Szekely, Ora. Syria Divided: Patterns of Violence in a Complex Civil War (Columbia Studies in Middle East Politics) Columbia University Press, 2023.
Notes from relevant books on Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Defence, Development and Humanitarian Action.
These are my personal notes from this book. They try to give a general idea of its content, but do not in any case replace reading the actual book. Think of them as teasers to encourage you to read further!
Introduction
Civil wars are rarely “about” just one thing. Most involve a range of ideological divisions, ethno-communal antagonisms, and even regional and global rivalries, each with their own champions among the participants.
each of the participants in the Syrian conflict has their own account of what the war is “really” about.
This book therefore seeks to address two questions:
How do Syrians—civilians and combatants—understand and explain the conflict that has engulfed their country?
And how do these competing narratives, and the conflict between them, shape the conduct of the war?
To answer these questions, the book makes the following argument:
First, the multiple state and nonstate participants involved in any civil war, including Syria’s, understand the war they are fighting in very different ways. Such wars often feature multiple and competing divisions, which can be ideological, communal, geographic, or otherwise oriented. Every party to a given conflict sees the war in terms of at least one of these divisions, but not all of those fighting will necessarily agree as to which of them the war is really about.
Second, everyone involved in fighting a civil war has key audiences, both at home and abroad,
Third, and perhaps most important, the drive to communicate a specific, preferred narrative of the war to those audiences, and to convince them it is the correct one, affects the behavior of those fighting.
In sum, this book argues—based on accounts from Syrians from a range of political, religious, ethnic, and geographic backgrounds—that both the overall patterns of violence in the Syrian war and the use of performative violence in particular have been shaped in part by a conflict over what the war is truly about. Put differently, the conduct of the war in Syria is shaped at least in part by the debate over its causes.
Explanations for the causes of civil war are equally diverse. They can be broadly grouped into four categories: the ideological, the communal, the material, and the structural.
they may not be of the utmost importance to the people doing the actual fighting.
In Syria, the war is variously explained as a fight for dignity, democracy, and human rights; a sectarian conflict between different communities; a counterterrorist campaign rooted in national security; an ethnonational struggle; or a proxy war between regional and global powers. For those involved in the war, these explanations are more than just causal stories: they are larger narratives that give meaning and purpose to the conflict.
Kevin Mazur focuses on the transformation of Syria’s popular uprising into, as he frames it, an ethnic civil war.
disjuncture between why the various combatants in Syria say they are fighting and what they are actually doing—that is, a gap between cause and conduct.
high degree of public and performative violence, both among combatants and against civilians.
driven by the warring parties’ need to establish their particular narrative of the war as dominant in the eyes of their most important audiences at home and abroad.
understanding violence as, among other things, a form of communication
three key components
participants
audiences
narratives
PARTICIPANTS
is less useful to think of them as having sides than as having participants,
minimum, four major sets of actors: the Asad regime, the Kurdish forces, ISIS, and the disparate assortment of rebels loosely grouped together as the armed opposition.
wide range of outside parties, including both neighboring states and international actors.
“a world war, but in just one country.”
AUDIENCES
The classic theorists of guerrilla warfare, such as Mao Zedong and Che Guevara, devote a great deal of ink to the importance of convincing locals to support the movement, as does the U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. Even rank and file members of armed groups are often aware of the importance of “winning hearts and minds.”
not everyone involved in the same civil war is necessarily interested in winning over the same audiences.
NARRATIVES
soft power in international politics, which Nye defines as “getting others to want the outcomes you want.”
An explanation that provides a cohesive story about the origins and purpose of the war and organizes its meaning around a particular cleavage constitutes a narrative.
The question a narrative answers begins with why, not should, although the should is sometimes heavily implied.
CONSEQUENCES
meta-conflict—that is, the war over what the war is about—
Attempts to do so shape the conduct of the war in two important ways.
First, the desire to promote a certain narrative can determine how the various combatants perceive one another.
Second, performative violence—both conventional military operations and, especially, violence against civilians—is sometimes used as messaging.
“repertoires of performances”
each of its many participants can be understood to be in some sense fighting its own war.
different audiences whom they seek to win over,
For the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (referred to variously as ISIS, Daesh, or ISIL), the conflict is a war between (Sunni) believers and (Sunni and non-Sunni) unbelievers,
For the Kurdish Democratic Union Party is largely about the establishment of a polity
opposition forces, generally speaking, share the goal of removing the Asad regime from power. Beyond that, though, it becomes difficult to generalize
Finally, the Asad regime would very much like the conflict to be understood as a fight for stability in Syria, and for a secular state in the face of the religious fundamentalism represented by ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, and others.
range of external actors have also become involved
five major points of cleavage, each of which serves as the basis for a larger narrative of the conflict:
the conflict between dictatorship and democracy;
a sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Alawites (or Shi’ites);
a related conflict between secularists and fundamentalists;
an ethnonationalist conflict between Kurds and Arabs;
and a narrative of the war as a series of interrelated proxy conflicts between Saudi Arabia and Iran, Turkey and the PKK, and Russia and the United States.
Although the salience of each has shifted throughout the war, they have remained relatively constant.
narratives, neither of which was explicitly championed by any of the parties to the war, but which were sometimes leveled as accusations
One consequence of this competition is the apparent disconnect between why the various parties in Syria say they are fighting, and what they are actually doing—that is, between (stated) cause and (actual) conduct.
Rather than assuming that a particular cause of the war determines its conduct—that, for instance, the war is a sectarian conflict and thus members of different religious groups are fighting because they hate each other—this book instead posits that violence is sometimes shaped instead by each participant’s desire to make the war into one
second feature of the war in Syria: the performative use of violence.
Although the extraordinarily high level of displacement in Syria is unusual—more than half of Syria’s prewar population has been displaced either inside or outside the country—in other respects, Syria offers parallels with other wars.
variation both over time and between actors.
represents the shape of things to come in asymmetric war, and perhaps warfare more generally.
the war in Syria is profoundly important in its own right.
legacies of the war will be with Syria for a long time to come.
whatever reconstruction takes place will likely benefit some segments of Syrian society more than others,
Internal displacement and resettlement has uprooted and dispossessed entire communities
powerful regional effects, some of which will be felt for decades.
strongest cautionary tale for citizens of other Arab states who might otherwise have been inspired to seek democratic reform via a mass uprising.
1. The Syrian Tragedy
events that laid the groundwork for the communal and political narratives that have shaped the Syrian war, from the waning days of the Ottoman Empire to the French Mandate, through the transition to independence and the rise of the Baath Party,
French pursued a divide-and-rule policy in Syria as a way of coopting some elites and marginalizing others while preventing the emergence of a unified independence movement. In the north, they established a separate administrative region in 1920 around Latakia, home to the Alawite minority (a sect of Shi’ite Islam), and in 1922 a similar “state” was established in the southern region of Jabal Druze, home to the Druze minority. These regions offered both communities a degree of autonomy while reinforcing their distinctiveness from the Sunni majority
it was only in 1946 that France, badly weakened by the war, reluctantly acquiesced to British pressure and accepted Syrian independence.
French rule during the mandate period paradoxically both reinforced sectarian divisions and led to the emergence of a robust Syrian nationalism embraced by Syria’s Sunni majority and its minorities alike.
If Ottoman and French rule laid the foundation for Syria’s sectarian competition, it was the years after independence that set in motion the ideological competition that would bring the Baath Party to power in 1966 and in 2011, threaten its rule.
shared Arab rather than Muslim identity,
Egypt and Syria merged into the United Arab Republic (UAR).
1966, a Baathist faction led by two young Alawite army officers named Salah Jadid and Hafez al-Asad took power.
“the corrective movement,” Hafez al-Asad took power, becoming president of Syria,
urban-rural division overlapped with the sectarian divide between Sunnis and Alawites.
1970s, a new challenger emerged in the form of the Islamic Front, the Syrian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Muslim Brotherhood had taken over parts of the city of Hama. In response, the army surrounded Hama’s old city and shelled it, eventually reducing it to rubble. Between ten thousand and thirty thousand people were killed,
1982 seemed, in retrospect, to offer a preview of 2011.
his elder brother Basil had been groomed since birth to take his father’s place. In 1994, however, Basil was killed in a car crash in while driving his Mercedes around Damascus, and Bashar was recalled from London where he had been working as an optometrist.
Lebanon, where the Syrian government had held the country’s politics in an iron grip since the end of the civil war in 1990, massive protests broke out after former prime minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated by a massive car bomb in February of 2005.
regime’s base—a combination of religious minorities, Alawite (and Sunni) army officers, Sunni economic elites, and a sprawling network of intelligence services—appeared to be as stable
Yet, in early 2011, the Arab Spring, against all odds, came to Syria.
Deraa. In late February, as protests escalated around the Arab world, fifteen local boys ranging in age from ten to fifteen were arrested for scrawling antigovernment graffiti on a wall.
The early protests in Deraa were driven less by demands for democratization than by anger at the continued humiliation of Syrians by their own government.
amnesty, releasing 260 prisoners from Saydnaya Prison. For the most part, however, they were not members of the secular opposition, but Islamists,
On March 30, Bashar al-Asad made a much-anticipated speech to parliament, but it was far from conciliatory,
Local Coordination Committees (tansiqiyat) were established to organize protests every Friday, with common themes and slogans shared on social media across cities.
parts of the uprising were beginning to take on a sectarian tinge.
The Free Syrian Army (FSA) came into being in part because soldiers who did not want to fire on civilians were put, by default, in the position of opposing the government.
Syrian National Council, led by longtime dissident George Sabra, was established as a kind of government in exile.
Syrian National Coalition, also known as the Etilaf.
These were independent brigades that, though part of the overall opposition, received their funding directly from donors abroad (often in Gulf states such as Kuwait, Qatar, or Saudi Arabia) and were largely outside the FSA chain of command.
more than a thousand armed factions were fighting in Syria—
jihadists. As the war escalated, these groups became increasingly prominent.
Seeking to avoid its mistakes in Iraq, al-Qaeda took a more cautious approach in Syria. It established a Syrian branch, Jabhat al-Nusra, headed by a Syrian member of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) Abu Mohammed al Jolani.
Al Qaeda leadership concealed the connection between AQI and Jabhat al-Nusra, instead positioning it as an indigenous Syrian organization.
friction was growing between Jolani and AQI’s Iraqi leadership.
Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi who, even by al-Qaeda’s standards, displayed a particular hatred of Shi’ites.
AQI’s leadership eventually passed to the Iraqi Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and the group became increasingly focused on establishing an Islamic state in Iraq. Internally, it began to refer to itself as the Islamic State.
By June of 2014, they had taken the Syrian city of Raqqa and the cities of Ramadi and Mosul in Iraq.
Although his claim that the division between Syria and Iraq was based on Sykes-Picot and therefore illegitimate may have been in line with al-Qaeda’s general world view, it also challenged the internal division of authority between Jabhat al-Nusra, AQI, and al-Qaeda’s leadership.
Public opinion in Yarmouk refugee camp, Syria’s largest Palestinian community, was divided
In the spring of 2013, Hezbollah openly committed its forces to defending Asad’s government,
In January of 2013, they were formally consolidated with other pro-government militias into the National Defense Forces (NDF). The NDF was staunchly loyalist, paid and armed by the Syrian government. It also had a somewhat sectarian character—it was almost entirely Alawite and Shi’ite and was trained by the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Because funding to the opposition factions often flowed directly from governments or even private donors in the Gulf rather than through the FSA, individual units had little reason to adhere to any kind of unified command structure.
August 21, 2013, when the Syrian military attacked the rebel-held Damascus suburb of Ghouta with sarin gas, a lethal neurotoxic chemical weapon.
Hafez al-Asad allowed the PKK to use Syria as a base of operations for much of the 1980s and 1990s, primarily as a way of putting pressure on the Turkish government,
March of 2004, violence between Arab and Kurdish football fans at a match in Qamishli erupted into rioting and antigovernment protests known as the Qamishli Uprising.
By February 2013, the PYD controlled 80 percent of the Kurdish regions. In November, it declared that these territories were now cantons of Rojava Kurdistanê, or Western Kurdistan, sometimes referred to simply as Rojava, more formally the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria.
As early as the fall of 2012, the YPG began clashing with Jabhat al-Nusra
Obama administration had become increasingly alarmed by the rapid growth of ISIS in Syria.
This left the Kurds in control of a long swath of the Syrian Turkish border, the United States directly involved in northern Syria, and the Turkish government deeply uneasy.
advance of the more radical factions was broadly advantageous to the regime in several ways.
Jabhat Fateh al-Sham
Asad had relied heavily on support from Iran and Russia
In the fall of 2015, however, it shifted its support from providing assets to direct military intervention.
regime’s most important victory was unquestionably in Aleppo,
the military used an approach known as surrender or starve
At its peak in August of 2014, ISIS’s ersatz caliphate covered territory inhabited by as many as 3.7 million people in Syria and Iraq, including the cities of Mosul (Iraq’s third largest) and Raqqa, its capital in Syria.
By 2019, the Asad regime had recaptured much of what was once rebel-held Syria.
most immediate challenge for the regime was Idlib.
Initially, Turkey acted as the de facto guarantor of Idlib’s security, more or less guaranteeing to Russia that it would restrain the rebel forces there in exchange for which Russia and the Syrian government would leave Idlib alone. By the end of 2018, this deal appeared to be faltering.
Meanwhile, the Kurdish PYD remains in control of much of the northeast, amounting to about a third of Syria’s territory and a sizable proportion of its oil resources.
pressed Trump to allow it to take control of territory along the border. In December of 2018, Trump acceded to Erdogan’s request, announcing on Twitter, much to the surprise of the Pentagon, that the United States was pulling out of Syria. Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Special Envoy for Anti-ISIS Operations Brett McGurk both resigned in protest.
By the time a cease-fire had been negotiated by Russia and Turkey, Turkey had taken control of a nine-hundred-square-mile swath of territory along the border, and the Kurdish leadership, in desperation, had agreed to allow Syrian government forces onto their territory to try and hold back the Turkish advance.
2011, it had traded at forty-seven lira to the dollar. By June 2020, it was at three thousand to the dollar, wiping out the value of whatever savings most Syrians still had left, and making the salaries of even government employees and military officers effectively worthless.
export of captagon,
2. What are We Fighting For?
the Syrian civil war evolved a great deal over the course of a decade. It has also been understood and explained very differently by its many participants.
five broad narratives
For some, the war was (or perhaps is) a fight for dignity and democracy;
for others, a sectarian conflict,
or a defensive war against terrorism;
for still others, an ethnonationalist conflict
or a proxy war.
Some of these narratives are shared by multiple parties to the conflict, others by only one or two. The first three—dignity and democracy, sectarian conflict, and counterterrorism—are each the primary narrative of the war for at least one party to the conflict; the latter two are secondary narratives for many actors.
DIGNITY AND DEMOCRACY
decentralized governance (known as democratic confederalism)
specific repressiveness of the Asad regime,
A second specific grievance focused on corruption.
it was more about fixing the government and making it better. But when the regime was monstrous in its reactions and killed people, there were more demands to overthrow the government instead.”
One implication of this narrative is that the entire war could have been avoided had the regime been willing to cooperate with the protesters’ demands for reform.
This even included a brigade of queer international fighters known as The Queer Insurrection and Liberation Army, or TQILA, whose slogans included “these faggots kill fascists,” although it is unclear how substantial this group was in reality.
Overall, the dignity and democracy narrative explains the war as a fight to establish a more democratic Syria, drawing on universalized values such as democracy and human rights. It is articulated, in slightly different ways, both by the opposition (or at least some segments of it) and the Kurdish PYD. Yet these groups view each other with something between suspicion and overt hostility.
SECTARIANISM
A second narrative posits that the most important cleavage in Syria is between religious groups, framing both the struggle for power and use of violence as organized along sectarian lines, and linking divisions between Sunnis and Alawites in Syria with regional divisions between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims.
Overtly sectarian ideologies—such as that articulated by the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1970s and 1980s—were brutally suppressed.
ISIS stands out for the zeal with which it applied a sectarian framework to explain its participation in the conflict.
Nusayri regime,” a pejorative term for Alawite—
terms such as sahat al-jihad (field of jihad), a catchphrase to indicate participation in global jihadist military action
Yusuf Qaradawi, who gave a pivotal speech in Qatar in May of 2013 describing the war in Syria in explicitly sectarian language:
regime’s response to the protests was colored by a deliberate desire to create a sectarian conflict
It’s amazing how people can just stop thinking when they face such a case of uncertainty and fear.
ensure the loyalty of the religious minorities—
particularly threatening sectarian slogan attributed to the opposition—alawieen ila al-taboot, mesiheen ila Beirut (Alawites to the coffins, Christians to Beirut).
CONTAINING TERRORISM
the conflict as a struggle between secular stability and terrorism.
Wahhabism as “a terrorist mentality.”
collapses all opponents of the state into a single category: terrorists.
So, although the sectarian narrative focuses directly on antipathy between communal groups, the terrorism narrative leaves space for the cooptation of loyal members of other sectarian groups.
Cham International Islamic Center, which hosts talks on Sunni Islam by friendly clerics and issues statements denouncing extremism, is one example.
the Syrian government would like the war to be understood as a conflict in which it is the only actor standing between Syria and the forces of jihadist chaos.
PYD and its armed forces have also at times framed the war as a conflict between the forces of secular order and jihadist chaos.
ETHNONATIONALISM
A fourth narrative of the conflict frames it as organized primarily around ethnonational identities, such as Arab or Kurdish.
The PYD actually spends a great deal of time trying to reassure ethnic minorities in its territory that it is not a Kurdish separatist group, as reflected in its leaders’ rhetoric.
A close cousin of the sectarian narrative,
The PYD’s political leadership does not currently call for a separate Kurdish state.
The other place we see an ethnonational narrative at work is in the Asad regime’s invocation of Arab nationalism,
PROXY WARFARE
civil war in Syria as “other people’s war on Syrian land” or “a big political game.”
less a narrative than an accusation:
Sincerely held or not, these narratives matter because they are how the parties to Syria’s war explain themselves, and their actions, to important audiences at home and abroad.
3. Patterns of Violence
In short, as in many protracted civil wars, the overall patterns of violence are complex and difficult to neatly summarize.
Some of the actors in Syria do indeed behave in ways that fit some of these patterns, at least some of the time. Perhaps unsurprisingly, though, this is hardly the whole picture.
The patterns of violence in the Syrian war, I argue, suggest three things:
first, some of those fighting in Syria—especially ISIS and the Asad regime—are not necessarily fighting the war that they claim to be, at least based on their narratives of what the war is about.
Second, and relatedly, some of the time this manifests as a focus on attacking those who offer a different narrative, especially one that might prove compelling to important audiences.
Third, violence—especially against civilians—is also used as a form of messaging to promote a given narrative.
As of July 2022, the SNHR and the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights put the total number of civilian casualties in Syria at 228,893 and 350,209 respectively, a sizable gap.
As figure 3.1 makes clear, ISIS was a far less important focus for the regime. Even though the organization conquered significant territory in 2013 and 2014, confrontations between the two did not escalate until 2015.
If ISIS was not a major focus for the Syrian military, however, the reverse was not the case. Conflict with the regime made up 38 percent of ISIS’s military operations, concentrated, as noted, in Aleppo, Deir Ezzor, and later Raqqa as it fought to defend its territory.
To summarize the broad patterns of violence in the war: the regime and the opposition were principally focused on one another. Both occasionally also clashed with ISIS. ISIS fought against the regime’s forces, the Kurds, and the rebels in different regions and with varying intensity over the course of the war. The Kurdish forces mostly fought against ISIS, though later in the war also fought against the Turkish-backed opposition. None was perfectly consistent, though their degree of focus on a single adversary varied a great deal.
conflicts involving some combatants were more lethal than others, reflecting both changes in the intensity of the war over time and the formation and disintegration of new alliances.
regime’s conflicts with ISIS, though far less frequent than those with the rebels, were deadlier for both.
apparent hostility to those whose who offered a competing narrative about the nature of the war.
If violence among combatants in Syria falls somewhat outside their own narratives of the conflict, violence against civilians, in contrast, often serves to enact and promote them in deliberately performative ways.
Violence against civilians falls into three broad categories: indiscriminate violence, which does not recognize the distinction between civilians and combatants;
repressive violence, which is used to quell or punish dissent or criticism;
and, of particular relevance here, propagandistic violence, such as terrorism or lynching, which is meant to send a wider message about the perpetrator’s goals and values.
The largest number of civilian deaths attributable to the Syrian regime are the result of indiscriminate violence, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians.
Perhaps the weapon most closely associated with the Syrian war, a barrel bomb is made by filling a metal container—perhaps an actual barrel, but often just scrap metal folded to create a crude envelope—with explosives and shrapnel and adding a fuse that is ignited before throwing the device from an aircraft. In 2014, barrel bombs filled with chlorine gas were used against civilians in Hama and Idlib, combining improvised and chemical weapons.
almost eight thousand fatalities from barrel bombs documented by the VDC between 2011 and 2016, 97 percent were civilians and 27 percent were children.
Combatants, in contrast, were overwhelmingly likely to die by gunfire,
UN investigators found evidence that the regime was deliberately targeting hospitals and health-care workers, especially in Aleppo.
Bombardment was also used in combination with other tactics, especially siege and starvation.
The use of weapons and tactics that were clearly more harmful to civilians than to the armed opposition factions, though, also suggests an element of collective punishment to this violence, and that it carried an implicit message: civilians who remained in rebel-held areas were considered to be supporting or even part of the opposition, and hence legitimate targets.
Asad regime has long engaged in extraordinary levels of repressive violence as a matter of state policy since well before the war. This included events such as the 1982 Hama massacre and the repression of the 2004 Qamishli uprising,
The regime’s prisons—where many of those arrested eventually found themselves—bear special mention as sites of extraordinary abuses of human rights and violations of human dignity. Syria’s political prison system was not—is not—an instrument of criminal justice, but of violent repression and punishment of dissent.
homemade piece of artillery known as a jahannam, or hell cannon, that fired the compressed gas cannisters used for cooking and heating.
After being ordered to cease playing music, Radio Fresh broadcast barnyard animal noises and other random sounds instead. Fares was murdered by unknown gunmen in Kafr Nabel in 2018.74
Jabhat al-Nusra in its various incarnations has been more likely than the FSA to attack religious targets—especially those associated with minorities—and more likely to treat civilians harshly in the areas it controls.
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria holds the distinction of deliberately directing a larger share of its operations against purely civilian targets than any other actor in the civil war, although depending on how one interprets the intention behind the regime’s attacks on urban areas, this could certainly be disputed.
Religious minorities in general faced severe persecution under ISIS’s rule. In Mosul and Raqqa, Christians were forced to either convert to Islam, pay a tax, or leave the city. Christian and (in Mosul) Shi’ite holy sites were destroyed and individuals were executed. 86 ISIS also expelled ethnic minorities—predominantly Kurds—from Tel Abyad and other towns.
The most extreme example, however, was the genocide against the Yazidi ethno-religious minority in northwestern Iraq in August of 2014.
On August 3, 2014, ISIS forces attacked Sinjar City, home to four hundred thousand people and the largest existing Yazidi community.
Approximately 3,100 Yazidis were killed: 1,400 by execution and 1,700 as a result of hunger, thirst, or exposure on Mount Sinjar. An estimated 6,800 were abducted and more than 2,000 remain missing.
attack on Sinjar made very little sense as a strategic choice.
This is also true of a second aspect of ISIS’s brutalization of civilians—its use of targeted violence against women.
“competitive state building”—a way of enforcing its norms and exerting political power via the same tools of torture long used by the Iraqi and Syrian states.
Finally, the Kurdish forces also engaged in violence against civilians, albeit at lower levels than many of the other participants in the war.
at least some of the time, the participants in the war in Syria were not fighting those who they claimed to see as their principal adversaries.
As this suggests, then, there is a good deal of overlap in terms of which audiences those fighting in Syria seek to win over, at the local, national, and international levels. Because of this competition, in addition to military decisions motivated by territorial or political ambitions, we also sometimes see those fighting in Syria attacking those they perceive as rivals for the support of key audiences.
In contrast, violence against civilians in Syria has been less shaped by competition over the narrative of the war than it has been a way of promoting each faction’s chosen narrative.
Especially striking is ISIS’s preoccupation with attacking civilians, which made up a larger proportion of its military activity than that of any other actor in the war—so much so that it interrupted its advance in Iraq to turn northward and commit genocide against the Yazidis. This genocidal violence, along with its highly publicized atrocities against women, gay men, foreign hostages, religious minorities, and others was clearly at least in part an end in and of itself. But the group’s public defense and even celebration of these acts suggests that the strategy is also a deliberate one.
In 2021, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights put the total number of civilian casualties in Syria at over 350,000, or 1.5 percent of Syria’s prewar population.
4. The Youtube War
The violence documented in these videos includes both military operations either deliberately or incidentally captured on film, and acts of violence explicitly carried out to be recorded;
The idea that violence is a form of communication is not new;
An American journalist who has covered the wars in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere observed that the use of YouTube by activists in Syria on what he termed an “industrial scale” was unusual;
if a fighter knows that her attack on an enemy military base is being filmed to create a propaganda video, that awareness likewise has the potential to shape her decisions—she is not only conducting a military operation, but also performing one.
It is helpful to draw a distinction between three categories of documented violence:
that carried out and filmed incidentally either by supporters or adversaries;
that which would have been happened anyway but was carried out with the knowledge that it would be filmed;
and that carried out for the express purpose of being filmed.
These categories are obviously blurred,
Charles Tilly terms a “contentious performance.”
one slogan in the early days of the uprising in Syria translated as “Your turn is next, Doctor” in reference to Asad’s prior career as an optometrist. But the regime was not the protesters’ only, or even most important, audience.
“the YouTube video has become as important as the demonstration itself.”
In Show Time, Lee Ann Fujii examines what she terms “violent displays,” public and performative episodes of violence such as lynchings that function as a way of “bringing to life ideas about how the world should be and more specifically, how it should be ordered.”
propaganda serves a range of purposes, including not only promoting the creator’s worldview, but also raising funds, recruiting fighters, and threatening adversaries.
CITIZEN JOURNALISM
One of the most prolific media centers, Raqqa Is Being Silently Slaughtered, created videos of long lines at bakeries under ISIS’s rule
activists were able to help shape Western perceptions of what was happening in Syria without much interference from the Syrian state,
The government also created a body known as the Syrian Electronic Army tasked with shutting down and defacing opposition websites, spamming opposition Facebook pages,
PROPAGANDA
Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA)
opposition social media universe is more decentralized.
channels affiliated with al-Qaeda or Jabhat al-Nusra or Hayat Tahrir al-Sham tend to be taken down by YouTube, although those posted by Ahrar al-Sham were not.
Kurdish forces likewise established a robust online propaganda apparatus, including websites, Facebook
ISIS also created a substantial media apparatus, including the al-Furqan and al-Hayat media centers, al-Itisam and Ajnad foundations, al-Bayan Radio, and A’maq News Agency.
A consistent theme in the messaging by many participants in the war is the close relationship each claims to have with the civilian population.
Spots created using well-known Syrian actors such as Waddah Halloum, Toulay Haroun, and cast members of the wildly popular historical drama Bab al-Hara call for, in Halloum’s words, the end of “unjust criminal sanctions by America and the West,”
consistent depiction of all of its adversaries as terrorists.
The first is that the YPG, YPJ, and later and especially the SDF are fighting for Syrians of all ethnicities, not just for Kurds.
parallels between the conflict with ISIS and the conflict with Turkey,
ideological focus on women’s rights
reciting political slogans associated with the uprising, such as “Allah, Suriya, hurriya, wa bas”
custom-made nasheed praising Ahrar al-Sham.
Of special note are the videos of executions circulated across its online networks.
edited and a storyboard and narrative arc were developed for each video.
the video showing the executions of James Foley and Stephen Sotloff is titled “A Message to America.”
use of a knife creates a visual parallel to animals being slaughtered, further dehumanizing the victim.
Filming was not incidental to these executions, but their primary purpose.
beheading as a form of execution telegraphs a deliberate brutality and lack of concern with the victims’ humanity.
captured Jordanian pilot Muath Kasasbeh was burned to death in a cage
deliberate choice to use not only violence, but especially horrific violence—
UNDERSTANDING VIOLENCE AS PROPAGANDA
relationship between propaganda and military decision-making.
was arguably the most successful at producing footage of violence designed not just to promote a particular narrative of the war but also, as an American journalist put it, to make anyone watching it “shit their pants.”
bodies of those who had been tortured to death in the regime’s prisons were sometimes returned to their families
A second objective of the propaganda produced by those fighting in Syria is the recruitment of new fighters, both at home and abroad.
“first-person shooter” videos created an image of the conflict that closely resembles a video game, in ways that seem designed to appeal to younger viewers
Thomas Hegghammer
fifty-five-minute Flames of War, was, like some of the videos shot by various opposition factions, shot in part from a first-person perspective, mimicking a video game or a high-budget action movie, and narrated in Canadian-accented English by a fighter from Toronto.
The YPG and YPJ have also attracted foreign fighters. 158 The majority are from Turkey and generally have ties to the PKK, but hundreds of Americans and Europeans have also joined the Kurdish forces.
Rojava is not an adventure park, this war is not a Hollywood film and YPG is not a PR-Agency.
After Saudi Arabia banned private donations in May 2012,165 Kuwait, in part because of its more open political culture, became the center of much of this fundraising.
armed factions in their neighborhoods had filmed attacks specifically in order to create videos to send to donors in Qatar, Kuwait, or elsewhere.
What is striking about the performative use of violence via social media in Syria is how much it resembles internet culture more generally.
Teenagers sitting in their bedrooms in Europe (those Jarrett Brachman and others term jihobbyists) can find all kinds of raw material to
existence of these platforms has shaped the ways in which Syrians themselves understand the war.
Conclusion
One finding of this book, then, is that the gap between how those fighting a war explain it—specifically, who they characterize as a threat—and their actual behavior can be significant.
This, then, is the second finding of this book: that winning the war sometimes means first winning the argument.
third finding: that the need to convince important audiences of a certain framing of the war—especially when there is a real disjuncture between that narrative and the group’s actual military choices—can also lead to the treatment of warfare as a kind of propaganda.
The extent to which the war in Syria has been documented by the participants themselves challenges a number of previously clear boundaries.
One of these relates to the role of the media;
second boundary that has been tested by the war in Syria: the role of the state. This suggests the potential for an increased privatization of diplomacy and foreign aid, especially in countries with high concentrations of private wealth and an ideological stake in regional or even global conflicts.
Finally, the performativity of violence in Syria—as well as the extraordinary brutality of the war—has challenged the boundary around the battlefield itself.
the war in Syria has been extraordinarily well documented. It is possible that the record of Syria’s agony may perhaps be used at some point in the future to hold those responsible—