Urban and Rural Militia Organizations in Syria’s Less Governed Spaces

This paper contends decline of Bashar al-Assad’s governing authority and the concomitant accretion of increasingly complex militia organizations suggests a future of petty militia fiefdoms affecting an Islamic veneer ruling the Syrian space. Geography, including its human domain, sustains the qualitative patterns of militia development and interactions across Syria’s rural and urban spaces and defines the geographic areas of dominance of these militia fiefdoms. The concurrence of severe drought, the Arab Spring, and the availability of social media ignited the Syrian rebellion in 2011. The rebellion itself ultimately became a militarized arena for conflict between outside powers as foreign fighter enhanced Salafi Jihadist Organizations displaced aspirational moderates to dominate the armed opposition to the Assad regime. The civil war ultimately became demarcated by hundreds of militias separated generally into a three sided contest between Iranian, al-Qaeda affiliated and Islamic State affiliated militias establishing petty fiefdoms while attempting to govern the Syrian space.


Introduction
Syria's civil war can be viewed through many lenses. The shape of the Syrian civil war in one sense is a gauge of the contest between modernity and its antagonists. At another level the popular uprising against Syria's Alawite dictatorship anchored in Ba'athist ideology, even conceding Ba'athist Westernizing and secularizing pretentions, was a response to the democratic aspirations initially defining the Arab Spring.
[1]The Assad government is frequently described as an "Alawite regime" but it is important to note that the dominance of the Alawite sect is less significant than the constellation of favored families and affiliates, often linked by marriage and including some Sunni's and other preferred family networks in the web of Assad's government. The core extended families include Bashar Assad's mother Anisa Makhluf (no longer living in Syria), his sister Bushra and the Shawkat family of her husband as well as the larger Makluf and Shalessh families. These families and some others generally but not exclusively Alawite ran Syria's government like a mafia fiefdom. [2] Politically the democratic aspirations firstly driving the popular revolt against the Assad dynasty are now washed away by a tide of Islamist and ethnic politics that is antagonistic to modernity and suspicious of democracy.

Sparking The Syrian Rebellion
While the Syrian rebellion is thought of as part of the larger Arab Spring it is geography, including its human domain that is a significant dynamic igniting the fires of the Syrian civil war. A combination of drought and usually bad Syrian agricultural policies in the early 2000s created an environment ripe for rebellion. Following Bashar Assad's ascension to power in 2000 Damascus sought entrée into world agricultural markets but badly mismanaged water resources by encouraging the production of wheat and cotton, both water dependent cash crops, concurrent with the beginning of a severe drought. [3] In what may be one of the first politically significant impacts of global warming a decade of extreme and unrelenting drought encompassed the al-Jazira desert straddling Iraq and Syria along with the adjacent marginal steppe lands (Badia) in eastern Syria. Consequently the underground aquifers across the region were ultimately depleted by roughly 60% through the digging of illegal wells. [4] This unusually punishing drought also displaced nearly a million Syrian farmers and herdsmen who migrated to towns and cities in search of work forcing approximately two or three million out of a population of twenty four million thrust into extreme poverty. [5] The intensity of economic deprivation was heavily focused in the eastern Governorates of Deir ez-Zor, Hasakah, and Raqqa. [6] In the words of Kilcullen and Rosenblatt this displacement "Fueled by economic necessity and a persistent drought, these villagers created vast, insulated neighborhoods of urban poor. " [7] The Assad government was not expecting this influx of displaced persons and had no security infrastructure in place to monitor the displaced population. Urban Syrian social structure at the time was defined by family groups and family branches (Bayt) while rural areas immediately prior to the rebellion could still best be described in terms of tribal hierarchies. [8] Geographically these shantytowns surrounding the cities and towns where Assad's Political Security infrastructure was less well developed later directly correlated with areas of Sunni militia strength. Examples of this include the Baba Amr area of Homs subsequently controlled by the Liwa al-Haqq battalions; the Ghouta and Harasta region of Damascus later dominated by the Liwa al-Islam militia now part of Jaysh al-Islam; and the eastern shantytowns of Aleppo currently controlled by an array of Sunni militias encompassing Asala wa al-Tanmiya, Jaysh al-Muhajirin al-Ansar (mostly made up of ethnic Chechens), Suqour al-Sham (by 2015 absorbed into Ahrar al-Sham) and now Islamic State militia fighters. [9] Those internally displaced rural peasants pouring into Syria's secondary towns and cities as well as the urban areas of Aleppo and Damascus changed the human geography of Syria and provided a ready source of unemployed and desperate young men who could ultimately be mobilized in rebellion.
The seminal event giving rise to what was initially seen as a democratic revolt is usually described as a series of increasingly violent demonstrations in Daraa south of Damascus in response to the torture of several teenagers who were accused of writing anti-Assad graffiti at the Daraa headquarters of Atef Najeeb's Political Security Branch. Daraa is a relatively underdeveloped and heavily Bedouin town situated on the Hawran plateau and those first demonstrations organized by the al-Zu'bi and al-Masalmeh clans were as much protests against the thuggish response to teenage graffiti as they were aspirations for political change. [10] The human terrain of Daraa was demarcated by a clan structure of unusual depth which could sustain a popular response against the thuggery of Assad's Political Police. Clans including the Abu Zeid, Zu'bi, Harris, Masalmas, Muqdad, Jawabra, and Mahamid had relationships extending across the southern border into Jordan and into the Jordanian town of al-Ramtha. [11] When the revolt began in earnest these clan connections stretching from the Nassib-Jaber crossing to the Arabian Gulf would ultimately provide important smuggling channels for money and arms trafficking sustaining the rebellion. [12] Over the course of the uprising the relationship between the Sunnis of Daraa and their Druze neighbors east of Daraa who were ostensibly neutral but somewhat supportive of Assad became increasingly strained. [13] Although the Daraa incident is as reasonable a starting point as any other the significance is that unlike other revolutions in what is now referred to as the Arab Spring the Syrian demonstrations begin in a fairly small agricultural hub rather than the capital city. Part of the explanation here may be in the economic plight of these secondary cities as compared to central Damascus and Aleppo. James C. Davies concept of relative deprivation also called the "J-curve" theory of revolutions provides some understanding as to the timing as well as the geographic ignition points of Syria's rebellion. [14] Davies explained that economic progress followed by a sharp economic reversal can leave a population desperate for recovery and amenable to rebellion.
While Damascus and Aleppo were somewhat insulated from economic hardship because of their importance to the Assad regime the smaller agricultural cities bore the brunt of economic setbacks. Those farmers and herdsmen displaced by the severity of the drought and loss of their livelihoods and now in the shantytowns of Syria's secondary agricultural cities had known better times. The hopelessness of their economic circumstances still required what Martha Crenshaw referred to as an 'entrepreneur" to channel this hopelessness into open revolt. [15] In Daraa this role was played in part by Sunni Ulama as Ahmad al-Sayasne the Imam of the 'Umari Grand Mosque and the city's Mufti Rizq Aba Zayd joined the demonstrations. [16 ] The outbreak of the Syrian Revolution thus has an identifiable geographic direction. The geography of the Syrian Revolution is initiated first in multiple secondary towns and cities and only thereafter moves into the shantytowns surrounding Damascus and Aleppo. [17] While Damascus and Aleppo had some demonstrations it would be a full year before these cities saw armed insurrection. [18] Shortly after the spark in Daraa for example the first "Day of Rage" demonstrations was in Hasakah in eastern Syria during early February of 2011 with its population swollen by despairing and impoverished farmers who had formerly produced nearly 50% of the countries wheat and cotton. [19] The Governorate of Deir ez-Zor so directly impacted by the drought along with its capital of Bu Kamal was "immediately and intensely mobilized" after Daraa with large and ongoing anti-Assad demonstrations. [20] An ancillary political space affiliated with Syria's human geography permitted organizational activity later used to expedite rebellion was unintentionally created by Bashar Assad's wife Asma Assad. Asma Assad facilitated the creation of state sanctioned charities under the Union of Charitable Associations (itihat jamiat al-Kharia) that were allowed to network with minimal supervision by the security services. By April of 2011 local Coordinating Committees organizing demonstrations against Bashar Assad were exploiting these networks to mobilize the rebellion.
[21] By the first week of May 2011 armed clashes were taking place in the Baba ' Amru neighborhood of Homs. [22] As demonstrations spread to more cities and towns across Deir ez-Zor, Homs, Idlib and even Latakia Governorate the Assad regime's decision to crush rather than co-opt the demonstrations led to the Darwinian consequences where moderates were squeezed out and only the most radical anti-Assad actors survived. With moderates driven out, the popular counter narrative to Ba'athism was voiced through Salafi Jihadism at war with both modernity and, in Syria, at war with the House of Assad.
[23] The uprising against Assad ultimately left the nominal government in Damascus spent with an unreliable Sunni dominated Syrian Arab Army (SAA), a wrecked national infrastructure, and major cities devastated by the Syrian fratricide.
[24] The collapse of Assad's governing authority across Syria saw a rising era of militias establishing petty fiefdoms across Syria correlating with Syria's human geography. These militias acted as both proxies for external powers and as native participants in Syria's civil conflict.
The Syrian civil war is another arena for the larger contest in the region between Iran and Saudi Arabia who lead competing coalitions. The Iranian coalition on one side organizes both state and non-state actors to intervene in the Syrian civil war. Saudi Arabia confronts the Iranian coalition with a Saudi alliance of states, private donors from the Gulf and a secondary tier of Jordanian, Israeli, and Western participants of varying reliability.
[25] Saudi Arabia and Iran who had supported their own favored proxies in Lebanon for decades now have expanded that conflict across Syria and ultimately into Iraq. [26]

Urban and Rural Militarization of the Rebellion
Militia groups as they emerged across Syria during the middle of 2011 and 2012 followed a geographically discernable pattern generally correlated with the geographic patterns of the initial anti-Assad demonstrations. Militias tended to grow first in rural areas and secondarily in towns and cities. These militias initially aimed at merely protecting anti-Assad demonstrators and only later becoming dominated by Islamists bent on actually overthrowing the Assad government. Urban militias by contrast, first in Damascus and later in Aleppo, would evolve after the rural militias and following the disintegration of Assad's Syrian Arab Army in the middle to latter days of 2012.
The urban militias in their evolution were divisible into pro and antigovernment organizations. The rural militias developed first as spontaneous anti-government organizations only later were pro government rural militias conceived as part of Iran's strategy to save Syria. The pro government militias in the central cities began as reasonably spontaneous neighborhood self-defense organizations mobilized by fear of Sunni Jihadist and it was these militias that were later co-opted by the Assad government under the National Defense Forces (Quwat al-difa al-Watani) umbrellas. Particularly in Damascus and Aleppo the merchant class while socially conservative was also secular and disinclined to support Salafi Jihadism. [27] It was this generally Sunni merchant class that continued to support Assad if the alternative was a return to a romanticized vision of the 9th century. The anti-Assad militias made up of young men displaced by economic hardships would characterize organizations controlling the shantytowns surrounding these central city cores.
The rural divisions respecting support for the Assad government in Damascus were anchored in tribal division's resultant from decades of Ba'athist governing strategies. For example the Aneza tribal confederation in central Syria saw the Haddiyon tribe generally remain loyal to Assad, while the Turki, Fawa'ira, and Nu'im's mostly joined the revolution. [28] In some instances defections punctuated changing tribal alignments. The 2012 defection of the Syrian envoy to Iraq Nawaf al-Fares of the al-Jarrah clan for example helped to move the Egaidat tribal confederation into the anti-Assad column. The Hasanah, Bani Khaled and Aqaydat tribes all had had factions supporting both the regime and the opposition. [29] The Saudis whose Nejd tribes have historic linages with Syria's Anzea and Shammar tribal confederations have taken advantage of these tribal networks to provide material support to the anti-Assad rebellion. [30] In Syria's geographically eastern Governorates of Hasakah and Raqqa local tribal leaders in the rural steppe country (Rif Badia) were initially opposed to the rebellion in contrast to the towns of those Governorates. [31] The Assad dynasty (Hafez and Bashar) had used Syria's tribal confederations over the years to balance any appeal of the Muslim Brothers (Ikhwan) so some of these tribes such as the Tay, Fad'an and al-Jabbur felt beholden to the regime and have generally remained loyal to Assad. Others such as the Shammar confederation made up of the al-Khursah and al-Aslam tribes have supported the rebellion. [32]

Al Qaeda and Sunni Extremism in Eastern Syria
The Syrian civil war that shattered state institutions by 2013 also effectively highlighted overt sectarian geographies across the region. [33] The Sunni aligned communities that initially aspired to democracy and fought Assad in the north and south however were weakened by both internal divisions and Western dithering over arms. Several major Sunni formations coalesced and disintegrated until a reasonably coherent body began to fight the Assad regime under the moniker of the Islamic Front in November of 2013. [34] This front included Aleppo's Twaheed brigade under Adnan Bakkour and supported primarily by Qatar and the Jaysh al-Islam (Liwa al-Islam) in Damascus under Zahran Alloush and backed by Saudi Arabia.
[35] Abu Issa's Suqour al-Sham originating in the Jabal al-Zaqiya of Idlib fought in both the Aleppo and Idlib Governorates although it was ultimately weakened by clashes with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). [36] Some traditional Sunni Salafi organization's like Ahrar al-Sham (Harakat Ahrar al-Sham al-Islamiyah, HASI or Islamic Movement of Free Men of the Levant) incorporated fighters that could align with traditional ideologies along the lines of the Ikhwan who would theoretically participate in elections but also included more militant Salafi Jihadists who did not believe in Western style democracy. [37] Harakat Ahrar al-Sham was one of the largest organizations under the Islamic Front whose resilience was demonstrated in the organizations recovery following the assassination of its entire first and second tier leadership by an Islamic State suicide bomber in September of 2014. [38] The Syrian Branch of the Ikhwan led in 2014 by the elderly and weak Mohammed Riad al-Shaqfa never successfully rebuilt the Brotherhood infrastructure eviscerated by Hafez al-Assad in 1982. [39] The Brothers have made some half-hearted attempts to engage the Revolution but do not have enough fighters or organization to be serious actors. Those organizations are now overshadowed by the black banners of al-Qaeda (Qa'idat al-Jihad) related Jihadis rising across Syria's east. [40] The rise of these Salafi Jihadist Organizations whose numbers are strengthened by foreign fighters changed the nature of the war as they displaced Assads' moderate opposition. The largest concentration of Salafi Jihadists in the world are now fighting from Syria to Iraq with tens of thousands of men under arms.
[41] The regional and to a limited extent global impact of these Salafi Jihadist organizations and their fighters forged in the fires of the Syrian civil war will be felt for decades. The geographic focal point of these Sunni badlands was the eastern Governorate of Hasakah in the epicenter of the Syrian drought. Hasakah links the corridor between ISIS controlled cities of Raqqa and Mosul as well as the Kurdish lands straddling Syria and Iraq. Hasakah city itself is divided between Assad regime National Defense Forces and Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) ruling competing districts of the city while surrounded across the rural spaces of the Governorate by ISIS and affiliate Salafi Jihadist fighters. [48] By the early summer of 2014 these Sunni badlands in Syria's east and the Sunni towns in western Iraq were subsumed under the Islamic State (IS) rubric as ISIS renamed itself following a series of victories across the Syrian and al-Jazira desert and into the central provinces of Iraq dramatically changing the nature of the war. [49] Operationally IS fighters did not try to overwhelm militarily the more populated cities and towns it conquered. Rather they would penetrate the security infrastructure from within exploiting local corruption to dominate local criminal enterprise. [50] IS thereby created revenue streams to the organization and used local criminal talent to identify politicians and security officials who could not be intimidated and assassinate them. [51] When IS did overtly overrun a given town or city there was less active resistance to the IS as local authorities by then were essentially collaborating with them. [52] The IS, even with several thousand men under arms, has relatively few heavy weapons and fights with fairly small formations and would have great difficulty overrunning any large town or city that was actively resisting. In the Sunni areas of Iraq the IS has been strengthened by making common cause with secular Ba'athists remnants of Saddam's army some of whom are calling themselves the Naqshbandi Army (Jaysh Rijal al-Tariq al-Naqshbandi or JRTN). [53] This marriage of convenience is playing a significant role sustaining the IS in Iraq's Sunni regions. The alliance is not a natural one however and it is a point of cleavage in the IS. [54] The IS is manifesting some characteristics novel to the Syrian War and lacking in the first incarnation of Al-Qaeda in Iraq or the Islamic State in Iraq. The IS is now demonstrating some ability to govern. They chose Azhar al-Obeidi for example, a Ba'athist ex Iraqi army General who is a respectable figure and certainly no Sunni extremist as Governor of Mosul. [55] That ability to govern and hold territory is critically important if the effort to overthrow Assad is to ultimately be successful. Al-Baghdadi's command structure has now expanded and includes a three man military council now led by Omar al-Shishani and a set of twelve deputies and regional commanders including Ali al-Anbari responsible for Syrian territories under ISIS control. They apparently operate with some autonomy but coordinate through some shared networks. [56] It is in Raqqa however that IS governance is most well developed. According to the Institute for the Study of War the IS is dividing Raqqa's government into two categories; Administrative and Muslim Services and they are in fact running municipal government. [57] The IS also seems to be intentionally separating local police from religious police (al Hisba). The religious police look to have a mission of promoting virtue and preventing vice that at least takes inspiration from the Saudi religious police with a comparable mission. [58] While mocked in many quarters by Sunni religious authorities for its pretensions the Islamic State's declaration of a Caliphate under al-Baghdadi, now referring to himself as Caliph Ibrahim, may have an unappreciated inspirational value to potential Jihadis. Sayyed Qutb argued that Islam could not be fully practiced without a Caliphate and young Jihadis looking for a cause may be unpersuaded by the scholarly and jurisprudential shortcomings of a self-proclaimed Caliph. [59] The desire of young Jihadists to be part of something historic and bigger than themselves and the inspiration of a Caliphate to those young Jihadists should not be underestimated.
The Islamic State's Syrian branch was able to develop in part because the Assad regime focused its military efforts in western Syria on the relatively more moderate opponents of the regime. The Assad regime's master narrative argued for a choice between Assad or al-Qaeda affiliated Sunni extremists. [60] Trying to destroy the moderate opposition while more or less ignoring al-Nusra and the then ISIS furthered that narrative since the moderates were the real and immediate political threat to the Assad dictatorship. The inability of the moderates to organize themselves into a credible army and the failure of Western powers to provide genuine support for the moderates on the ground have probably doomed any prospects of regime change that is not antagonistic to Western interests. Now that the IS has emerged as a more credible entity both governing and holding territory is has come to the attention of outside powers including the United States which is making limited kinetic efforts to contain it.
The creation of the IS means that Sunni Salafi fighters from Iraq which heretofore had to move into Syria through formal border crossings in addition to the informal trade and smuggling routes can now move as if there were no border at all. [61] This was facilitated in part, by common tribal affinities as the Aneza, Shammar, Aqaydat and al-Jabbur tribal confederations span both sides of the former border between Syria and Iraq. [62] Iraq's Shi'a dominated nominal government allied with Assad, is now limited to the south of Iraq and unable to prevent Iraqi Sunnis from joining the fight in Syria.
In early 2014 the al-Qaeda core leadership in Pakistan speaking in the name of Ayman al-Zawahiri had attempted to renounce ISIS as an al-Qaeda affiliate knowing that ISIS and its precursor entity the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), had a history of alienating local Sunni populations. This renunciation received less attention than it probably deserved in that there are not prior instances of al-Qaeda overtly renouncing initially affiliated organizations. The emergence of the Caliph Ibrahim's Islamic State however may be an argument that the idea of al-Qaeda itself is outdated. Al-Qaeda was born as an administrative and logistical shell originally organized by Abdullah Azzam as a "Services Office" (Maktab al-Khidamat) to facilitate Jihadist resistance against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan thirty years ago. It may be less a matter of al-Qaeda as an organization factionalizing but more the concept of an al-Qaeda that factionalized with multiple Salafi related Jihadi organizations claiming piety representing Companions of the Prophet while fighting one another.
The rebellion is still aimed at the Assad regime but much fighting occurs between the militia fiefdoms created by rebel formations as a result of intra Salafi disputes particularly in the northern tier northeast from Aleppo and along the Turkish border where the IS has tried to extend its influence. [67] The Border between southeastern Turkey and northeastern Syria is quite porous and has been one of the major regions for entry for foreign fighters moving into Syria. Geographically northeastern Syria is also the area where we are seeing the emergence of a viable Kurdish state. The Kurdish Peshmerga heretofore have been content to defend their town territories from the IS and use the opportunities presented by the Syrian war to build Kurdish national infrastructure. The predominately Sunni Kurds, although they have been betrayed repeatedly by Western powers over the last century, are playing a role quite similar to Jordan in their amenability to Western interests. [68] That role includes affiliating the Kurds with other 'at risk' local minorities. The Kurdish Peoples Protection Units (YPG) therefore historically facilitated alliances with local militias defending minority communities in northeastern Syria even before the civil war. The Kurds, for example, supported the creation of the Kings Peacock (Malik al-Tawus) militia in 2007 to protect the Yazidi community and in 2008 across the border in the Nineveh Governorate in Iraq Sabah Behnem working with the Kurdish Asayish developed a Qaraqosh Protection Committee to defend local Assyrians. [69] In the current rebellion the Kurds helped propagate the small Syriac Christian militia Sutoro founded in Qamishli during March 2013. [70] Kurdish actors then generally remain in their historically defined territories while assisting and / or affiliating with adjacent ethnic minority militias to secure their geographic space. Unlike the Salafi Jihadi Organizations the Kurds are better understood in terms of establishing national infrastructure than creating petty militia fiefdoms.
The various formations within al-Nusra may become more enamored with the vision of the IS if the territories under Caliph Ibrahim's control continue to expand. In practice however an interlocking matrix of Salafi groups on the ground in Syria coalesce and disintegrate as local truces and alliances between Salafi are made and broken. [71] One of the characteristics of militia formations, both urban and rural across the Syrian space, is the creation and disintegration of truce arrangements between rival formations. Since all of the militias have intrinsic military weakness as compared to regular army formations the truce has become the vehicle to most effectively use the military capacity of a militia organization allowing them to focus their military efforts on targets left out of the truce arrangement. [72] It is also this process that is the basis for creating the transient militia fiefdoms.

Southern Syria
The war in southern Syria with its more compact geography is characterized by a different militia dynamic than other parts of the country. Geographically the wheat growing Hauran plateau and the three provinces of Deraa, Quarteira and the Druze province of Sweida define southern Syria. [73] The Amman -Damascus highway that transects the region was well known for smuggling before the Syrian civil war and served a similar function following the outbreak of the rebellion. In some areas near Daraa al-Julani's al-Nusra is established and other Salafis' are trying to become established although Islamic State fighters have so far been unsuccessful in creating a significant presence. There is considerably less Salafi influence in the Sweida region of the south where Syria's Druze live. The Druze Jaysh al-Muwahideen (Army of Monotheists) militia has been generally neutral in the conflict preferring to protect their own mountain communities rather than taking sides [74] The Druze share some analogs with the Kurds in that they are content to defend their own region although unlike the Kurds the Druze have no interest in creating a state. Israel, Jordan, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia also cooperate in this region to support rebel operations with semi-vetted pro-western militias such as the Liwa Yarmouk under the Zu'bi Bashar al-Zu'bi against Damascus and to move war material and fighters across the border. [75] Unfortunately the political theater of multiple re-organizations of Sunni fighters from the more democratically oriented Free Syrian Army (FSA) to the Syrian Revolutionary Front in futile efforts to exclude al-Qaeda related Salafi extremists have proven fruitless in a war where the Salafi Jihadists are the most effective combatants. [76] Nonetheless Assad's Syrian Arab Army formations out of Nawa sporadic attempts to hold the motorway running between Damascus and Sunni controlled Daraa have been less than successful. [77] The SAA struggles to do anything beyond trying to secure portions of the highway for the Assad regime having lost the balance of the adjacent territory to the Druze or to Sunni rebels. [78]

Shi'a Militias and their Affiliates in Western Syria
As the Syrian civil war has now evolved into a generalized Sunni revolt the shape of todays' conflict against the House of Assad is affected by the decision of Damascus to ally itself with Iran a generation ago. The ostensively secular but now shattered Syrian Ba'athist regime originally made common cause with Iran in the 1980s and in the years after the death of Hafez al-Assad in 2000 Syria effectively became an Iranian dependency. [79] While Khomeini's concept of Velayat-e Faqih governance is challenged domestically by Iran's own struggle with economic and social modernity the Syrian civil war, which is now engulfing Iraq, directly confronts Iran's Supreme leader Khamenei with a looming catastrophe. [80] Tehran is facing in Syria something close to an existential threat to its vital national interests. The rivers of Sunni blood flowing from Assad's efforts to crush the rebellion means any successor Sunni government in Syria must be hostile to Tehran. A hostile Sunni government in Damascus along with a fractured Iraq endangers the totality of Iran's Resistance Axis (Jabhat al-Muqawama) from the Levant to the Persian Gulf. "Saving Syria" then has become second only to the acquisition of nuclear weapons in Tehran's hierarchy of needs lest Iran lose the regional influence it has gained since the 1979 Revolution. [81] Tehran's ability to "Save" Syria however is complicated by the complex intra-Iranian political matrix of relationships between clerics, the bonyad (controlling various economic assets), the Revolutionary Guard (Pasdaran or IRGC) and other Iranian security organs that compete for influence in an ever changing constellation of conflicting interactions. The politically contradictory aspects Hezbollah is of course the most important of the Shi'a militias attempting to "Save Syria" for Tehran as well as itself. [95] Hezbollah is organized and operates differently than the Iraqi Shi'a militias fighting on behalf of Tehran in Syria. In southern Damascus for example a number of Iraqi Shi'a militias and Hezbollah fighters occupy the ground around the Sayyidah Zaynab and Sayyidah Ruqqaya Shrine complexes in Damascus, Bab Saghir Cemetery (also called the Sayyida Sukayna or Small Gate Shrine), and the Damascus Umayyad Mosque. These positions simultaneously hold territory in the capital while protecting the regimes air bridge to Iran via the Damascus airport. [96] One of the largest mixed Shi'a formations fighting in south Damascus is the Abu Fadl al-Abbas Brigade using a common moniker to aggregate several distinct Shi'a militias with roughly 10,000 fighters from Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. [97] This Sayyidah Zaynab region facilitates local support for both Hezbollah and Iraqi Shi'a militias as it is also the region of Damascus settled by Shi'a refugees from earlier wars in Iraq so may constitute an identifiable Shi'a militia fiefdom as the war drags on. [98] The Lebanese Hezbollah deployment aimed at saving Hezbollah as well as saving Syria is focused in the spaces abutting eastern and northern Lebanon in Syria. [99] The Hezbollah militia fighters are definable as a hybrid between special operations type groups and neo-guerrilla groups configured in a way approaching conventional military formations and meant to buttress the Syrian army on the ground. [100] In this sense Hezbollah is functioning as neither an urban nor a rural militia but something more akin to a small but more traditional military formation acting under Iranian command. Hezbollah's geographic deployment in Syria's western spaces supports a range of configurations. In and near Lebanon proper Hezbollah deploys in defined operational units. In the Qalamoun region it operates in tandem with the Syrian Arab Army while in other areas Hezbollah cells are embedded with Iraqi Shi'a militia formations. Hezbollah's initial deployments focused on efforts to secure Hezbollah's own historic arms supply route through Zebdani on the western side of Damascus which had been under effective rebel control for some time. [101] In western Syria when significant elements of the Syrian army are arrayed for particularly important battles Hezbollah appears to form what have been called "corseting" forces on the Syrian army flanks to strengthen the mediocre ability of the Syrian army to take and hold ground. [102] A Syrian army that is wanting in its ability to take territory is likewise middling in administering the territory it occupies. In the case of Qusayr for example the Syrian army's political unreliability means it is Hezbollah and not the Syrian army is really administering a militia fiefdom in the town. [103] Administration of Qusayr was important to Hezbollah because families from one of the organizations founding Hammadi clans lived there but it is also geographically important to the Assad regime as it links Damascus with the Orontes river valley through the Qalamoun Mountains into the coastal Alawite regions. [104] Although Hezbollah in theory controls Qusayr and, along with the Syrian army, the Qalamoun in fact there are still some thousands of rebel Sunni fighters operating in small bands harassing both Hezbollah and the SAA across that region. [105] Hezbollah's intervention in Syria in 2012 at the behest of Iran and to protect its own interests in Lebanon fundamentally altered the character of that organization. [106] Politically Hezbollah's resistance narrative is no longer tenable since Hezbollah is now party to a major war outside Lebanon in which Israel is not even an overt participant. Militarily Hezbollah is engaged in extensive counterinsurgency operations in a neighboring country defending an Alawite dictatorship against a popular uprising by a majority Sunni population. [107] The course of the Syrian civil war has also seen an historic expansion in the size of the organization as veteran fighters become casualties and less seasoned fighters replace them.
Iran's Revolutionary Guard while genuinely allied with Hezbollah are by contrast utilizing Iraqi Shi'a militias differently in their efforts to save Syria. Whereas Hezbollah has a hierarchy almost comporting with that of a conventional army operating under Iranian command the Iraqi Shi'a militias are much less coherently organized. [108] The Iraqi Shi'a militias also lack the experience and training of the original Hezbollah cadre who cut their teeth against the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) in south Lebanon. Many in the Iraqi Shi'a militias fighting in Syria have minimal training and their only advantage over Assad's Syrian Arab Army is that the Iraqi Shi'a are politically reliable unlike Assad's supposed army.

Lebanon's Discontents
Lebanon has historically been integral to Syria and so is inevitably engaged in the struggle for Syria. The petty fiefdoms being established by contending militias in Syria are beginning now to be reflected in Lebanon. While not entirely merging with the Syrian conflict the Syrian war is now directly impacting Lebanon with nearly a million Syrian refugees in the country and Sunni Salafi Jihadists initiating operations against Hezbollah in Lebanese territory. [119] This influx of Syrian Sunni refugees is demographically making Lebanon more Sunni and less Shi'a. The Bekka Sunni town of Arsal for example, now swollen from 40,000 to nearly 100,000 people has become one nexus for the spillover. The Sunni inhabitants provide significant logistical support for the anti-Assad rebels opposite Arsal and Tfeil in the Qalamoun region of Syria despite develop anchored in Arsal and creeping south on the western side of the Bekka.
Although there is not a significant militant Sunni tradition in Lebanon that is now changing as some segments of Lebanon's Sunni community become radicalized and Sunni Syrian refugees in Lebanon remain actors in the Syrian civil war. That radicalization is most pronounced in the rural areas of Lebanon particularly the northern Bekka although it is happening to a lesser degree in urban settings as well. [121] In the fall of 2013 for example, ISIS car bombs struck Hezbollah facilities in Haret Hreik in south Beirut while the Salafi Abdullah Azzam Brigades directly attacked the Iranian embassy in the Beirut's Jnah area. [122] The northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, always divided from the time of Lebanon's civil war, is now witnessing an emergent kinetic struggle between various Salafist supporters of the Syrian rebels in the Bab al-Tabbaneh quarter and their Alawite neighbors abutting Jabal Mohsen. [123] The Lebanese Army deployed in Tripoli during April of 2014 as part of a security plan but the Lebanese army is itself now coming under fire. Likewise Sidon in Lebanon's south now sees regular fighting between Sunni Salafists and Hezbollah supporters. [124] The real danger from Hezbollah's point of view would be Salafi Jihadists from the Ain al-Hilwah refugee camp near Sidon developing modalities for Salafi Jihadi safe passage through the Iqlim al-Kharroub where there is significant Sunni population and then move north through the Sunni villages on the western side of the Bekka up toward Arsal. [125] The danger for Lebanon is this could create a band of Sunni zones from Arsal in the north, down the western side of the Bekka then cutting further west to Sidon on the coast. This would essentially split Lebanon in half with a zone of potential refuge for Sunni Salafi Jihadists.
The modus vivendi between the Lebanese Army and Hezbollah following the 1989 Ta'if accords had been predicated on the army limiting its activities to maintaining security over the various Palestinian camps in Lebanon. Those Palestinian Camps were inadvertently destabilized by Bashar Assad himself when he placed Syrian Jihadist fighters returning from operations in American occupied Iraq in the Lebanese Palestinian Camps to prevent them from threatening his government. [126] In 2005 Syria had been forced to withdraw its occupation army from Lebanon and placing these returning Jihadist fighters in Lebanese Palestinian Camps seemed like a way for Bashar Assad to maintain influence in Lebanon. However Fatah al-Islam (in Nahr al-Bared Camp) and Usbat al-Ansar (in Ain al-Hilwah Camp) became the nucleus of a Salafi Jihadi network now facilitating operations in Syria against Assad and creating space in Lebanon for Sunni Salafi Jihadists to grow. [127] Consequently the Ta'if understanding is now secondary as the Lebanese Army attempts to suppress Sunni militants in Tripoli and Sidon while avoiding involvement in the larger Syrian conflict. Nonetheless the Lebanese Army's 2 nd and 6 th mechanized infantry brigades and 1 st and 2 nd border regiments deployed in northeastern Lebanon are slowly becoming belligerents supporting Hezbollah and the Assad government against the Sunni rebellion [128] Conclusions When Syrians first rose up in search of democratic reforms as the Arab Spring moved across the Levant the country was not a failed state. Bashar al-Assad's thuggish attempt to bludgeon into silence the moderate Syrian cry for freedom did however succeed in destroying the Ba'athist state his father built. The ethnic and religious geographies that characterized twentieth century Lebanon's civil war had their analogs in Syria but the Syrian experience is not merely reflective of Lebanon. Historically Lebanon has been the economic driver of commerce in Syria and western Syria will remain dependent on Lebanon for economic viability whatever the ultimate permutations of Syria's civil war. [129] Syrian ethnic and religious geographies were animated by a Salafi Jihadism at war with modernity and the determination of imperial Iran to hold the gains of its twentieth century revolution.
Syria's democratic revolutionaries themselves fell victim to men more ruthless in political ambition. The disciples of Syrian democracy saw their revolution hijacked by Salafi Islamists seeking not only the destruction of the Ba'athist state but the restoration of a version of Islam allegedly followed by the Companions of the Prophet. The battle in Syria grew into one between Salafi Jihadism and Iran's local procurator in Damascus Bashar al-Assad. The Western powers stepped back and contented themselves with allowing sufficient support to reach the Salfists and the smattering of democratic fighters to bleed Tehran and its allies on the battlefield but not aid sufficient to defeat Assad and allow the Salafists to come to power.
It is now possible to articulate some observations about the qualitative pattern of militia development and accretion of militia dominated petty fiefdoms across the geography of Syria. In the timeframe since the outbreak of the rebellion in 2011 we have seen an emergence of increasingly complex relationships between anti-Assad militias. The raw number of militias fighting the Assad regime increased dramatically in 2012 along with a slower increase in their military capacity and growth of spaces dominated by militia fiefdoms that continued into 2013 and 2014. A shifting constellation of alliances and truces particularly between various Salafi militias and the geographic areas they controlled characterized inter militia relations. The cumulative breakdown in Assad's governing authority across the country provided less governed spaces conducive to both militia growth and the petty fiefdoms. The involvement of external powers also followed this general trend with greater and greater involvement from 2012 forward.
While there are literally hundreds of militias across the Syrian battle space coalescing and disintegrating as truces and alliances change all the militias are not equally relevant. Major Casey Mills of the U.S. Army created an approach for assessing terrorist threats relevant to understanding Syrian militias with focus on scale, scope, and salience. Mills argues that scale defines the size and capabilities of the organization, scope looks at the ability or desire of the entity to extend its area of operations and salience examines the importance and resonance of the groups' message and objectives. [130] The anti-Assad militias with their focus in rural spaces appear to be coalescing into three general groupings. The first grouping consists of the so-called moderate militias whose fiefdoms exist in pockets of north central Syria and in the south adjacent to Jordan. These militias have been marginalized with much of their leadership outside the country and compromised to Western powers not much interested in a military victory over Assad. These militias are small and are intentionally limited in their capabilities as their Western sponsors are not seeking an outright military victory over Assad. The ability of these groups to expand their area of operations is limited secondary to the minimal support delivered from those sponsors. Their salience is problematic because their lack of military capacity makes them irrelevant. The second major grouping is defined through the Islamic Front coalition now defined primarily by Ahrar al-Sham and affiliated factions ruling multiple petty fiefdoms immediately adjacent to the Syrian rump state from Latakia south along with Jabhat al-Nusra abutting Lebanon and terminating in Damascus. These militias are Salafi Jihadist in orientation but sympathetic to the ideology of Hasan al-Banna's Muslim Brotherhood in terms of their willingness to engage non-Islamic elements to reach an ultimate goal of Islamic governance. [131] While these groups generally have no frank affiliation with the Ikhwan they do adopt Hasan al-Banna's thought as distinct from Sayyed Qutb's Leninist Vanguard Party approach in compromising with the modern world on the way to Ummah. [132] These militias are large and reasonably capable. They are sympathetic and / or affiliated with al-Qaeda but it is somewhat unclear whether they have any intentionality to expand operations outside Syria. They are more salient now than they were two years ago because the Salafi Jihadists have proven most relevant and most effective on the battlefield. The third grouping consists of Islamic State affiliated Jihadists whose fiefdoms govern in the eastern Syrian space while competing with Islamic Front formations in some northern regions. These Islamic State affiliated Jihadists incorporate transnational Jihad into their ideological worldview and for them the Syrian war is merely part of a larger struggle. Islamic State and affiliated Jihadi militias are large and reasonably capable although they rely on battlefield recovery for most of their arms and ammunition but have created their own revenue streams. They do, and in fact are, expanding operations outside Syria. The expansion is principally in Iraq with some efforts aimed now at Jordan. The message of a restored Caliphate clearly resonates with many impressionable Jihadist sympathizers outside Syria. It is the second and third groupings in Ahrar al-Sham, Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State that have attracted the greatest numbers of foreign fighters. [133] An era of militia dominated petty fiefdoms covered with an Islamist veneer then is likely to emerge across the whole of the former Syrian state with the political orientation of the various self-proclaimed Islamist Emirs dependent on the major sources of their political and material support as well as the audience to whom they are speaking in a given moment. [134] In the western Syrian rump state defined by the Tartus Latakia Damascus axis these militia fiefdoms will likely be characterized by territories ruled through Shi'a affiliated militias of different configurations united principally by faux allegiance to Iran's Revolutionary Guard through the figure head of Bashar al-Assad.
Here Assad is essentially another militia chief, albeit the largest one, beholden to a foreign patron. The threat in western Syria succinctly defined by Aaron Lund is the gradual disintegration of Iran's ability to exercise much authority through Assad. [135] Lund foresees the gradual unraveling of central authority even on the pro-regime side as the concurrent rise of local rulers operating with independent resources in ostensive regime controlled areas furthering a likelihood of militia dominated fiefdoms in western Syria. In the eastern expanses of Syria militia fiefdoms with a Salafi face will be more pronounced and adhere to disparate ideological currents flowing from Caliph Ibrahim's Islamic State and united in their rejection of modernity.
The trend over time mirroring Lebanon's experience will be towards consolidation and a re-emergence of a Syrian state but an era of militia fiefdoms will likely precede it. [23] Syrian Ba'athism is as outdated as Marxism in the Near East as the most powerful dynamics sweeping the region are now ethnic and Islamist. Democracy, Socialism, and Ba'athism have just failed politically and economically in most of the region. Democracy promotes social insurgency in the face of dictatorship but has not really survived as an end in itself. Democracy combined with Western style nationalism has functioned only in Israel where it is joined with ethnicity and, to a lesser extent, in Turkey. Egypt's experiment with socialism died forty years ago with Nasser and is a model for no one. Ideological Ba'athism with its Westernizing and material affectations have been obliterated in Iraq, failed in Syria, and exists only in the political margins of Lebanon and Jordan.

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[24] Even setting aside the sectarian make-up of the Syrian Arab Army it was still ill-equipped to suppress a massive popular revolt. The Syrian Army consisted primarily of heavy divisions intended to fight Israel in a conventional war and was neither trained nor prepared to fight a widespread counterinsurgency campaign within Syria proper. The formations of the SAA that remained most loyal to Assad were the 4th Armored Division nominally commanded by General Mohamed Ali Durgham but de facto commanded by Assad's brother Maher al-Assad and the Republican Guard Division under Geneeral Shoaeb Suleiman headquartered at mount Qasioun west of Damascus. Now Syria's national infrastructure has been reduced to ruin the only thriving economic activity seems to be the local production of the illegal amphetamine called captagon. in Iraq and Syria but that is unlikely to prove any more successful than previous efforts to segregate Salafi Jihadists from al-Qaeda factions.
[41] The increasingly sectarian nature of the war has led to "dueling fatwa's" issued by prominent scholarjurists. Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi based in Qatar issued a fatwa in the spring of 2013 supporting a Sunni Jihad against the Assad government. Grand Mufti Abdul-Aziz ibn Abdullah Al ash-Sheikh of Saudi Arabia supported al-Qaradawi. Ayatollah Kazim al-Heri now in Iran countered with a fatwa giving approval for Shi'a to fight on behalf of the Assad government. The recruitment networks for these fighters appear to be fairly informal. While informal networks of facilitators are involved in transporting housing and fighters once they arrive in Turkey the structure is not centrally administered. Jihadis often intend to fight with one organization and then find themselves associated with another once they are in Syria. As the Salafi Jihadists came to dominate the anti-Assad factions across the east of Syria both the native Syrian and foreign Salafi Sunni fighters were driven by the usual mix of political motivations to join a Jihad. In Syria however there is the additional subtext of the Sufyani narrative predicated on a claim of a Muslim tyrant arising in Damascus and ultimately being defeated by the Mahdi (an Islamic deliverer prophesized to defeat the enemies of Allah and rule for a period of years immediately before the Day of Judgment). While not a major stimulus it is relevant in actuating the desire of some young Jihadists to engage the fight against Bashar Assad as the archetype, if not the person, of that Sufyani (Islamic eschatology facilitates utilization of prophesy for politics whether there is a consensus among the scholar-jurists or not).
[42] Al Baghdadi was seriously injured in drone strike in early 2015 and designated Abu Alaa al-Afri as his successor in the event of al-Baghdadi's death. See "Isis leader incapacitated with suspected spinal injuries after air strike" The Guardian 1 May 2015. Al-Afri has himself been reported killed but the relevant point is that al-Baghdadi is arranging a succession. [88] This became more complicated in the early summer of 2014 as Iraqi Shia militia were also confronted with the need to protect the Shia populations in the south of Iraq.
[90] Jaysh al-Sha'bi were originally built on what were called Popular Committees (Lijan al-Sha'bia) that were reasonably spontaneous organizations of local militias who attempted to provide security in their own neighborhoods and were at first under the control of local notables and had no relation with the Shabiha thugs operated by the Assad's prior to the civil war. Country wide the NDF are now supposed to be organized in the various Syrian Governorates through a Governorate Security Committee nominally commanded by a retired Syrian Arab Army officer. The Assad government prefers to co-opt men who have completed their military service and can be re-trained quickly in one month courses in areas of the various Governorates still controlled by the regime.
[91] Aaron Lund "The Baath Battalions Move into Damascus" Carnegie Endowment for International Peace 13 January 2014.
[92] Latakia airport is seeing major Iranian funded expansion as an alternative to Damascus international airport should that eventually fall to the rebellion. Tartus by contrast is an ethnically mixed city now filled with Sunni and Christian regime supporters who are refugees from Homs, Aleppo, and even Damascus. [94] Aron Lund, "The Baath Battalions Move Into Damascus, " Syria In Crisis, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 13 January, 2014.