Insurgent Fragmentation and State Attachment in the Syrian Civil WarAron Lund, The Century Foundation Research Grant, 2017 Syria has been ravaged by conflict since 2011, when an uprising against President Bashar al-Assad’s authoritarian rule spiraled into civil war. From the start, but especially in its first few years, the conflict was characterized by an extraordinary proliferation of armed factions. In 2013, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency counted around 1,200 insurgent factions. On the government side, too, Syria’s pre-war army had been partially replaced by a multitude of irregular units and volunteer militias. The fragmentation of the anti-Assad insurgency hobbled its effectiveness, undercut opposition governance, and culminated in costly infighting, most notably when the so-called Islamic State broke away to establish a rival political-religious project in 2013–14. Repeated foreign-backed attempts to unify Syria’s rebel factions behind a central leadership, often using the Free Syrian Army brand, were unsuccessful. Conversely, Syria’s proregime militias have sustained an adequate level of unity through the entire war. While they are deeply embroiled in organized crime and often feud over financial or local advantage, they have, with very rare exceptions, remained loyal to Assad’s rule and reasonably responsive to central government direction. The fragmentation of the anti-Assad insurgency hobbled its effectiveness, undercut opposition governance, and culminated in costly infighting. In “Insurgent Fragmentation and State Attachment in the Syrian Civil War,” a project funded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and carried out in my capacity as a fellow with The Century Foundation, I investigated key aspects of how Syrian armed groups have coalesced or fragmented since 2011. In addition to studying the conflict’s history and evolution, the project posed two questions: (1) Why did violent groups within the anti-Assad insurgency fail to unite behind a common platform despite their largely homogeneous ethno-sectarian makeup? and (2) What role did state institutions and regime patronage play in ensuring that violent actors on the internally diverse loyalist side would remain united behind Bashar al-Assad? Over the course of the project, from January 2018 until June 2020, I used a variety of research methods—interviews and field work, literature studies, and monitoring of media and social media—to answer these questions and to improve my understanding of the war in Syria and of fragmented conflicts more generally. My research into coalition-building among anti-Assad factions suggests that bottom-up unity efforts within leaderless, factionalized insurgencies will, as a rule, be unsuccessful unless led by a powerful core faction that can attract, coerce, and absorb weaker groups; deter or defeat near-peer rivals; and secure the resources (often including external patronage) needed to sustain its dominance. When and where such “alpha factions” appeared in Syria, I found that they tended to share certain characteristics, including an intense ideological commitment, a prewar organizational structure or other assets that provided a first-mover advantage, and a willingness to aggressively and unsentimentally pursue their interests, even against likeminded actors. Examples include several of the most prominent Sunni Arab insurgent groups, such as the Islamic State (which ruled much of eastern Syria in 2014–17), the Nusra Front (which has dominated Idleb since 2016–17 and is now renamed Tahrir al-Sham), and the Islam Army (the strongest faction in the 2013–18 East Ghouta enclave). Ideological and other differences aside, the description also fits Syria’s dominant Kurdish faction, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), which rose to dominate northeastern Syria from 2012 onward. In the case of Syria’s loyalist militias, there was no need to search for a dominant faction: they had by definition emerged in support of President Assad’s regime. My research suggests that state and military institutions played a key role in mobilizing these militias and have subsequently acted to centralize and streamline control over them, such as by appointing liaisons, establishing regional Security and Military Committees, and herding disparate factions into state-linked umbrella structures such as the National Defense Forces. They also provide services and resources essential to militia operations, such as security clearances and permits, access to training grounds and bases, weapons and ammunition, and sometimes salaries. Moreover, even if many militias arose in service of local or personal interests, they and their constituents remain embedded in a social and institutional environment subject to state control and Assad’s authority. This structural dependence on, and immersion in, the Assad-led system helps explain the relative strategic coherence of Syria’s loyalist militia movement. Intermilitia competition remains a source of friction and dysfunction, but it plays out in a loyalist context where rivals are more likely to appeal to the regime’s higher echelons for support or adjudication than to organize against it.
