Syria’s uprising

On 18 March 2011, against the backdrop of rising anti-authoritarian protest movements in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, protestors in the southern Syrian city of Dera’a gathered to demand the release of a dozen teenagers who had been arrested and tortured for drawing graffiti criticising the regime of Bashar al-Assad. The crackdown was swift: security forces killed protestors with live fire, which, rather than quelling protests, caused them to spread across the country. Damascus, Homs and Idlib erupted in large demonstrations. Spurred on by decades of socio-economic marginalisation and a repressive political environment, protests were made up of a mix of Syrians, including those who had been economically marginalised (especially in the countryside), youth with democratic aspirations, and conservative Sunnis who opposed the rule and privileges of Assad’s Alawi minority.

Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez, had come to power in 1970 following two decades of coup d’états, and, from his early days, focused on immunising his government against rebellions. Coup-proofing was done primarily through the construction of a pervasive security apparatus built on the surveillance, arrest, and torture of suspected dissidents, but also through intermittent bouts of brutal, large-scale violence. When a Muslim Brotherhood insurgency attempted to assassinate Hafez al-Assad before launching an armed insurgency in the early 1980s,[1] the regime responded with brutal violence that killed tens of thousands and saw many more arrested or disappeared into the regime’s detention archipelago. In the early days of the 2011 protests, the younger Assad deployed many of the same techniques, overseeing harsh crackdowns on protests that involved the use of sniper-fire, tanks, and massacres against demonstrators, while promising symbolic and insufficient political reforms.[2] The response by the Syrian government was widely condemned internationally, and by the end of 2011, the European Union, US, and Arab League had all imposed sanctions.

In less than a year, Syria’s popular uprising became militarised. Many protestors continued their peaceful demonstrations, often at great personal risk, while others believed that only armed resistance would bring about change. Military defectors created the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the opposition started organising politically. President Assad’s strategy was to explicitly target civilians and medical facilities in burgeoning opposition-held areas, calculating that this would deprive the armed opposition of popular support.[3] Many of the opposition groups obtained support from external players such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey; western states meanwhile fretted over how to support ‘moderate rebels,’ although they too provided ‘non-lethal’ and ‘lethal’ support to opposition armed groups.[4] Furthermore, the opposition calculated on a western military intervention like the one that helped overthrow Muammar Qaddafi in Libya in 2011, in which rebel factions operated under a NATO no-fly zone following authorisation by the UN Security Council to take ‘all necessary measures [..] to protect civilians.’[5] Despite the push for his removal from western countries and the Gulf, Assad retained diplomatic backing from Russia and battlefield support from Iran and Hezbollah.[6] As a result, the civil uprising turned into a civil war, with extensive international intervention on both sides.

Over the course of 2012 and 2013, western countries came to recognise the opposition’s Syrian National Coalition (SNC) as Syria’s legitimate representative. Nevertheless, as the intensity of fighting increased, the most ideologically committed rebel groups—often Islamists or jihadists— became the dominant anti-Assad forces on the battlefield. One of these groups, Jabhat al-Nusra (“Nusra”), emerged as an ascendant actor in early 2012, claiming responsibility for a series of car bombings in Damascus in December 2011 that targeted the Syrian security services.[7]    

It later became apparent that Nusra had been formed on the orders of al-Qaida leader Zawahiri to Baghdadi.[8] In 2011, Baghdadi sent Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, another former Camp Bucca inmate, as his representative to Syria, together with several dozen hardened al-Qaida operatives.[9] Nusra sought to keep its affiliation with al-Qaida secret and collaborated closely with other Islamist opposition factions, participating in Shari’a committees in areas captured from government forces while actively recruiting within Sunni communities.[10] It also attracted many of the incoming foreign fighters, and enjoyed strong financial support from the Gulf.[11] Nusra’s degree of integration in the Syrian rebellion was such that, when the US designated Nusra as a terrorist organisation in late 2012, accusing it of being part of ISI, a protest of 29 Sunni rebel factions featured the slogan, “We are all al-Nusra.”[12]

The designation of Nusra underlined that while the US (and other western countries) wanted Assad to be overthrown, they were deeply concerned about the current and possible future role of Nusra. A US Defense Intelligence Agency assessment from August 2012 had foreseen that ‘ISI could […] declare an Islamic State through its union with other terrorist organisations in Iraq and Syria,’ adding that ‘if the situation unravels, there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria.’[13] The same assessment noted that this was what some foreign states supporting the opposition intended, as it would isolate the Assad government.[14] The fear that Islamists would hijack the uprising meant that although the US and other western states would cooperate with—and even train and arm—opposition groups, they would apply more scrutiny to these groups than other states, who appeared more willing to work with the growing number of overtly Islamist groups on the ground.[15]

The ever-increasing strength of the Islamists within the anti-Assad ranks played into the hands of Assad, too. The Syrian president had always had a mercurial relationship with international jihadi militancy. Until the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005, Assad had co-operated with the US on the extraordinary rendition of terrorism suspects to Syria.[16] But Syria had also been a conduit for arms and cash to Lebanese Hezbollah and following the US invasion of Iraq, it had provided channels of Islamist militants to AQI—with the US government estimating that as many as 85 to 90% of all foreign fighters in Iraq at the time had come via Syria.[17] This meant that when ISI decided to establish itself in Syria, networks were already in place. To make matters worse, in the early days of the uprising, Assad released from detention a large number of known Islamist militants, such as Zahran Alloush and Hassan Abboud, calculating that they would join and radicalise opposition forces already on the ground.[18] Many of these detainees ended up becoming leaders in ISIS, or Nusra, or new, powerful Islamist groups such as Jaish al-Islam and Ahrar al-Sham.[19] This served to strengthen Assad’s narrative that he was facing a rebellion of Islamist extremists rather than a popular uprising.

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