The Battle for the Arab Spring

by Lin Noueihed

  Deraa was the torch that set light to uprisings in other provinces, as people across the country took to the streets in solidarity with those in the southern border town. In most cases, the same destructive pattern of escalation occurred. By late spring, there were regular protests and clashes in provincial towns like Deir ez-Zour, Idlib and Baniyas, but also in major population centres like Homs and Hama, as well as Duma, a suburb of Damascus. From a relatively early stage there was evidence suggesting that the protesters were fighting back using weapons, though the arrest and expulsion of independent journalists from March made details impossible to verify until many returned later in the year.

  Rami Makhlouf had become an early target of public anger. In Deraa, angry mobs had trashed the local Syriatel offices and burned its SIM cards in a gesture of disgust with the cronies of the Assad regime. In May, Makhlouf had sold his duty-free shops to Kuwaiti investors and now promised to sell his 40-per-cent stake in Syriatel.28 In mid-June, he promised that he would ‘no more run any projects for personal profit’ and would henceforth ‘dedicate himself for charity, development and humanitarian work’.29 It made no difference and few believed him anyway.

  Bashar made a much-anticipated speech on 30 March, his first since the protests had snowballed. In a televised address to the Syrian parliament, he blamed the unrest on foreign agents, declaring that Syria faced a ‘great conspiracy whose tentacles extend to some nearby countries and faraway countries, with some inside the country’. While he acknowledged that not all of the protesters were conspirators, he said the opposition was waging a ‘virtual war using the media and the internet’. Explaining how and why economic reforms had taken priority over political change in the past decade, Bashar made vague promises to ‘study’ the lifting of the emergency law – in place continuously since 1963 – and to open up the political arena. A week earlier, he had dismissed the government and announced the formation of a National Dialogue Committee. There were also some early economic concessions: subsidy cuts were shelved, state salaries raised, fuel prices lowered and a long-planned introduction of VAT put off indefinitely. In a token gesture in February, direct internet access to Facebook and YouTube had been permitted for the first time, even though Syrians had long become adept at using proxies to access the plethora of blocked websites.30

  The speech was a chance to recognize the real issues at the root of popular anger, but it struck many as being out of tune with the acute levels of tension and political awareness that both the domestic protests and the regional situation had created. His audience in parliament, a body run by the Ba'ath party since the 1960s, cheered any significant point and gave a standing ovation, but Bashar's effort to seem unperturbed, by grinning, giggling and joking, did not match the sombre public mood. Insinuating that the protests were driven by foreign agendas seemed an insult to the intelligence of Syrians. Even those who harboured goodwill towards the president and had expected solutions from his speech were disappointed, even if they were not angry. It was a squandered chance for Bashar to rescue the situation while he still retained some popular credibility.

  But the president could still muster impressive support on the streets, whether through mild coercion or genuine backing. A rally on 29 March, a day before his first speech to parliament, gathered tens of thousands of people in Damascus and other major cities, while another, two weeks later, involved a 2.3-kilometre Syrian flag being carried down the Mezze highway in the capital. State media claimed that hundreds of thousands attended the rally, and accused foreign media of ignoring it.31

  The information war was raging, just as it had in other countries, making it difficult to determine the real level of support for each side. But the mismatch between words and deeds, the rising death toll and Bashar's mounting international isolation meant many Syrians had already lost faith in their leader. ‘It's like faith in God,’ said one local businessman. ‘Once you stop believing, you can't go back.‘32

  By the time he delivered another lengthy speech on 20 June, rights groups said the national death toll had risen above 1,300.33 ‘Conspiracies are like germs, after all, multiplying every moment everywhere,’ said Bashar, claiming that the opposition possessed sophisticated weapons and communication systems. Promises of political reform and pardons now rang hollow. Bashar called on those who had fled to Turkey during a violent battle in the border town of Jisr al-Shughur, to return, promising that the army was ‘there for their security and the security of their children’. Few took the president at his word. Others speculated that the harder-line elements of his regime, particularly his brother Maher, were really in charge. His loyal military brigades were sweeping from city to city to put down the protests, spreading fear and anger.

  Those elite army squads were exhausted but still holding together late in the year. Syria's more than 400,000-strong armed forces were thought to include up to 300,000 conscripts drawn largely from the Sunni community.34 A majority of the career soldiers, however, are believed to be Alawites.35 Maher controlled the Alawite-dominated Republican Guard, the country's most elite division, as well as the Alawite-dominated Fourth Division. The so-called shabbiha, a word derived from the Arabic for ghost, were armed pro-regime thugs who opponents say were involved in beatings, drive-by shootings, executions, sectarian killings and intimidation. They were named after the organized crime gangs that ran amok in the town of Lattakia in the 1980s. It is not clear who the shabbiha are and who they answer to, but it is clear they have been used to rebuild the barrier of fear that kept Syrians off the streets for so long, allowing the regime to deny involvement in some of the most vicious attacks. Together with the shabbiha, these two elite military units were at the heart of a security apparatus whose ultimate goal was to ensure loyalty and enforce domestic control rather than fight foreign wars.36

  Most of Syria's air force pilots were Sunni, for instance, but the air defence force which controlled logistics and communications is mainly Alawite, preventing the pilots from making a play for power.37 The Alawite community's long history of internal divisions should not be underestimated, and past challenges have come from the inside, but by the end of 2011 their techniques had so far been effective in averting a military coup.

  The sectarian nature of Syria's military structure also illustrated how religion would be central to what comes after the Assads, and could determine how they fall. Assad's Alawite elite had much to lose if the regime collapsed, but they had not yet calculated that their interests were best served by turning on the Assads. Their fate, it seemed, was tied to that of the leader and his family. Those who had joined the ranks of the Free Syrian Army would be likely to encounter a well-armed, well-trained and highly motivated core of Alawite military brigades who would fight to the death, even if Alawites themselves were less than a tenth of the 24-million strong population.38

  By early 2012 many Syrian towns were in open revolt. An Arab League monitoring mission begun in December had provided cover for more demonstrators to come out on the streets, especially in Homs and Hama, but had served little other purpose and lost credibility. ‘Even I am trying to leave on Friday. I'm going to Cairo or elsewhere… because the mission is unclear…. It does not serve the citizens,’ one Arab League observer told Reuters. ‘It does not serve anything. The Syrian authorities have exploited the weakness in the performance of the delegation to not respond. There is no real response on the ground.‘39

  Nor did any direct foreign intervention appear imminent, however, and many sections of Syrian society had not yet actively opposed Bashar – even if they had privately lost faith in him long ago – because they had too much at stake. The domestic and international cards that Assad had inherited from his father, and which gave him the protection that Gaddafi had so sorely lacked, had come into play.

  Trumps in the Deck

  By early 2012 localized protests and clashes were becoming ever more common in Damascus or Aleppo, the two largest cities in Syria, whose combined population of around 9.5 million comprised
more than 40 per cent of the national total.40 Yet the urban middle and upper classes, mainly Sunni, had not come out in great numbers, for the large, wealthy trading families to which they belonged stood to lose much from escalating the situation into all-out war. Albert Hourani's observation about a ‘recurrent pattern in Middle Eastern history’ was particularly relevant for Syria. ‘The classes which dominated the structures of state and social power in the cities wanted peace, order and freedom of economic activity,’ he wrote in his seminal History of the Arab Peoples, ‘and would support a regime so long as it seemed to be giving them what they wanted; but they would not lift a finger to save it, and would accept its successor if it seemed likely to follow a similar policy.‘41 By now, many members of those classes realized Assad's days were numbered, and some were secretly funnelling cash to his opponents, though with the streets filled with security forces many had not publicly turned against him. This was not just about religion – many in the poorer provinces were Sunnis and indeed Alawites – but it is one reason why the conflict could drag on.

  Another was Syria's collage of minorities, who will be at the heart of any future battle over the role of religion. Like the wider population, the majority of the opposition was Sunni Arab but it historically included large numbers of Christians, Kurds and even Alawite intellectuals, including some high-profile activists, who supported the 2011 uprising. The minorities were a card in Bashar's deck and his regime regularly warned of a potential civil war as it sought to fan popular fears and discourage protests.

  For the same reasons that Syria's Muslim Brotherhood was naturally opposed to the Alawite-Ba'athist axis, many in the Christian community felt protected by it. Making up around a tenth of the population, Syria's Christians encompass Maronites, Greek Orthodox, Syriac Orthodox and Armenians, and are mostly clustered in Damascus, Aleppo, Homs and western areas close to the Lebanese border. Their religious freedoms had been protected under the Assads and Christians lived side by side with Muslims, in relative harmony. Within a brisk stroll in Old Damascus, you could walk from the stunning seventh-century Umayyad Mosque, where hundreds of cloaked Iranian pilgrims wept at the shrine of the Shi'ite imam Hussein, to the Bab Touma quarter with its churches, Christian icons, liquor stores and unveiled girls wearing body-hugging clothes.

  Just as the death of Hafez al-Assad in 2000 had caused anxiety among Christians, fearful of their status should the transition give way to a conservative Sunni regime, so the weakening of his son stoked similar concerns. In the intervening period, those concerns had been exacerbated by the persecution and exodus of Christians in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq and, in 2011 itself, by the sharp tensions between Muslims and Copts that followed the ousting of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. With the protest movement now gathering steam, Christian leaders in both Syria and neighbouring Lebanon – where Christians made up a much larger proportion of the population – pointed to a dangerously unknown future which stood little chance of being more favourable to their community than the present.

  The Maronite Patriarch of Lebanon, Bechara al-Ra'i, feared that a Ba'athist demise ‘could lead the way to the birth of a fundamentalist Sunni regime and this could lead the way to sectarian violence or even the division of the country into three or four parts based on sectarian differences. These are scenarios that are deadly for the future of Christians in Syria.‘42 Yet there were also splits within the Christian community itself, from which many veteran and high-profile Assad opponents hailed. Many Christians believed that no Syrian could be free under the current system, and that a democratic regime would guarantee freedom to all. Appearing too cosy towards Bashar also raised the risk that, should he fall, his successors might take deliberate retribution on those who had failed to publicly support the uprising. It was a delicate balancing act.

  Divided loyalties of a different kind could be found among Syria's Kurds. Reckoned to number about 10 to 15 per cent of the population, and concentrated in the impoverished and largely rural north-east, this was a group long marginalized by Damascus. A ‘special census’ in 1962 had decreed that many had crossed into Syria illegally from neighbouring Turkey, thus depriving them of Syrian citizenship and effectively leaving them stateless. Damascus had deliberately underinvested in Kurdish areas, paid Arab families to settle in the region, and restricted expressions of Kurdish cultural identity like its language or its celebration of Nowruz, the Persian New Year. Riots had erupted in March 2004 after a football match in the city of Qamishli, where local residents brought out a Kurdish flag and clashed with police. They later burned down the local office of the Ba'ath Party and toppled a statue of Hafez al-Assad, provoking a bloody response that killed dozens.

  But here, too, the Assads had insurance policies to complicate the situation. In the late 1990s, Syrian support for outlawed Kurdish groups like the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) had brought it to the brink of war with Turkey before Bashar improved relations with Ankara by extraditing a prominent PKK leader and adopting a harder line towards militant Kurdish groups. Kurdish involvement in Syria's 2011 protests was at first muted. In the early summer, Bashar held talks with leaders of Kurdish organizations and promised, not for the first time, to grant Syrian citizenship to the stateless population. Later, though, the October killing of a prominent activist, Mashal Tammo, ignited an all-too-familiar pattern of escalating anti-regime protests.43

  Yet while Syria's Kurds were doubtless antagonistic towards Damascus, like the Christians they were also concerned about the future – and especially one that continued to exclude them as non-Arabs or that brought Turkey greater influence in Syrian internal affairs. Although some Kurdish groups agreed later in the year to become part of the Syrian National Council (SNC), a newly-emerging opposition coalition, others did not, and the Kurdish factor diluted the strength and unity of the anti-Assad movement. While Syrian Kurds say they do not seek a separate state inside Syria, their cause is enmeshed with the wider struggle for an independent state on a contiguous Kurdish-dominated area that transcends the borders of Iraq, Syria and Turkey. A senior member of the PKK warned in late 2011 that they would fight on Syria's side against any Turkish intervention, while Kurdish tensions inside Turkey itself risked being enflamed.

  The threat of ethnic and sectarian conflict seemed to loom over the Syrian uprising, particularly given what had happened in Iraq and Lebanon. Yet despite some signs of targeted sectarian killings, often between Alawites and Sunnis, the anti-regime movement had so far neither disintegrated along sectarian lines nor acquired a specifically Islamic tint. For those who were part of the opposition, religion had little to do with it. Although their tactics and end goals differed, theirs was a fight against a dictatorship from which all Syrians suffered and from which they would all be relieved. For them, the battle over the role of religion would come only after Assad was gone.

  In 2011 the more hardline Islamists had every reason to fight for his downfall, just as they had done in the 1970s and 1980s, and were suspected of playing a role in an insurrection that became increasingly militarized as the year went on. In hot spots like Jisr al-Shughur, a town close to the Turkish border that was the scene of a violent battle between Assad forces and Islamist militants in both 1980 and in the summer of 2011, Bashar claimed that he faced a sophisticated and organized enemy. Several car bombs that killed dozens in Damascus in late December, just days before the arrival of Arab League observers, were blamed by Damascus on Al-Qaeda suicide bombers, but they bore many hallmarks of the Syrian security services.

  In late summer, Ali Sadreddine Bayanouni, the exiled former leader of Syria's Muslim Brotherhood, had declared his support for the Syrian National Council. But the organization, support base and logistics of the Muslim Brotherhood on the ground was unclear, especially as many thousands of Islamists still languished in jail and the party had been banned for decades. Like the main Islamist parties in Egypt and Tunisia, it would likely benefit more than any other group from any elections in the future, but its supporters may have delibe
rately stood back to avoid branding the uprising with a religious stamp that risked discouraging secular or minority Syrians from taking part, or giving Bashar real evidence for any claims that he was battling Islamic extremists. There were also ambiguities about the group's position. A senior member of the Brotherhood, exiled in Saudi Arabia, drew controversy in November by appearing to support the idea of a Turkish military intervention, something which other opposition elements were then opposed to.44

  Escalating a domestic sectarian conflict was one reason why external powers were far less gung-ho about intervening in Syria than in Libya, with its religiously homogenous Sunni population. Another was that the Assad regime had long capitalized on its location at the heart of the Middle East to cultivate overseas friends who could come to its aid or stir up trouble elsewhere. ‘Strike Syria and the world will shake,’ warned Bashar in late November, a threat that had not been tested by early 2012.45 But unlike Libya, the stakes went far beyond what happened inside Syria's borders.

  ‘If there is no stability here, there's no way there will be stability in Israel,’ threatened Rami Makhlouf in May, highlighting one card that Damascus reckoned it could play.46 While there was little danger of war between Syria and Israel, Bashar could nonetheless cause disruption by deliberately removing restrictions on access to the UN-monitored Golan border from the Syrian side, permitting raids or rocket attacks by militants. A couple of shots were fired across the bows in the spring. On the 15 May anniversary of the nakba, or ‘disaster’, that commemorates the displacement of Palestinians during the creation of Israel in 1948, more than a dozen pro-Palestinian protesters were killed near the village of Majdal al-Shams on the Syria-Golan border. Washington accused Damascus of a ‘cynical use of the Palestinian cause to encourage violence along its border as it continues to repress its own people?…‘47