as important were the Desert Hawks (Suqur al-Sahra’), led by General Muhammad Jabir, trained in ambush tactics, and employed in special assignments on several fronts elsewhere. Next to belonging to the regime’s most important offensive formations, the two organisations were considered to be bitter rivals, as a result of which they did not share fronts. Moreover, they were considered to be corrupt, defending their own interests and not always those of the regime. The Desert Hawks were notorious for their smuggling in the oil sector.³⁶

As the regime’s army and security forces were not sufficiently effective to defeat the opposition forces on their own, use was being made of additional support in the form of militia-like Popular Committees and the new National Defence Forces, in 2013 believed to be 50,000–60,000 strong.³⁷ Irregular units like the Shabbihah were involved as well. These units and groups were active in villages, towns and cities to fight opposition forces.³⁸ At first they helped the regime to better survive, but later they simultaneously also undermined it because of their corrupt and independent behaviour. Many of its members in the course of time started to disregard instructions from the central military command, and operated more and more independently in their own regions of action. They started to build up their power bases like warlords, earning money from extortion and other activities like smuggling and kidnapping.

After several years of war, many sources of income had been lost and many sought a form of economic substitution and compensation to survive. With public wages barely enough to feed the conscripts themselves, al-Asad’s men, according to defence policy analyst Tobias Schneider, started feeding off the land and the civilian population, as a result of which a larger part of loyalist fighting formations no longer fully relied on the regime for the majority of their income.

Sometimes there were clashes between the regime and these organisations, as well as with some of the Special Forces of the army that were supposed to be loyal, but were not always so when it came to their personal and economic interests. As an important side effect of the prolonged war and the deteriorating economic situation, corruption increased correspondingly. As a result, the central authority of the regime started to be undermined to some extent by its own original supporters.

Tobias Schneider in August 2016 gave one of the bleakest descriptions of the situation on the ground by concluding that the ‘decay of the Syrian regime was much worse than generally thought’:

Over the past three years, despite foreign military aid and support, the regime under Assad has continued to atrophy at an ever increasing pace. If these trends continue, the Syrian president will soon find himself little more than a primus inter pares, a symbolic common denominator around which a loose coalition of thieves and fiefdoms can rally. Thus, with the slow decay of the once powerful state, military, and party establishment, the person of Bashar al-Assad himself has increasingly come to embody the last remaining pillar not of a state but of ‘the regime’ and its brutal war against its own citizens …

Indeed, after five years of war, the regime’s force structure today is not entirely different from that of opposition militias. While much better supplied by the Syria Arab Army’s still-standing logistics skeleton, the government’s fighting force today consists of a dizzying array of hyperlocal militias aligned with various factions, domestic and foreign sponsors, and local warlords …

Today, where briefing maps now show solid red across Syria’s western governorates, they ought to distinguish dozens and perhaps even hundreds of small fiefdoms only nominally loyal to Assad. Indeed, in much of the country, loyalist security forces function like a grand racketeering scheme: simultaneously a cause and consequence of state collapse at the local level.³⁹

The extent to which the regime was still firmly in control or severely undermined as a result of the prolonged war situation was still a matter of controversy and debate at the time. Opponents of the regime were inclined to give the impression that the regime was weaker than it was in reality, whereas the regime did the opposite and wanted to give the impression that it was stronger than it really was (which is normal in military propaganda warfare).

Whatever the case, the Syrian regime, with the help of its military supporters (both foreign and domestic), turned out to be strong enough to gain the upper hand and retake the city of Aleppo in December 2016. This was an important turning point in the war in Syria, to the advantage of the regime.

According to Cody Roche, it was clear that Syrian loyalist militias were playing an increasingly large role in fighting for the al-Asad regime, and that the ‘militiafication’ of loyalist Syrian forces strongly increased in number, size and strength from 2015 through 2016. The main intertwined reasons for this were, according to Roche, the ‘degradation and exhaustion’ of the Syrian Arab Army, the financial difficulties of the regime and the dire economic situation in Syria generally. The latter factor contributed strongly to making the numerous local private militia more attractive for men who urgently needed to feed their families. Being local (and the Syrian conflict was extremely localised on all sides) meant that they could stay close to their families. Moreover, they could profit from the amnesty offered by the regime to draft dodgers.

Roche disputes the view that the Syrian Arab Army ‘barely exists any longer’, with the fight being in the hands of the various foreign militias and military forces that have joined the fighting on the regime’s behalf. Nevertheless, the importance of these forces should, according to Roche, not be ignored: foreign forces have indeed played key roles for the regime, including taking the lead in several important offensives. The Syrian Arab Army continues to exist, however, albeit as a ‘much diminished shell of itself, mustering less than half the manpower of the pre-Civil War figure’.⁴⁰

On the side of the 1,500 or more opposition groups there was a similar phenomenon of warlords going after their own interests, which did not necessarily coincide with the interests of the Syrian Revolution against the regime.

The Syrian War was not a conventional war between two or more regular armies. In the beginning, it was a violent confrontation with the regular Syrian armed forces on the one hand, assisted by the security forces, and their adversaries on the other. These at first were mainly peaceful civilians, but they were gradually flanked more and more by armed groups who became more powerful thanks to support from abroad. Among the military opposition forces the Islamists and Jihadists gradually gained dominance, as a result of which Islamism developed into a strong dimension among the opposition. The Jihadi opposition was by definition radical Sunni sectarian and anti-Alawi.

During the battle for Aleppo in August 2016, Jabhat Fath al-Sham even named its military attack on the Aleppo Artillery Academy, close to al-Ramusah to the south of Aleppo, after Captain Ibrahim Yusuf (Ghazwat al-Shahid Ibrahim al-Yusuf ), who in 1979 had been responsible for the massacre of Alawi cadets there. It was a clear message that the Jihadists intended to eliminate in particular the Alawi forces of the regime. In addition, three battalions were formed by Islamist radicals, named after the main perpetrators of the Aleppo Artillery massacre, notably the battalions of Ibrahim al-Yusuf, ‘Adnan ‘Uqlah and Husni ‘Abu, who had all been killed within a year following the Aleppo massacre.⁴¹

Earlier, the leader of Jabhat al-Nusrah, al-Jawlani, had declared that he would ‘protect those Alawis who would give themselves up on their own initiative, distantiated themselves from the regime, and would express their regret for their idolatry (shirk) and would return to Islam’.⁴² Alawis therefore had to give up their religion in order to be accepted. It was obvious that not one Alawi followed his advice, and that they would not have trusted al-Jawlani. Jabhat al-Nusrah wanted to impose the Shari’ah on all areas conquered by them.

It should be stressed that all this did not mean that other military opposition groups were also similarly sectarian inclined. Many of them were not, but they were not the dominant forces.

After the severe defeat of the military opposition groups in Aleppo, Jabhat Fath al-Sham (ex-Nusrah) initiated a new umbrella organisation in January 2017 under the name of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS – ‘Council for the Liberation of al-Sham’). The aim of HTS was to incorporate as many Jihadist and Islamist military opposition groups as possible, preferably in the form of a merger, so as to regain a stronger position vis-à-vis the regime. Ahrar al-Sham refused to join HTS, and formed its own alternative umbrella organisation under its original name. A considerable number of experienced Ahrar al-Sham fighters defected to HTS, however, weakening their mother organisation. Both Ahrar al-Sham and HTS succeeded in incorporating a number of other military groups (most of them relatively small, and sometimes only parts of them), but their mutual rivalry also diminished their military potential, with HTS gaining a stronger position than Ahrar al-Sham at the time. Infighting among Jihadist, Islamist and FSA factions undermined the position of the military opposition groups as a whole. The Jihadist–Islamist mergers also negatively affected the willingness of Western and regional countries to keep supporting the involved groups, in particular because of their perceived links with al-Qa’idah via HTS, and the blurring of the lines between radical Jihadists and Islamists. Some – originally moderate – FSA factions went over to HTS and Ahrar al-Sham, reportedly just because they already received insufficient Western and regional support. Disunity among the military opposition groups worked in favour of the Syrian regime. The geographic intermingling of Jihadists, Islamists and FSA factions made it difficult to arrange local ceasefires between the regime and non-Jihadist opposition factions, because of the presence of HTS and other Jihadists amongst them.

SHIFTING MILITARY ALLIANCES

During the Syrian War, military alliances or rather military ‘marriages of convenience’ shifted on various occasions, depending on what was considered to be the most advantageous or least harmful at a particular moment for the parties involved. The cooperation between the more moderate military groups and Jabhat al-Nusrah or other radical Jihadi movements has already been referred to. The groups involved had little in common ideologically speaking, but merely cooperated on certain occasions in order to survive or to be able to win. Generally, such forms of cooperation and coordination were only of a temporary nature.

The regime was on various occasions accused of cooperating with IS, or of condoning IS victories, as for instance in the historic desert city of Palmyra in May 2015.

The reality seemed to be more complicated. In the first place, Western allied airforce units might have been able to prevent the capture of Palmyra by IS, if they had attacked their highly visible military columns, exposed in the open desert on their way to the historic city. It is not really known why the Western military allies ignored such a relatively easy military target. One reason might have been that they did not want to be seen as defending the regime. Their aim was to attack and eliminate IS on their own, but not in cooperation with the regime; that was strongly rejected. After various battles, Palmyra was recaptured by the Syrian army with Russian military support.

IS was an enemy for the regime as well, but as long as IS was fighting the military opponents of the regime elsewhere in the country, it was beneficial to the regime because it could save its urgently needed military capacities for fights in other places. Once the military threat of other opposition groups was eliminated, the ‘marriage of convenience’ with IS would certainly have been over.

On other occasions the regime was accused of threatening not to defend certain towns against IS, like Salamiyah to the east of Hama, and instead condoning its occupation by IS, if the local population refused to provide enough new conscripts for the army. Salamiyah was inhabited by many Isma’ilis and was for some time considered an anti-regime bulwark. As Isma’ilis were considered to be heretics by IS, they ran the risk of being massacred if IS occupied Salamiyah.

The regime was also accused of tacitly cooperating with the YPG, the military arm of the Kurdish PYD, against other opposition forces. In reality the PYD was an enemy of the Syrian regime because of its aim of achieving an autonomous Kurdish status in northern Syria, which had always been anathema to the Ba’th regime, because it wanted a unitarian Arab state. In March 2016, the PYD declared the establishment of a federal system of government in the ‘Federation of Northern Syria – Rojava’. This initiative was strongly rejected by most other Kurdish parties and, of course, by the regime. Nevertheless, in the case of the Syrian War, the PYD was used by the regime as a military counterbalance against other military opposition groups, including IS.

At first, Turkey did not mind the PYD fighting against the regime or against IS, but when developments turned in favour of the PYD, once it succeeded in conquering bigger parts of northern Syria, the PYD came to be seen in Ankara as an imminent security threat against Turkey.

This was one of the factors that induced Ankara to drastically adapt its Syria policies by the end of 2016, and to be prepared to initiate political cooperation with Russia and Iran to help find an end to the conflict. On 23–24 January 2017, Russia, Turkey and Iran initiated a series of International Meetings on Syria in Astana, Kazakhstan, in an effort to launch talks between the Syrian regime and several armed opposition groups, to try to reach a ceasefire and to contribute to reinvigorating the UN-facilitated political process.⁴³ Real face-to-face negotiations were not realised, however, and there could not be found any room for compromise. The United States was sidelined this time, and only attended as an observer.

Turkey could play a key role because of its control over military supplies to the armed opposition groups in Syria across the Turkish–Syrian border.

The PYD was considered by Turkey to be the same as the Turkish Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, PKK), which Ankara considered a terrorist organisation. The PYD not only succeeded in controlling a bigger part of the three mainly Kurdish areas in northern Syria, of which were two adjacent areas in the east (Qamishli and Kobani) and one in the west (Afrin), but also wanted to link them up geographically by occupying the border area in between (Kobani-Afrin).⁴⁴ This was something Turkey wanted to prevent at all costs because of the negative security effects it could have in the view of Ankara on the Kurdish area inside south-eastern Turkey. At the same time the United States, contrary to the wishes of its ally Turkey, supported the PYD because it was considered an effective force in the war against IS, which was their priority. In the case of the regime succeeding in defeating the other opposition groups in the north, it would certainly no longer condone PYD’s self-declared autonomous zone there and would try to eliminate it.

The Syrian regime was also supported by Iraqi Shi’i militias in its fight against the Syrian military opposition, including in the areas of Shi’i holy places.⁴⁵ It was another example of strange alliances. Western governments cooperated with the Shi’i-dominated regime in Iraq in its fight against IS, whereas they considered any cooperation with the al-Asad regime against IS a taboo. Nevertheless, the Iraqi regime in turn allowed, or at least condoned, Iraqi Shi’i fighters to fight on the side of al-Asad in his war against the Syrian military opposition groups who were supported by the same Western countries. The Iraqi Shi’i militias were supported by Iran, yet another adversary of Western countries. It was a strange and seemingly contradictory network of alliances, although all these links had their own explanation.

All such alliances were generally meant to be temporary, depending on the military and political priorities of the day, and therefore could better be considered as temporary ‘marriages of convenience’ that were intended to prevent developments turning from bad to worse for the parties involved.

A big question remained. Which party would take over the territories that were under control of IS, after IS had been defeated: the regime, the military opposition groups like the FSA, PYD, Islamist and Jihadist forces, or others? It all depended on the military balance of power on the ground, and the political consequences could be far-reaching.