Introduction

Background: Sectarian Demography and Alawi Rule

Online debate continues to rage over the political situation in Syria and its relationship to broader developments in the Middle East.

The political situation in Syria fundamentally shaped the religious and ethnic composition of the country.

Syria is home to various religious groups.

Approximately 80% of the population is Sunni (Sunni Arabs are ~70% of the population and Sunni Kurds are ~10% of the population).

Alawi Shia are around 10-15% of the population.

The remaining 5-10% consists of other minority groups like Christians and Druze.

Since the 1960s, the Alawi minority has controlled the Syrian government through a combination of coups and nepotism. To maintain their power, they have fiercely and systematically discriminated against Sunnis – ensuring that Alawis dominate all the top political and military positions. They have exhibited a particular hostility against Arab Sunnis, seeing them as the biggest threat to their power.

To keep Sunnis subservient, Alawis have undertaken the most constant and extreme persecution of Sunnis found anywhere in the world. They have ruled through terror to maintain their power – arresting, torturing, and disappearing countless Sunnis.

Whenever Sunnis have demanded justice, they have been crushed. A good example was the 1982 Hama massacre, where a Sunni uprising was put down through sweeping unrestricted and completely disproportionate government violence – killing over 30,000 Sunnis.

The same pattern is found with the Syrian revolution, where Bashar al-Asad and the ruling Alawi elite responded to (largely Sunni) protests by intentionally initiating a sectarian civil war between Sunnis and Shia.

Foreign Intervention and the Civil War’s Death Toll

The US and Israel helped foment the civil war to advance their geopolitical interests.

Iran and Hizbollah then entered Syria to block the US and Israel from taking over and destroying Syria. But they also bloodied their hands in the process – aiding Asad in his atrocities. Various Sunni countries (e.g., Saudi Arabia) also entered to secure their interests and sponsored radical Sunni factions that committed atrocities (although fewer in number).

Although there are different estimates of the death count in the Syrian civil war, some of the more common figures are presented below:

(1) The Syrian conflict has claimed just over 600,000 lives
(2) The Syrian government and its Shia allies (Iran, Hezbollah) have killed about 400,000
(3) The Sunni Syrian rebels have killed about 200,000

To be more specific:

(4) The Syrian government and its allies (Iran, Hezbollah) have killed about 200,000 combatants from rebel forces.
(5) The Syrian rebels have killed about 180,000 combatants from government forces.
(6) The Syrian government and its allies have killed about 200,000 non-combatant civilians, focusing on adult males (i.e., ~80% of casualties are adult males)
(7) The Syrian rebels have killed about 20,000 non-combatant civilians, focusing on adult males.

Notice that the Syrian government and its allies have killed far more non-combatant civilians (~200,000) than the rebels (~20,000). This reflects the fact that the Syrian government has pursued far more vicious tactics and has committed many more war crimes.

Denial and Downplaying of Asad’s Sectarianism

That being said, in popular discourse on Syria, many people persist in denying or downplaying Asad’s anti-Sunni sectarian policies. They deny his extreme sectarian policies before the revolution. They also deny his intentional amplification of sectarianism during the revolution.

In many cases, the tendency to deny or downplay the sectarianism of Bashar al-Asad comes from (justified) hostility to the post-revolutionary government of Ahmad al-Sharaa (Goylani).

There are many valid grounds for criticizing al-Sharaa, someone who has been an agent of the US after being apprehended for his involvement in committing terrorism against Muslims in Iraq. In terms of his policies as ruler of Syria, what is particularly objectionable is he has renounced Islamist politics and application of the Sharia, embraced secularism and nationalism, developed alliances with the US and Israel, abandoned the Palestinian cause, and refused to challenge Israel’s continued and expanding occupation of Syria.

Nevertheless, al-Sharaa’s many egregious crimes do not justify ignoring or denying those of Asad.

Scope and Organization of the Resources

Presented below are a collection of nine key academic resources.

These resources are essential for understanding Asad’s anti-Sunni sectarianism before and during the Syrian revolution.

The resources also provide an understanding of the sectarian policies of other relevant actors including Iran, Saudi Arabia, and ISIS/Jabhat al-Nusra

The resources are organized under the following six topic headings

Topic 1: Asad’s government was based on repressive policies targeting Sunnis, although he did embrace and coopt some loyalist segments of the Sunni population.

Topic 2: Asad targeted Arab Sunnis with special harshness (1) because of the small size of the ruling Alawi community (2) because his broader ruling coalition was highly heterogeneous. This operated to boost sectarianism both before and during the revolution.

Topic 3: Asad targeted Arab Sunnis with severe war crimes during the Syrian revolution, and intentionally sought to transform the revolution into a sectarian conflict.

Topic 4: Although the geopolitical strategy of Iran is complex, it has a sectarian dimension.

Topic 5: Although the geopolitical strategy of Saudi Arabia is complex, it has a sectarian dimension.

Topic 6: The geopolitical strategy of ISIS is maximally sectarian.

Topic 1: Asad’s government was based on repressive policies targeting Sunnis, although he did embrace and coopt some loyalist segments of the Sunni population.

Resource (I): Thomas Pierret, “The Syrian Baath Party and Sunni Islam: Conflicts and Connivance,” Middle East Brief 77 (2014).

In the first weeks of the Syrian uprising that began in March 2011, religious symbols and figures rapidly emerged as important components of the movement. Allah Akbar (“God is the Greatest”) was often shouted, along with liberal slogans like “God, Syria, Freedom, and that’s it!” Certain Muslim scholars or ulama became iconic figures of the protests, and many demonstrations took place in and around mosques, which offered some degree of protection from security forces. With the gradual radicalization of the uprising in the months since, and the consequently greater presence of Islamist armed groups, religion came to occupy an increasingly central place in the rhetoric of the opposition.

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Religion is also key to understanding the Syrian conflict to the extent that the issue of religious—or, more precisely, sectarian—identity has been at the heart of Syria’s domestic tensions for decades. Although Sunni Muslims probably account for 80 percent of the country’s population, members of President Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite sect, which accounts for only 10 percent, have dominated the military, and hence the regime, from the 1960s on. By 2011, it was estimated that a majority of the officers in the army and the intelligence apparatus were Alawites, as were most of the rank and file in elite units such as the Republican Guard and the 4th Armored Division.

…

I address the issue of sectarianism in Syria by analyzing the history of the relationship between the regime and the Sunni Islamic community: to the Islamist opposition movements, on the one hand, and the ulama (the learned religious elite), on the other. (I will highlight the specificities of the Syrian case but also point out the resemblance of the Syrian situation to that of other states in the region.) I discuss the regime’s partnership with foreign Shia actors and the resentment that has generated among Syrian Sunnis, as well as the role of economic liberalization in the post-2000 rapprochement between the regime, the ulama, and the Sunni bourgeoisie at large. On that basis, I will analyze the stance adopted by Sunni religious actors since the outbreak of the current uprising.¹

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The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, established in 1946, made its debut in the context of a parliamentary democracy. Although at that time, notables (belonging to the landed and merchant elites) dominated the political system, the Islamists nevertheless managed to secure a few seats in the assembly in the elections of 1949 and 1962 as well as ministerial portfolios. The Brotherhood had another good reason to be loyal to the parliamentary system: This system’s main enemy—that is, the military—which regularly intervened in Syrian political life from 1949 on, was heavily influenced by the founder of the Turkish Republic Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s experience of authoritarian secularization. As for the Egyptian president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who from 1958 to 1961 ruled over Syria as a result of the latter’s merger with Egypt into the short-lived United Arab Republic, he marginalized the Brotherhood in Syria along with any ideological party that might overshadow him.

In 1963, two years after Syria’s return to parliamentary life as a result of its secession from the United Arab Republic, the Baathist coup put a definitive end to the country’s democratic experience. The Brotherhood was now at odds with the new masters of the country not only ideologically—since the secularist enthusiasm of the Baath was at its apex in the mid-1960s—but also socially and sectarianly. Whereas the new regime’s strongmen were often sons of peasants from heterodox Muslim minorities (Druzes, Ismailis, and Alawites), the Muslim Brotherhood was strongly rooted in the urban Sunni middle class.

Following the Baathist coup of 1963, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood continued to operate in a semi-underground fashion; but by the mid-1960s, the organization was bled dry by the self-imposed exile of hundreds of its members to Gulf monarchies. In the 1970s, however, in a context of a looming Islamic revival throughout the region, they took advantage of the very limited liberalization initiated by Hafez al-Assad to rebuild their forces in a semi-clandestine fashion. This development coincided with the emergence of a militant current advocating the abandonment of the Brotherhood’s educational strategy in favor of armed struggle—which in turn gave rise to the Fighting Vanguard, a breakaway faction that at the end of the decade launched a campaign of assassinations and bomb attacks against the regime. By early 1980, northern cities like Aleppo and Hama had witnessed broad protest movements involving students, professional associations, and the merchant bourgeoisie.

The regime responded to this predominantly urban uprising with military operations that culminated with the 1982 siege of the rebel stronghold of Hama, which led to the death of thousands and the destruction of the city’s old center. Assad’s ability to defeat the insurgency came about as a result of the loyalty of the Alawite community along with the passivity of Sunni peasants, many of whom had benefited from the regime’s agrarian policies. Limited economic liberalization in the 1970s had also entailed a rapprochement between Assad and the Damascene bourgeoisie, which helped Assad circumvent dissent in the capital.

In the meantime, the regime had put an end to the presence of the Muslim Brotherhood inside the country. In 1980, with the promulgation of Law No. 49, mere membership in the organization was made punishable by death. In the following years, the gradual annihilation of Islamist networks in the country resulted in a new generation of exiles swelling the ranks of the Syrian Islamist diaspora in the Middle East and Europe. From then on, this diaspora became the only real sphere of operations for the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, which was now no more than a movement of exiles run by aging figures. Secret talks between the Brotherhood and the regime took place from the late 1980s on, but the latter offered only individual amnesties and never indicated any intention of allowing the reintegration of the Brotherhood into the political game.

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The Syrian Baathist regime’s management of Sunni religious institutions has been more distinctly idiosyncratic than its relationship with the political Islamic opposition. Between independence in 1946 and 1963, Syrian governments adopted an approach similar to that of Kemalist Turkey and Nasserite Egypt: They “nationalized” religious institutions. The state built up legal and administrative structures (creation of a position of Grand Mufti, establishment of a Ministry of Religious Endowments [awqaf] in charge of religious affairs); actively participated in the modernization of higher religious education (opening of a Faculty of Sharia at the University of Damascus); and even tried to impose a uniform on Muslim clerics, detailed down to the color of their socks!

After 1963, the Baath rapidly broke with that model by shifting away from institution building and focusing on the political neutralization of the Sunni religious elite. Rather than incorporating the latter into the state bureaucracy, as Nasser had done in Egypt, the new Syrian regime opted for a policy of exclusion, by depriving the vast majority of the grand ulama from any responsibility in the religious administration. Moreover, that bureaucracy did not undergo the expansion enjoyed by other state agencies in the now socialist state, and private Islamic seminaries were among the few exceptions to the nationalization of schools that the regime effected at the end of the 1960s.

The religious policies of the Baathist regime were driven by two main considerations. On an ideological level, the secularist revolutionaries in power were reluctant to use state resources to the benefit of a reactionary religious establishment that many in the party assumed was doomed to disappear in any case. In terms of political strategy, the ruling team did not wish to open the gates of the state apparatus to an inherently hostile conservative religious elite.

Instead of encouraging the regime to rethink this approach, the Islamist insurgency of 1979-82 only radicalized it further. The state religious bureaucracy, now perceived as a threat rather than employed as an instrument of control, lost no less than two-thirds of its staff during the 1980s and 1990s. The establishment of the Assad Institutes for the Memorization of the Quran was in fact a mere relabeling of pre-existing, mosque-based informal study circles. As for the expansion of higher Islamic education in response to a growing social demand, it was entrusted to new institutes run by pro-regime clerics, like Grand Mufti Ahmad Kaftaro, but remained entirely private from both legal and financial points of view.

The 1979–82 uprising also led to the establishment of an unlikely alliance between the regime and a prestigious Sunni religious figure, the dean of the Faculty of Sharia, Sa‘id Ramadan al-Buti. Al-Buti was radically hostile to the pillars of Baathist ideology—that is, nationalism and socialism—which he had denounced in several of his widely read books. At the same time, his arch-conservative understanding of Sunni political theology included advocating absolute obedience to political authority, regardless of its (many) flaws, on the basis that tyranny is preferable to “discord” (fitna); but it was also justified by the belief that dialogue with the government was the surest path to eventually achieving clerical goals.

And indeed, from the mid-1990s on, the regime gradually lifted severe restrictions on basic religious practices, such as wearing headscarves in schools, holding religious lessons in mosques, and celebrating the Prophet’s birthday. During the next decade, the new president, Bashar al-Assad, while turning a deaf ear to the Islamist parties’ demands for political inclusion, was increasingly receptive to the demands of the ulama as a means of securing their support in the context of multiple regional crises (the U.S. occupation of Iraq; Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon). Reaching out to former enemies—some of them freshly returned from exile, like leaders of the Zayd movement Osama and Sariya al-Rifa‘i—Bashar allowed them to expand informal networks of religious education, while the number of charities and Islamic secondary schools skyrocketed.

Assad’s conciliatory strategy did not produce the desired outcome, however, as the Sunni religious elite’s retrieved self-confidence rapidly proved embarrassing. Of course, no one dared attack the President himself, and even traditionally independent figures exhibited a readiness to praise Assad’s anti-American and anti-Israeli stance. But the ulama did feel strong enough to launch rhetorical offensives against secularist elements within state agencies like the ministries of Media and Education. In 2006, in response to the Ministry of Education’s decision to abolish the preparatory level (first three years) of Sharia high schools and institutes in order to extend the compulsory core curriculum of general education, forty of the country’s most famous Muslim scholars sent Assad a petition condemning a “conspiracy” fomented by the Ministry of Education in order to “destroy religion.”

In the face of such wayward clerical behavior, the regime started to look for an alternative to its policy of relative lenience toward the ulama. The opportunity to change course arose in 2008, when Syria’s foreign policy successes (the victory of pro-Syrian militias in the May 2008 clashes in Beirut; Assad’s official visit to Paris in July) relieved the regime of the need to seek the support of the ulama. Combined with a deadly terrorist attack in September that was attributed to Islamic militants, that context paved the way for an ambitious program of reforms, which aimed to significantly increase the role and resources of the state religious bureaucracy, particularly through the partial nationalization of private Islamic seminaries. These measures were accompanied by a revival of the regime’s secularist ambitions, as evidenced by the closing of prayer halls in shopping malls, the ban on face veils (niqab) in universities, the transfer of face-veiled schoolteachers to administrative positions, and the prohibition against displaying signs of sectarian affiliation on cars. As a result, on the eve of the uprising of 2011, relations between the regime and the Sunni religious elite had considerably deteriorated, not only because of the 2008 crackdown but also because of growing rumors of Shiite missionary activities in the country.

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Of all the issues discussed above, the Syrian state’s relationship to Shiite Islam is undoubtedly the most directly related to the Alawite affiliation of the regime’s strongmen. Despite a distant common origin, clerics belonging to Twelver Shia Islam—that is, the mainstream brand of Shiism, predominantly found today in Iran and Iraq—long looked upon the secretive doctrines of the Alawites, and in particular their reported deification of Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali, as nothing but heresy, and many still do. Only in the first half of the twentieth century did reformist Alawite scholars make serious efforts to foster doctrinal rapprochement with Twelver Shiism. As for the Baathist regime, its partnership with Twelver Shiism started after Hafez al-Assad’s coming to power in 1970.

As the first non-Sunni president of a country whose constitution requires that the head of state be a Muslim, Assad sought fatwas affirming the Alawites’ affiliation with Islam. He never obtained such fatwas from Syrian Sunni clerics, even the most obsequious among them, but rather from foreign Twelver Shia scholars who were indebted to him for political reasons: Hasan al-Shirazi, an Iraqi opponent who sought refuge in Syria, and Musa al-Sadr, the founder of the Syrian-sponsored Lebanese Amal movement. Assad’s network of Shia partners vastly expanded after 1979 when he established a strategic alliance with the Islamic Republic of Iran and its Lebanese extension, Hezbollah.³

Thanks to their excellent relations with the Syrian regime, various foreign Twelver Shia networks were allowed to open several hawzat (seminaries) in the Damascene suburb of Sayyida Zaynab. They also rebuilt, at great expense and according to the canons of Persian architecture, the shrines of key figures of Shia hagiography, such as the Prophet’s relatives Sayyida Zaynab and Sayyida Ruqqaya in Damascus, and the Companions Ammar bin Yasir and Uways al-Qarni in the north central city of al-Raqqa. By 2011, these sites had been visited by hundreds of thousands of foreign Shia pilgrims every year.

Early on, Shia institutions in Syria were suspected of working for the conversion of Sunnis, a goal some Shia clerics were in fact not really trying to conceal. Although they did not achieve significant success in that endeavor, individual—and, in one village of the Euphrates valley, collective—conversions grabbed people’s attention. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, anti-Shia resentment spread among Sunni Syrians, along with rumors of “Shiitization” (tashayyu‘) in the country. The regional context—a Sunni-Shia civil war in Iraq and looming sectarian tensions in Lebanon—provided fertile ground for such apprehensions. They were fed, as well, by propaganda efforts on the part of both radical and moderate Syrian Islamist opponents and other enemies of Assad in the region. Anxiety in the face of Shiite activities was such that even a loyal regime ally like Dr. al-Buti dedicated a Friday sermon to denouncing the Syrian authorities’ permissiveness with respect to Shia missionaries.

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Regardless of the tensions generated by the post-2008 crackdown and by rumors of Shiitization, the partnership between the regime and the ulama was being structurally consolidated as a result of the process of economic liberalization that had accelerated earlier in the decade. Although the “opening” (infitah) of the Syrian economy—meaning opening it to private investment—formally started in the 1970s, it remained extremely limited until the rule of Bashar al-Assad. Under his aegis, the Syrian economy officially moved from socialism to a “social market economy,” and experienced such radical changes as the launching of private banks and the establishment of a legal framework aimed at stimulating foreign direct investment.

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the ulama with the resources required to sustain their mosques, seminaries, and charities. Donations to religious institutions thus skyrocketed after 2003 because of the oil boom and economic liberalization, and also increased as a result of the support of regime cronies trying to buy themselves some respectability. Such was the case, for example, with respect to Muhammad Hamshu, the brother-in-law of Bashar al-Assad’s brother Mahir and an “independent” member of Parliament (meaning, non-affiliated with the Baath or one of its satellite parties). Hamshu spent millions of pounds in support of religious activities, and many ulama reciprocated the favor by supporting him during his electoral campaigns.

Economic liberalization also benefited the ulama by giving some of them a prominent role in newly founded Islamic banks. The Sharia boards of these banks recruited prestigious religious figures as well as experts in Islamic finance in order to appeal to potential customers. In the end, therefore, the neo-liberal turn in the economy strengthened the ulama’s relationship with Syrian economic elites and, through the latter, with the political and military establishment.

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As a result of the contradictory dynamics discussed above, the Sunni elites in Syria did not react to the 2011 crisis in a unified fashion. Whereas the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist opponents unsurprisingly lent full support to a movement that offered an opportunity to finally break the Baath’s monopoly on state power, the ulama were divided.

Long-standing allies of the regime, such as Grand Mufti Ahmad Hassun as well as al-Buti, put aside the grievances provoked by the regime’s recent “anti-religious” policies: Being deeply involved in the incumbent system, they had much to lose from Assad’s disappearance. Al-Buti immediately denounced the protest as a foreign conspiracy and went so far as to praise the Syrian military at a time when it was already responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians. Al-Buti died in a bomb attack while giving a mosque lesson in March 2013. Very few scholars were as vocal as al-Buti in their support for the regime, but many merely warned against “discord” or took refuge in silence.

On the other side of the struggle, revolutionary ulama first emerged in secondary cities that were in the forefront of the uprising, such as Daraa in the south, Homs in the center, and Banias on the coast. In Damascus and Aleppo, which witnessed only limited demonstrations during the first months of the uprising, Friday preachers were considerably more measured in their rhetoric; but some of them nevertheless stood out as particularly outspoken, and consequently attracted anti-regime crowds. In the capital, the mosques of two of the city’s most respected scholars, Osama al-Rifa‘i and Krayyim Rajih, served as a starting points for several demonstrations. Although they did not initially call for the overthrow of Assad, these preachers totally rejected the regime narrative of the uprising (which attributed it to “armed gangs” remote-controlled from abroad); asserted the legitimacy of democratic demands; and blamed the police for the violence. Unsurprisingly, such challenges to the state generally came from former opponents (al-Rifa‘i had spent fifteen years in exile) who had reconciled with the regime only recently, and had subsequently maintained ambiguous relations with the authorities.

After five months of hesitation, the regime cracked down on Damascus’ rebellious preachers. After these preachers’ fierce criticism of the army’s intervention in the cities of Hama and Deir ez-Zor, dissenter ulama were banned from preaching, and al-Rifa‘i was even physically assaulted by regime thugs. Many expected that this sacrilegious aggression against an immensely respected religious scholar would trigger outraged protest that would shatter the regime’s control over Damascus. Yet, surprisingly, very little happened: Demonstrations were witnessed in the populous suburbs of the capital, which were already revolutionary strongholds, but downtown Damascus remained calm, even though the affluent neighborhoods of the city center were home to the majority of al-Rifa‘i’s followers. The sheikh’s most enthusiastic supporters did not hide their feeling of betrayal in light of the passivity of those who, but a few days before, were still thronging to kiss the hand of their spiritual leader.

Resource (II): Heiko Wimmen, “The Sectarianization of the Syrian War,” in Frederic Wehrey, ed., Beyond Sunni and Shia: The Roots of Sectarianism in a Changing Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017):61-86.

Initially, the Syrian protesters who rose up against the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in 2011 adopted a non-sectarian approach. However, sectarian rhetoric and perceptions came to prevail in the ensuing conflict. Within a month following the first wave of protests in mid-March 2011, sectarian identity became an important, often overriding, element in the interpretation and escalation of violence.

This does not mean that Syria is exclusively, or even mainly, experiencing a sectarian civil war, as many analysts have represented it.¹ That a significant portion of Syrian Sunnis still support the regime, or that hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people from Sunni areas have sought refuge in government-controlled areas, illustrates that this is not a struggle between distinct and cohesive groups vying for supremacy and control over territory and institutions or the exclusion or extermination of other sects.

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Despite the considerable efforts of early anti-regime activists, the narrative of a social and political struggle—pitting impoverished rural masses and migrants, disenfranchised urban-middle and lower-middle classes, liberal intellectuals, and youths with dim prospects against an abusive authoritarian regime and its clientele of parasitic enforcers and crony capitalists—did not prevail. The narrative was soon eclipsed by interpretations that presented the events purely, or mainly, in sectarian terms. The regime and its partisans portrayed the conflict as a defense of Syria’s religious pluralism against Sunni religious extremism, which external actors sought to instigate and exploit. The opposition represented it as a struggle against a regime whose sectarian Alawite character had made it implacably hostile to mainstream Sunni Islam.

As events were narrated and interpreted through sectarian lenses, these representations quickly turned into reality on the ground, thus giving them credence. Attacks on Sunni mosques, which were the only available public sanctuaries for protesters, were perceived as expressions and proof of the regime’s sectarian bias rather than as attempts to extinguish centers of dissent. On the other side, assassinations of Alawite security officers were interpreted as evidence of the sectarian hatred of the opposition, not as retaliation against the enforcers of a detested regime who had met unarmed protesters with live ammunition. These perceptions affected and shaped public attitudes and behavior on both sides and fueled self-sustaining cycles of mutual recrimination, fear, and violence.

If the conflict was not caused by age-old sectarian hatreds released by a combination of regime weakness and regional and international interference, then why did the perception of an existential sectarian conflict prevail so quickly? Why did the inclusive rhetoric of the protesters fail to convince enough Syrians—in particular non-Sunnis—that “the Syrian people are one” in their struggle against the regime? Why did so many Syrians instead fall for the fearmongering of a regime that nearly everyone (including its beneficiaries) knew and loathed for its corruption, insincerity, and opportunism?

For many supporters of the uprising, the answer to these questions is clear: it was “the regime’s cynical exploitation of sectarianism” that turned the uprising away from its early inclusive and civic orientation.⁴ Such a perspective appears intuitively plausible, given the advantages that the process of sectarianization offered Syria’s rulers. On a domestic level, portraying the uprising as being the result of Sunni sectarianism and extremism could scare religious minorities into siding with the regime. It could also scare liberal segments of the Sunni majority, who feared a turn toward state-imposed religious rigidity and conservatism, as occurred in Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf. On an international level, this concern, in particular when expressed by religious figures in Christian communities, could also influence Western societies, in which Islamophobia is rife and where most observers were unaware that many of these figures had been co-opted by the regime.

Certain decisions at the regime’s highest levels may also be evidence that at least some elements in the Syrian power structure sought to steer the situation toward outright sectarian conflict. Statements that attributed the first wave of protests to a “conspiracy to sow sectarian strife” and conjured up scenarios of “internal conflict” were a sure recipe to fan fears that would hasten the outbreak of the very sectarian conflict the regime was purportedly warning against.⁵ Attacking mosques using crack troops—commonly perceived as Alawite-dominated—or irregulars recruited in minority, particularly Alawite, areas,⁶ and releasing militant jihadists from prison certainly enhanced the sectarian dimensions of the conflict.⁷

And yet there is no conclusive evidence of a coordinated and coherent regime strategy aimed specifically at igniting sectarian conflict. The regime’s responses to protests during the first few weeks were contradictory and haphazard, and sometimes elements of the regime appeared to be working at cross-purposes.⁸ While the official rhetoric concerning the sectarian dimension of the contestation certainly qualified as fearmongering, it was essentially the continuation of a long-standing and “deliberately ambiguous” strategy: branding as sectarian anyone who exposed the reality of Alawite preponderance in the composition of the Syrian regime and its security apparatus and the crony-dominated economy it fostered—all this behind a facade of secularism.⁹

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Sectarianism had been implanted in Syrian society long before external actors started to play a significant role in the country’s current war.¹⁰ Its extent was also greater than those who blame the phenomenon on a regime strategy to counter the uprising are prepared to admit.¹¹ Its origins lay primarily in the ruling practices of the Syrian regime, which have left a legacy of violence, in particular from the conflict with the Muslim Brotherhood during the early 1980s. Rather than an existential condition suppressed by a supposedly secular regime, sectarianism was the product of the political behavior of this regime. Once the regime was seriously challenged, it served as a tool for mobilization for both sides and as a fuel for violent conflict.

This distinction is important for at least two reasons. First, it represents a response to those who argue that no matter how unsavory, authoritarian regimes are necessary to manage divided societies outside the “developed world.” Such perspectives merit denunciation because they are culturally deterministic and occasionally racist, but also because they tend to obscure the developed world’s propensity to deepen and intensify these conflicts in pursuit of its own strategic interests. To those who defend authoritarian regimes from a realpolitik perspective, it is worth remembering that accommodating dictators is often self-defeating in that it may only delay, and likely amplify, an inevitable revolt.

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Absent of such change, and barring a decisive military victory for either side, Syria is liable to end up permanently bedeviled by deep, politicized sectarian rifts, with institutions, state power, and perhaps territory divided among competing power centers that rely on sectarian mobilization and fear to appear legitimate and maintain power. Such an outcome would represent only a moderate change from (and much continuity with) the system of dispersed domination, structured by sect, clan, region, and other substate identity formations characteristic of the Assad regimes. In other words, the post-conflict system in Syria may closely resemble the system that has been in place under the Assads since the 1970s.

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Syria is often described as having a “minority regime”: that is, a society where the minority Alawite community (some 10 percent of the population) rules over the Sunni Arab majority that accounts for approximately two-thirds of the Syrian population. However, it can be argued that the regime exploited tribal and kinship solidarity and networks to maintain the loyalty of the security sector and that the far-reaching clout of the latter created an image of Alawite supremacy that only partly reflected social reality.

The rise of Syria’s Alawites, thanks to French colonial policies, from a marginalized rural community to one that found advancement through the armed forces, has been extensively documented and analyzed.¹⁴ One typical interpretation of the Alawite trajectory is that “both [Assad] regimes exploited state resources in order to reinforce Alawi solidarity or asabiyya, ensuring that public sector employment was concentrated in the hands of the Alawi community and the regime’s supporters were rewarded for their commitment to the state.”¹⁵

At least as equally important, however, was the urge to secure the regime by stacking the security agencies and the officer corps with family relations of the ruling clan and its Alawite tribal allies. These preferences at the top level were reproduced among the rank and file. Military and security institutions represented desirable career opportunities that were especially attractive to hitherto marginalized segments of society, among all sects. However, recruitment and advancement were to a large extent dependent on connections to higher officials, ideally through blood relations. Thus, Alawites related to those sections of the community that dominated the upper ranks were at a significant advantage for upward social mobility, while those with less privileged access still had an advantage when it came to filling the lower ranks. Thus, employment in the military and intelligence services became a primary vehicle for upward social mobility and was “inextricably woven into the fabric of Alawite society.”¹⁶ Particularly after the conflict of the 1980s against the Muslim Brotherhood, the significant sway these institutions enjoyed meant that a career in the military and security institutions came with considerable social power, further benefiting the larger Alawite community. Statistically, an Alawite was much more likely to have a relative or close friend serving as a higher-ranking officer in the armed forces or security services than members of other communities—and that relative or friend was, in turn, likely to wield more influence and patronage power than counterparts from other sects.

Interviews with Sunni officers who defected from the armed forces after the uprising in 2011 reveal a clear imbalance in enrolment at the military academy, in addition to significant power differentials between branches of the Syrian armed forces. Alawites were overwhelmingly assigned to those branches receiving the best equipment and the highest funding and social prestige. According to these accounts, many Sunni officers felt pressured to overcompensate for their sectarian identity by engaging in conspicuous displays of “secularism” (for example, by consuming alcohol) and being discrete about personal religiosity, even before the uprising.¹⁷ One assumes such tendencies must have applied even more in the opaque world of the security services.

A strong position in the security sector helped provide access to professional and material advantages—first and foremost public employment—and to the benefits of systemic corruption in the public sector. Thus, for many Syrians, their perception of Alawites was inextricably linked to experiences of unfair privilege and quite frequently to abusive practices, such as protection rackets or the extortion of bribes for access to public services.

Systematic and conspicuous discrimination in access to labor and life opportunities effectively leads to a deeper identification with the sect or other particular category on which this discrimination is based.¹⁸ The effect was pronounced in Syria, where the state wielded strong control over much of the economy and the labor market and where formal procedures and institutional rationality were largely supplanted by extensive networks of patronage.

Revealingly, during the first phase of the protests in 2011, protesters in mixed Sunni-Alawite cities, such as Baniyas, Latakia, and Tartus, demanded the rectification of alleged pro-Alawite sectarian biases in employment in state industries and public administrations.¹⁹ In these cities, perceived communal competition over limited state resources and benefits was also tied closely to rural migration. Migration increased the percentage of Alawites in Latakia from the single digits on the eve of independence in 1945 to around 50 percent in the first decade of this century; in Homs from near zero to about 25 percent; in Tartus from about 30 percent to 80 percent; and in Baniyas from less than 10 percent to around 60 percent during the same period.²⁰ Such significant demographic shifts caused tensions between the traditional urban population, comprising mostly Sunnis and Christians, and the new arrivals.

However, these local fractures were compounded in that they appeared to indicate a dramatic reversal of communal fortunes on a national scale, whereby formerly dominant groups—urban Sunnis and Christians—were supplanted to the benefit of one-time rural outcasts. Widespread rejection of intermarriage and incompatible behavioral norms (relating to alcohol consumption, the mingling of genders, and female dress code) further contributed to community divisions. For instance, in Baniyas, the seaside area of Corniche was informally divided between Sunni and Alawite residents even before 2011.²¹ Thus, in mixed cities where sectarian violence first erupted in 2011, relations between Sunnis and Alawites had already been clouded by long-standing social grievances.

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By the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, shrinking opportunities for ordinary citizens of all communities contrasted with increasingly ostentatious displays of wealth by a small stratum of extremely wealthy businessmen and their entourage.²² Connections to those at the center of power, like the protection of high-ranking individuals in the security establishment, were essential to flourish in this environment. The prevalence of kinship ties meant that, among the beneficiaries, Alawites were still prominently represented in the top tier.²³

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Liberalization also contributed to the exacerbation of sectarianism by diminishing the role of the Baath Party and its affiliated mass organizations. The party’s entrenchment in the public sector and its resilient commitment to egalitarian values—however compromised through practices of patronage—were increasingly perceived as a nuisance by the elite. While in the past the party had offered a degree of inclusion and an avenue of influence that potentially transcended the sectarian divide, its decline served to expose the Alawites’ domination of the security apparatus even more.²⁵ Likewise, as faith-based charities and non-governmental organizations operating under the umbrella of First Lady Asma al-Assad increasingly took charge of social services, the number of people dependent on religious groups or powerful individuals only increased.²⁶

Economic restructuring, the state’s withdrawal as a provider, and the continued parasitic nature of the security sector served to accentuate existing communal grievances. Yet the effects of securitization on communal relations were not restricted to material issues. The regime’s response to the 1980s conflict had turned Syria into a society characterized by ubiquitous surveillance, leading to a common, probably greatly exaggerated, assumption that one in four individuals was an informer.²⁷ And because of the known recruitment patterns of the security agencies, Alawites were generally suspected of being informers until proven otherwise.²⁸ The opaque character of these agencies, their propensity for violence, and the absence of any accountability²⁹ further contributed to an aura of existential suspicion of Alawites, which contributed to popular views of them as a tightly knit, closed-off community with carefully guarded, secret beliefs—or, more unsettling, no beliefs at all.

Above all else, this Alawite aura inspired pervasive fear. For instance, in the early 1990s, rumor had it that on the beaches around Latakia, young women were at risk of being kidnapped by thugs suddenly appearing in speedboats.³⁰ The implication was that the kidnappers were part of semi-criminal smuggling networks related in one way or another to the Assad clan. While such stories may have been partly invented or exaggerated,³¹ the rumor was persistently retold and believed, which inarguably deterred numerous Damascenes from vacationing on the coast—and thus expressed, as well as reproduced, the fear that was lurking under the surface of ostensibly harmonious communal relations.

One result of this generalized association of Alawites with power was that individuals with high-ranking positions in the security sector were sometimes widely assumed to be Alawites, such as, for instance, the supposed founder of the all-powerful Air Force Intelligence Directorate and current director of the National Security Bureau, Ali Mamlouk, who is a Sunni.³²

Even in social milieux where disavowing sectarianism and exposing the insincerity of the regime’s professed secularism was common, sectarian affiliation was never entirely forgotten.

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On the surface, the omnipresence and brutality of the security state, the absurd personality cult around the Assads, and the state’s ideological posturing and militarism made the Baath Party appear similar to totalitarian parties in North Korea and earlier in former communist Romania.³⁴ However, as will be discussed in this section, Syrian Baathism in fact relied on a dispersed, localized power structure that allowed the regime to integrate, promote, or marginalize groups belonging to different sects according to their loyalty and their usefulness for the purpose of power maintenance.³⁵

This power structure was based on the management of informal networks of power and patronage structured by subnational identities and categories: sect, region, ethnicity, and tribe. At the grass-roots level, a combination of official regime representatives, intelligence officers, and prominent members of local society would cooperate in running a specific locality as a fief, sometimes with considerable autonomy. These officials would provide their loyalty and material proceeds to the leadership in return for franchises of authoritarian power. Thus, the main currency in this system of dispersed rule, and the key to accessing privilege and resources, was not so much sectarian affiliation but rather loyalty to the regime and usefulness for its maintenance of power.

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As for the relationship between corporatism and sectarianization, the crucial question is which types of groups would the regime acknowledge as members of the national body and attempt to integrate and accommodate? In its classical form, corporatism proposes a differentiation of society according to functions and roles (peasants, blue- and white-collar workers, industrialists, intellectuals, clerics), which justifies, indeed renders natural, differences in treatment, resource allocation, and access to participation. The Baath Party originally incorporated groups along such functional lines by setting up mass organizations and designating quotas for them in its rubber-stamped bodies, some of which survive even as the party’s standing has diminished.³⁹ The party also successfully co-opted existing institutions of collective interest representation, such as the chambers of commerce.

As for the religious sects, their supposedly harmonious integration into the state through the co-optation of their clerical leadership served two major purposes. It testified to the regime’s professed secularism by placing the sects under state authority and constituted a positive contrast to sectarian mayhem in neighboring Lebanon and later Iraq. It also recruited religious leaders for purposes of mediation, and even more so for the disciplining and surveillance of their flocks.⁴⁰ And these tended to increase in importance as the intermediary role of the Baath Party’s structures receded.⁴¹

For instance, Sunni clerics such as Grand Mufti Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun or the renowned scholar Muhammad Said Ramadan al-Buti were employed to rally the loyalty of Syrian Sunnis. In return, they sometimes received significant concessions when the support was especially valuable. Thus, on 5 April 2011, a presidential decree revoked the license for the only casino in Syria and overturned an earlier decision that had banned from public schools hundreds of female teachers wearing the full body veil (niqab). Both issues had been sharply criticized by al-Buti in late 2010, though he stood by the regime after the uprising began.⁴² Ironically, when protesters demanded the teachers’ reinstatement during the early phase of the uprising, regime mouthpieces used their demand as evidence of the protesters’ alleged Sunni extremism.⁴³ Even real Sunni extremists were at times tolerated or exploited for political ends, for example, when jihadi networks infiltrated by the Syrian intelligence services facilitated the transit of jihadists to Iraq to fight against the American occupation forces after 2003.⁴⁴

Furthermore, a hidden quota system provided for sectarian balance within the leadership and throughout the Syrian administration.⁴⁵ For instance, although the de facto establishment of dynastic rule implied that the president would always be an Alawite, since the conflict in the 1980s, the posts of first vice president and foreign minister have been occupied by Sunnis. In other words, the two executive positions at the head of the state that were beyond criticism, the presidency and vice presidency, and the one minister whose portfolio was so closely tied to the president as to be beyond reproach as well, were reserved for the two sects most crucial for the regime’s survival: the Alawites and Sunnis. Abdul Halim Khaddam, who took over from Hafez al-Assad’s brother Rifaat after the latter’s failed bid for power, held the post for twenty-one years (1984–2005). After his removal, former foreign minister Farouk al-Sharaa took over the position of vice president, with Walid Al-Muallim, also a Sunni, named as foreign minister. Sharaa remains in office despite rumors of differences with President Assad.⁴⁶

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In particular, it would have been entirely counterproductive to marginalize collectively the majority of Syrians who are Sunnis and thus generate a shared sense of injustice, which opponents could have readily exploited for the purpose of mobilization. The regime, instead, went to great lengths to placate the Sunni clergy. It also worked consciously to downplay and obscure outward signs of Alawite religiosity and encouraged assimilation into the Sunni mainstream. During fifty years of so-called Alawite rule, the Alawite clergy never obtained any form of official recognition or institutionalization that even remotely resembled the status of the Sunnis and the other minorities.⁴⁸ Instead, Syria’s Alawite presidents performed public prayers in Sunni mosques, flanked by the mufti of the republic. Alawite children, like those of other Muslim minorities, received a Sunni religious education.⁴⁹ And Sunni mosques were built across Alawite-majority areas, even though they remained empty, emulating practices applied by the Ottoman Empire a century ago.

The formation of a coherent Sunni collective opposed to the regime, with a sense of shared purpose under a unified leadership, was made all the more difficult because of other factors. The social and behavioral differences and historical animosities between Sunni agriculturalists in the south, Bedouin tribes in the north and east, bourgeois urban dwellers in Damascus and Aleppo, and the inhabitants of the small and medium towns of the central plain and the coast, ruled out such a development. Throughout their almost five decades of rule, the two Assad regimes instead accommodated and marginalized each of these groups—at different times and on different terms—in response to changing domestic and regional dynamics.

In contrast, during the early 1980s, the radical wing of the Muslim Brotherhood attempted to generate Sunni solidarity that would cut across Syria’s social and regional divides. The Brotherhood sought to mobilize violent confrontation against the “heretical” Alawite regime, but only found a response among the Sunni middle classes of the northern cities of Hama and Aleppo, whose interests had been negatively affected by the Baath Party’s economic policies. The Sunni populations of the countryside and the smaller cities, as well as the Bedouin, rewarded the regime’s pro-rural development agenda with their loyalty, alongside the Sunni urban elite of Damascus, which the regime had made significant efforts to co-opt.⁵⁰

Topic 2: Asad targeted Arab Sunnis with special harshness (1) because of the small size of the ruling Alawi community (2) because his broader ruling coalition was highly heterogeneous. This operated to boost sectarianism both before and during the revolution.

Resource (III) is a key theoretical work which explains why small and heterogeneous ruling groups are more inclined to utilize violent repression to maintain power.

Resource (III): Cullen Hendrix and Idean Salehyan, “Ethnicity, nonviolent protest, and lethal repression in Africa,” Journal of Peace Research 56(4)(2019):469-484.

Abstract
Why do governments use deadly force against unarmed protesters? The government’s threat perception may be a function of the mobilization potential of the opposition and/or the size of the ruling elite’s support coalition. Given the high salience of ethnicity in African politics, governments that depend on small ethnic coalitions will see peaceful protests as more threatening, as the opposition may be able to draw on larger numbers of potential dissidents and excluded groups. Alternately, governments with larger, more homogeneous ethnic coalitions will find nonviolent mobilization less threatening and will be less likely to respond with deadly force. Using the Social Conflict Analysis Database, we demonstrate that as the size – and to a lesser extent homogeneity – of the ethnic ruling coalition grows, governments are significantly less likely to use deadly force against nonviolent protesters. This finding is robust to several operationalizations of the size of the government’s support coalition, the inclusion of other measures of ethnic demographics, and estimators that account for the hierarchical nature of the data. Threat perception hinges not only on dissident tactics but on their demands, their mobilization potential, and their capacity to impose costs on the government. This article demonstrates that the size and composition of the government’s ethnic support base matters as well.

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The decision by governments to kill nonviolent protesters represents one of the most egregious violations of international human rights norms and law. Articles 3 and 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantee to all people the rights of ‘life, liberty and security of person’ and ‘peaceful assembly and association’ (United Nations, 1948). While governments can be expected to respond to violent challenges with force, the use of such force against unarmed protesters is puzzling. Given that the opposition uses peaceful means, why then would governments respond with violence? The rapacity and brutality of the regime might offer partial explanations. However, governments are more rational and strategic than this argument would suggest (Sutton, Butcher & Svensson, 2014). Threat perceptions by the government are multifaceted and take into account a variety of factors related to protest movement success. We argue the size and cohesion of the ruling coalition affect its ability to endure popular protest and overcome collective action problems in formulating a response to social movements. While it is uncommon, governments do use deadly force against peaceful demonstrators. Between 1990 and 2011, roughly 3% of nonviolent protests, demonstrations, and strikes across Africa were met with lethal force, resulting in at least 1,200 deaths. If we include those protests, demonstrations, and strikes that began peacefully but escalated to violence – in many cases, as a result of government repression – lethal force is used 7% of the time and the death toll jumps to over 7,000. Given its contravention of international norms and potential to inflame further protests, why do governments use deadly force against peaceful protests?

The ‘law of coercive responsiveness’ holds that more severe threats to government authority will elicit repression (Davenport, 2007). Yet, perceived threat to the regime is not limited to the use of violence by dissidents. One example occurred in Guinea in 2009, after Moussa Dadis Camara took power in a coup d’état. After promising to act as a caretaker and step down following a democratic transition, Camara reneged, choosing to stand for election. Defying a ban on pre-election protests, thousands marched peacefully against his decision, eventually congregating in a football stadium in Conakry. Chaos erupted as members of the Guinean Presidential Guard opened fire, resulting in 157 deaths and over 1,000 people injured.

Camara had been an unpopular leader, in part because he is a member of a minority ethnic group. Camara is Kpelle, a group which makes up 5% of Guinea’s population, and which ruled in coalition with other minority ethnic groups in a fractious coalition. Thus, Camara’s perceptions of threat may have centered on the rising popularity of opposition leader and former prime minister Cellou Dalein Diallo, a member of the Peul (Fulani) ethnic group that comprises 40% of the population. We find the Guinean case to be emblematic of broader trends: governments supported by small, diverse ethnic coalitions are much more likely to respond to nonviolent protests with deadly force. While elections in Guinea jeopardized incumbent rule most vividly, protests in general can signal discontent against governments and pose a threat to their longevity.

We argue that the government’s perception of threat is a function of the mass mobilization potential of the opposition as well as the size and concentration of the ruling coalition. Given the salience of ethnicity in African politics, governments that depend on relatively small ethnic constituencies will likely see peaceful protests as more threatening, given that sizeable ethnic groups are excluded from power and can potentially be mobilized by the opposition. Governments that are based on rule by larger, more ethnically homogeneous coalitions are less likely to be threatened by nonviolent protest and will tolerate such dissent.

However, the size of the ruling coalition relative to the opposition is not the only dimension to consider. The difficulty of collective action across ethnic lines also matters. For ruling coalitions, more diverse membership undermines unity and loyalty to the regime; for opposition activists, forming a multi-ethnic alliance is more difficult than organizing within groups.

We demonstrate that as the size and, to a lesser extent, cohesion of the ethnic ruling coalition grow, the use of deadly force against nonviolent protesters declines. Our estimates suggest a government with a majority ethnic support coalition (51% of the population) would be roughly 47% less likely to use deadly force against nonviolent protesters than one such as Camara’s. This finding is robust to several operationalizations of size and diversity, various estimators, and the inclusion of controls.

Our empirical approach is based on event data across countries in Africa (Salehyan et al., 2012). Much of the literature on repression employs annual, cross-national data to look at aggregate levels of abuse, but this approach tells us little about the actors and events that are targeted for repression. Other approaches look at dynamic sequencing and government responses to dissent over time, but typically focus on a small set of countries (Moore, 1998). Using the Social Conflict Analysis Database, we can account for structural factors affecting the probability of repression and attributes of the contentious events themselves.

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Many of our variables are taken from the Social Conflict Analysis Database (Salehyan et al., 2012), which contains data on over 12,000 conflict events in 47 African countries from 1990 to 2016. The data were derived from keyword searches of Associated Press (AP) and Agence France Presse (AFP) news wires. Each record refers to a unique conflict event. To define an event, researchers determined the particular actor(s) involved, their target(s), and the issue(s) at stake. A conflict is classified as a single event if the issues, actors, and targets are the same and there is a distinct, continuous series of actions over time.

Resource (IV): Konstantin Ash and Kevin Mazur, “Ethnicity and Strategic Repression of Protest during the 2011 Syrian Uprising.” Perspectives on Politics (2025): 1-21.

Why do incumbent governments carry out harsher repression against some opposition groups than others? Drawing on research on the coalitional nature of revolutions, we contend that governments target repression at segments of the challenger group they perceive as most threatening in order to fragment the challenger coalition. We illustrate this argument by analyzing protest repression during the 2011 Syrian uprising. We find that protestors in majority-Kurdish towns in Syria’s northeast region were significantly less likely to face lethal repression than those in nearby Sunni Arab towns protesting at the same rate. Qualitative evidence from interviews and the Arabic-language secondary literature demonstrate that the Syrian regime shaped its strategy of repression around diverting Kurdish protests from the regime-focused demands of the revolution, thereby separating Kurds from the primarily Sunni Arab opposition. These findings have implications for how ethnic and other identities can be used by incumbents and how incumbent regimes communicate with their populations through the selective deployment of violence.

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The first six months of the 2011 Syrian uprising were characterized by a strikingly violent state response to protest. The Syrian army and security forces regularly shot into crowds of unarmed protesters (Slackman 2011), tortured and killed suspected dissidents after conducting house-to-house raids (Human Rights Watch 2011), and laid siege to neighborhoods for weeks at a time (Barout 2012, 254). Longtime regime clients were not spared. Sunni Arab communities of tribal background in the country’s northeast, many of whose leaders had long maintained informal patronage relations with regime agents, faced intense state violence. Although the regime initially attempted to head off protests in the northeastern city of Dayr al-Zur by meeting with leaders of tribal confederations (al-Furat 2011), it sent tanks into the city’s streets and killed dozens when protests grew in size and scope (Darwish 2016, 17). Yet protests in some of that same region’s communities evoked a notably different response: protestors in Kurdish towns and cities voiced similar demands to other protests around the country but faced a far less violent state response. The regime used conciliatory tactics to deal with Kurdish protesters: meeting with leaders of protesting groups, directing protests away from public buildings and regime symbols, and leaving most protestors unharmed (Barout et al. 2013, 103).

The Syrian regime’s differential response to similar forms of challenge in a single episode is a common feature of state repression strategies. The Algerian government, for example, granted cultural rights it long denied to Amazigh populations in 2016 after otherwise repressing popular dissent (Maddy-Weitzman 2022, 39). Similarly, Libya’s Qaddafi regime reached out to Amazigh community leaders to keep the Amazigh from joining their Arab neighbors in the 2011 rebellion while violently repressing protests among Arabs (Lacher 2020, 76–82).

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To explain heterogeneous state responses to protest, we draw on literature concerning authoritarian institutions and the coalitional nature of revolutions. We contend that incumbent regimes exploit identity divisions to weaken and fragment challenger groups in order to survive episodes of revolution. States are likely to repress the most threatening of the groups coalescing to challenge their right to rule. By sparing other groups, incumbents can sow division within diffuse challenger coalitions, which are often united only by their dislike of the incumbent. Such violence sends a message not only to its physical targets but also to those spared the violence.

We test this logic of strategic repression by examining the incumbent regime’s response to the 2011 Syrian uprising, focusing on the ethnic identity difference between Arabs and Kurds. First, we present descriptive quantitative evidence on ethnic composition, protest incidence, and lethal state repression, showing that the Syrian regime used violence toward protesters differentially along ethnic lines. Then, to account for the endogenous selection of protesting towns into a greater likelihood of being targeted by the state, we fit a selection model that, in two stages, accounts for the likelihood of town-level state repression given the occurrence of protest in that town. The results show ethnicity-based differentiation of repression by the state. In the first months of the uprising, Kurdish towns were significantly less likely to face lethal repression than towns with majority-Sunni Arab populations, whereas Sunni Arab tribal towns faced rates of repression comparable to other Sunni Arab towns, despite having a lower propensity for protesting than nontribal Sunni Arab towns.

We substantiate the quantitative findings with a qualitative analysis of regime response, drawn from interviews and Arabic-language secondary literature. Initially, the interactions between the regime and protesters in both Kurdish and Sunni Arab communities of tribal background followed a similar pattern: protesters made national-level demands and the regime appealed to local elites to quell protests. However, when efforts to halt demonstrations failed, the regime only showed restraint toward protests in Kurdish areas, and especially in response to protests that made demands regarding the political and cultural rights of Kurds. This restraint, we argue, was aimed at convincing the Kurdish elite and wider public that Sunni Arab-dominated rule would be more unpalatable than the current ʿAlawi-dominated regime. In contrast, because regime clients of Sunni Arab tribal background in Syria’s northeast shared the Sunni Arab identity of protest leaders in other regions of Syria, the regime employed more lethal forms of repression against protesters from tribal communities.

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Why do incumbent governments conduct harsher repression against some protesting groups? We contend that incumbents respond to the coalitional dynamics of revolutionary movements by focusing their repression away from less threatening groups and toward groups that constitute the greater threat to their rule, with the aim of splitting revolutionary movements.

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Our argument builds on the scholarship of contemporary revolutions as phenomena brought on and sustained by “negative coalitions”: alliances that form when coalitions constructed by incumbent authorities break down and excluded social actors gather to challenge the regime (Dix 1984). These coalitions are typically united by antipathy toward the incumbent, rather than by a shared vision for the country’s future (Beissinger 2013); founded on mass gatherings in central urban spaces to force the resignation of prevailing political authorities (Beissinger 2022, chap. 4); and subject to fragmentation either before, during, or after successful toppling of the incumbent regime (Clarke 2023).

An incumbent government facing a negative coalition calling for regime change has various options for containing the uprising. Before escalating to repression, incumbents are known to use clientelism (Chandra 2004), media messaging (Snyder and Ballentine 1996), and even the incitement of interethnic violence (Wilkinson 2004) as a way to fragment ethnically heterogeneous opposition coalitions. Along with fostering divisions, governments may also buy off opposition groups by offering them spoils (Weingast 1997) or positions in toothless legislatures (Lust-Okar 2005) to prevent the emergence of a cohesive negative protest coalition.

But when these techniques fail and challenge persists, regimes often turn to violence. We focus on autocratic regimes because one of the most robust findings in the repression literature is that democracies are less likely to use violence to suppress challenge (Davenport 2007). Among autocracies, recent work has found that the severity of state repression varies and is related to ethnic coalition size (Hendrix and Salehyan 2019), the presence of relatively autonomous civil society organizations (Berman 2021), low levels of information about challengers (Xu 2021), and very high or very low levels of inequality (Shadmehr 2014).

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We posit that the most threatening groups in such settings are those that (1) are less likely to accept accommodation with the incumbent, (2) represent a larger share of the population, and (3) have a history of anti-regime mobilization. First, groups that seek to control the center and implement wholesale change to the economic or political system are less likely to accept compromise as a solution. Second, groups that comprise a large share of the population are likely to be more threatening because solidarity along group lines could bring large numbers out nationwide. Regimes are often aware of the threat from large groups and aim to draw distinctions within such populations, exemplified by divisions that incumbent regimes tried to stoke among Shiʿis in Baʿthi Iraq (Baram 1997), Oromos in Ethiopia (Abbink 2006), and Sunni Arabs in Syria (Mazur 2021). Third, previous episodes of anti-regime mobilization indicate a willingness and capability among members of a group to mobilize. For this reason, multiple Arab regimes have targeted the Muslim Brotherhood (e.g., Egypt, Darwich 2017; Syria, Lefèvre 2013), and Ethiopia targeted Amhara-associated political groups (Abbink 2006).

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We test our argument by examining the Syrian government’s response to the early stages of the 2011 uprising. Syria at the time of the uprising fits the theory’s scope conditions. It is a multiethnic society that, in 2011, was ruled by an autocratic regime centered around the family and close associates of President Bashar al-Asad. Al-Asad belongs to the ʿAlawi ethnic group, which constitutes a small percentage of the Syrian population. Ethnic demographic data were not officially collected or publicized by the regime, but one prominent demographer of Syria, Youssef Courbage (2007, 189), estimated that 72% of the pre-2011 population was Sunni Arab, 10% ʿAlawi, 8% Kurdish, and the remaining 8% were members of other ethnic groups, including various Christian denominations, Druzes, Ismaʿilis, and Turkmans. Areas of substantial Kurdish settlement and the ethnic composition of large towns in and around Syria’s Northeast are presented in figure 1 and table 1. Our understanding of identity in Syria is in line with the prevailing social-scientific understandings of ethnicity.

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Ethnic identities emerged historically, with shifting boundaries and varying salience, and they are thus ambiguous in some situations and largely irrelevant to others. Before the 2011 uprising, regional provenance and discrete social networks often took precedence over ethnic boundaries in navigating security checkpoints or accessing state resources (Khaddour and Mazur 2013). Moreover, neoliberal restructuring of the economy led to an increasing rate of intermarriage of Sunni elites and ʿAlawis close to political power (Terc 2011). Yet these interactions and their increasing prominence in the lead-up to the 2011 uprising neither erased ethnic boundaries nor rendered them irrelevant for many Syrians. For instance, many Kurds were denied basic rights and excluded from regular access to state-controlled resources (Tejel 2009). The patchwork structure of ethnic boundaries thus set the stage for the instrumentalization of ethnicity by the regime.

We follow Wimmer (2013) in conceiving of religious differences, commonly described in the Levantine context as “sectarian,” as a subcategory of ethnic difference. Ethnicity also includes differences along linguistic or racial lines. Kurdish identity differs from these “sectarian” identities because most Kurds are Sunni Muslims but are differentiated from their Arab coreligionists by their native language and distinct cultural practices, such as dress, food, and celebrations. These differences could, in principle, motivate a separatist challenge. Nevertheless, Druze and ʿAlawi religious difference defined the only two ethno-states in Syria’s modern history, which were created under French Mandatory rule (Neep 2026, chap. 4). In 2011, challengers from all ethnic backgrounds called for center-focused political change in the early phases of the Syrian uprising.

The uprising began with demonstrations in several cities in March 2011. Regime repression fueled protest throughout the country and greatly increased its frequency, turning isolated demonstrations into nationwide challenge. The majority of participants in the early protests, like the overall Syrian population, were Sunni Arabs. However, the protest movement that emerged in March 2011 consisted of members of all of Syria’s ethnic groups, and demonstrators overwhelmingly articulated demands focused on supraethnic political issues, including democratization and equal treatment of all Syrian citizens (Ismail 2011). Sustained regime repression during the summer of 2011 tilted the largely nonviolent demonstrations toward an armed response. Starting in summer 2011, challengers formed militias, loosely organized under the Free Syrian Army (FSA) umbrella (al-Haj Saleh 2017, 78). These groups began to wrest peripheral areas around major cities from regime control in autumn 2011. By January 2012, rebels had fully expelled regime agents from the town of al-Zabadani in the Damascus periphery (Bishara 2013, 199).

As nonviolent protest morphed into civil war in 2011 and 2012, regime tactics and challenger response varied significantly. In the following section, we examine how the multiethnic coalition of challengers from the early, nonviolent phase of protest set the stage for the regime’s use of strategic repression, differentiated along ethnic lines. Our focus is on how repression of challengers differed across ethnicity from the baseline of Sunni Arabs, who formed the numerical core of the Syrian opposition at the outset of the uprising.

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As a first empirical step, we describe patterns of protest and repression during the first year of the Syrian uprising. We present these data at the level of the town (n = 5,204).

To measure lethal repression, we use data from Syria Tracker (Kass-Hout 2016), an online database cataloging killings in the early stages of the Syrian uprising. Syria Tracker aggregates data from other online repositories and user reports and has been used in other academic studies of violence in Syria (e.g., De Juan and Bank 2015). It geolocates killings, allowing us to match them to our town-level data using GIS software. Protest events are drawn from the Syrian Uprising Event Database (Mazur 2020), an event catalog based on a range of newspaper sources and coded at the town level. For ethnic identity, we use the Syria Town Database (Khaddour and Mazur 2018), which provides information about the ethnic composition of each town, including whether it was ethnically homogeneous and the identity of the majority ethnic group. We condense the many ethnic categories in the Syria Town Database into five, creating dichotomous variables for whether a majority of town residents were ʿAlawi, Kurdish, Sunni Arab, or from another minority ethnic group (e.g., Christians, Druzes, Ismaʿilis). We also distinguish between Sunni Arab populations with tribal lineage and those without this background. Those of tribal lineage historically had extended family structures and closer relations with state authorities that might depress their participation in contentious challenge or facilitate state conciliation (Al Mashhour 2017, 23; Chatty 2010, 43). Table 2 presents the distribution of towns according to ethnic majority from the Syria Town Database (Khaddour and Mazur, 2018).

The core group within the challenger coalition in the Syrian uprising was Sunni Arabs, so we expect that repression would be disproportionately focused on Sunni Arab towns. We focus in this initial descriptive exercise on Kurdish- and Sunni Arab tribal-majority towns because they are spatially proximate to one another, concentrated in Syria’s northeast region, and experienced similar levels of relative state neglect.

Because repression decisions are bound up in challenger actions (Lichbach 1987; Tarrow 2022), we examine patterns of challenge and repression simultaneously. Figure 1 plots incidences of protest and challenger fatalities, demonstrating a clear pattern: Kurdish locales experienced a considerable amount of initial protest, like those in Sunni Arab tribal neighboring towns, but faced comparably little repression. The same trend is borne out when we examine state response to protest over time within a locale.

Table 3 reports a count of protests by town ethnic majority, as well as the percentage of those protests followed by deaths in the same town two weeks after the protest in question occurred. Sunni Arab tribal-majority towns experienced deaths in the two weeks following protests 61% of the time. In contrast, only 1 of the 50 protests in majority Kurdish towns between March and October was followed by a challenger death in the next two weeks.

Topic 3: Asad targeted Arab Sunnis with severe war crimes during the Syrian revolution, and intentionally sought to transform the revolution into a sectarian conflict.

Resource (V): Samer Bakkoura and Gareth Stansfield. (2024). Sectarianism, indiscriminate violence and displacement in the Syrian Regime’s Civil War strategy. Conflict, Security & Development, 24(3)(2024), 203–226.

ABSTRACT
In the Syrian Civil War, external observers have often misunderstood and misrepresented the nature and significance of indiscriminate violence that drives displacement, with the result that it has been (mis)understood as being driven by primordial sectarian hatred. This is of course far from the only contemporary civil war in which sectarianism has been ascribed without due care and consideration. While this article acknowledges sectarianism as part of the conflict; however, it treats it as less of a natural ‘outgrowth’ and more as part of a calculated and deliberate ‘coercive counterinsurgency’ strategy that the Regime has applied across the country. The article suggests that indiscriminate violence, which we might otherwise be predisposed to view as an ‘excess’, should be understood as part of a strategy, and more specifically a ‘coercive counterinsurgency’. Therefore, the article identifies four population displacement strategies (bombings, blockades, starvation and massacres) that the Regime has applied in four parts of the country and brings out their strategic features in clearer detail. Ultimately, the reader will come to understand how sectarianism, indiscriminate violence, and displacement function as part of an integrated ‘coercive counterinsurgency’ strategy that the Regime has developed and applied over the course of the Civil War.

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Displacement has frequently tended to be overlooked in the Syrian Civil War, and when it has been acknowledged, its significance has been misunderstood, resulting in it being frequently characterised as an outgrowth of sectarian enmities. There is accordingly an ongoing need, which this article addresses, to reconceptualise displacement in the Syrian conflict, and to bring out its strategic dimensions and implications in clearer perspective. The ultimate intention of this article is therefore to contribute to an acknowledgement of the role and significance of strategic displacement in the Civil War. In challenging the pervasive tendency to equate this displacement with cleansing, this article will seek to demonstrate how the Syrian Regime’s uprooting of populations enabled it to work towards established military and political goals.

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Although other parties in the conflict have also used strategic displacement, this article focuses exclusively on the Regime because it has applied it much more extensively in the Civil War. In building on this insight, it demonstrates how the uprooting of civilians has functioned as a part of a more general Regime strategy.¹ Although the Regime has used various methods, including indiscriminate bombing, blockades, and starvation, to achieve strategic objectives, this article zooms in on three specific Regime displacement practices, namely bombardment, blockade/siege and massacres.

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These contributions subvert the distinction that we might otherwise be tempted to draw between targeted (or discriminating)¹¹ and indiscriminate violence.¹² The latter presumes guilt on the basis of association or collective identity and produces brutalisation¹³ and mass killing¹⁴; and has alternately been described as a form of mass violence,¹⁵ the irrational consequence of a particular ideology,¹⁶ the product of the ‘adrenaline of war zones’¹⁷ and/or revenge on a defenceless population.¹⁸ Presented in these terms, it might be presumed to occur as a result of a lack of self-control and/or a yielding to frustration and stress. However, as this article will demonstrate, this does not apply to the Regime’s Civil War strategy, where indiscriminate violence is applied in pursuit of clearly defined aims and objectives.

In demonstrating the strategic significance of displacement in further detail, this article refers to case studies of Daraya (bombardment), Aleppo and Al-Zabadani (starvation and siege) and Homs (massacre) Considering the application of displacement across each context makes it possible to identify an underpinning logic that cuts across specific acts of indiscriminate violence, which is brought out in more detail in the ‘Strategic Significance of Displacement’ sub-section and the Conclusion.¹⁹ The case studies are based on a series of reports published by international organisations, international NGOs and regional research organisations. These reports do not tend to focus on displacement and are instead concerned with other aspects of the conflict, which is consistent with a more general tendency to discuss displacement as a sub-theme. One of the main contributions of the case studies is therefore to engage this material from within a displacement framework and to situate individual testimony within a broader strategic framework of reference.

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At the end of 2011, it was estimated there were 170,000 IDPs²¹ and 12,400 Syrian refugees in the neighbouring countries of Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, and Iraq.²² By the end of the following year, there were 2.5 million IDPs inside Syria,²³ and around 568,950 refugees.²⁴ By 2013, at least 9,500 Syrians were displaced each day and by June of the following year, almost half the country’s population had fled their homes.²⁵ In 2015, more than 1.6 million were displaced,²⁶ declining to 929,534²⁷ in the following year before increasing to 1,173,042 in 2017.²⁸ Sustained conflict, especially in the country’s northeast and northwest, displaced 120,000 each month,²⁹ producing the world’s largest number of IDPs (6.6 million),³⁰ and concentrating almost a third of Syria’s population (30 per cent) in the country’s northwest (Idlib and West Aleppo) and rural Damascus.³¹

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Both collateral and strategic displacement have produced significant change, reducing the Sunni majority from 64 per cent to 61 per cent of the country’s overall population,³⁹ and shifting the country’s ethno-sectarian balance in favour of minority groups, such as Alawites, Shia, Christians, Druze and Ismailis,⁴⁰ who have largely remained pro-Regime throughout the Civil War. International observers have only gradually recognised that these changes have, in substantial part, been driven by an integrated military and political strategy. This is despite the fact that strategic displacement has been part of the conflict since a relatively early stage of the Civil War – for example, in 2012, 200,000 were displaced from their homes in Aleppo, when security forces destroyed 1,500 properties in ‘an obviously deliberate’ and ‘premeditat[ed]’ attack.⁴¹

In January 2023, an independent U.N. commission on Syria⁴² observed that displacement in the country had been ‘undertaken by Government forces pursuant to an organizational policy’ and was ‘a crime against humanity and/or a war crime’.⁴³ General Philip Breedlove, a NATO commander, claimed the Syrian and Russian governments were ‘deliberately weaponizing displacement in an attempt to overwhelm European structures and break European resolve’. He added imprecise but deadly barrel bombs were intended to ‘terrorize, [to] get people out of their homes and get them on the road and make them someone else’s problem’.⁴⁴

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However, this largely considered displacement in terms of its immediate military impact and failed to acknowledge the longer-term political implications, including demographic engineering. Other observers made the same error when they viewed and treated displacement as a protection challenge. And here it should be remembered that Assad has openly welcomed demographic change – in one speech, he observed the country had “lost the best of our young people and an infrastructure . . . but in return, we have gained a healthier and more harmonious society’.⁴⁵ This sentiment was echoed by Major General Jamil al-Hassan,⁴⁶ the head of the country’s air force intelligence and one of the country’s most senior security chiefs, who said: ‘A Syria with 10 million trustworthy people obedient to the leadership is better than a Syria with 30 million vandals’.⁴⁷ Both were however referring to outward migration, whereas this article is more concerned with the question of how internal displacement within the country has been used to reinforce and strengthen the Regime’s authority.

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In the Syrian Civil War, the Regime has frequently resorted to indiscriminate violence, as Human Rights Watch (HRW) has recognised in a report. In discussing a Regime attack on Idlib, this report observes:

‘The repeated Syrian-Russian alliance attacks on civilian infrastructure in populated areas in which there was no apparent military objective suggests that these unlawful attacks were deliberate. The intent may been have been to deprive local residents of the means to sustain themselves, to force the civilian population to flee and make it easier for Syrian ground forces to take territory, or simply to instil terror in the civilian population as a way to achieve victory’. The Syrian-Russian alliance apparently intended to fulfil these aims with little regard for international law [my emphasis].⁵²

In mischaracterising this indiscriminate violence as ‘ethnic cleansing’ observers have reinforced the misconception that it originates in, and is sustained by, sectarian enmities.⁵³ They have also, in common with other accounts,⁵⁴ implied that the establishment of ethnically homogenous territories is a desired outcome. Even more nuanced treatments of sectarianism, such as the one provided by Straus, who proposes that targeted group violence arises from elite-promoted ‘founding narratives’ that uplift a particular subnational group while excluding others from state authority,⁵⁵ are problematic in the Syrian case because they suggest that group identities precede, and therefore stand outside of, the conflict.

In reality, sectarianism is in many respects an artificial feature that has been deliberately grafted onto the conflict – from an early stage in the Civil War, the Regime deployed an openly sectarian political discourse with the aim of ensuring that minorities (Alawites, Christians, Druze and Shiites) would either stand by or support the Regime, which then established a framework that other actors were obliged to operate within.⁵⁶ By implication, sectarianism was not a ‘natural’ outgrowth of the conflict that stood outside of the wishes and manoeuvres of conflict actors. This was clearly shown in Homs City, for example, where sectarian violence was effectively ‘imported’.⁵⁷ There were also various instances where sect or religious group identity functioned as a proxy for political loyalty. ‘Cleansing’ was therefore effectively a way in which the ‘identification’ problem (distinguishing ‘friend’ from ‘enemy’) was overcome in mixed areas⁵⁸ and was not therefore ‘sectarian’, in the conventional meaning and implication. A closer examination of Regime targeting in the conflict also supports the conclusion that location, rather than group membership, was a better predictor of Regime violence – for example, Eline Bostad claims that in these heterogeneous territories, ‘sectarian identities served as particularly potent proxies for the [O]pposition’.⁵⁹

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Primordial accounts of sectarianism also overlook the fact that the Revolution initially cut across social and religious boundaries, as shown by the fact that many participants and demonstrators were members of minority communities, including the ‘ruling’ Alawite sect, whose members have historically been the ‘backbone’ of the country’s key military and political institutions. The Regime responded to the first protests by invoking fear, and the state media depicted the Opposition as sectarian Islamists, locking most of Syria’s minorities (and Sunni secularists) into a security dilemma that strengthened as extremists such as Al-Nusra and ISIS became more prominent in the Opposition.⁶⁰ Similarly, in the Homs region, which is a gateway that leads onto its Alawite ‘heartland’, the Regime deliberately weaponised the ‘ancient hatreds’ narrative.⁶¹ Here the Regime specifically sought to alter the demographic balance between Sunnis and Alawites. Homs became a specific target for regime massacres due to its strategic location between the coast, Damascus and rural Damascus, and also its location in supply lines extending from Lebanon. In addition, the governorate was also part of the Regime’s long-established ‘useful Syria’ project.

At the beginning of 2011, Homs governorate had a population of 2,147,000.⁶² Most residents were Arab, although Circassians, Dagestans and Turkmens were also present in smaller numbers.⁶³ Sunni Muslims accounted for around two-thirds (65.5 per cent) of the population, and were mainly based in the city centre and surrounding areas.⁶⁴ Alawites (20 per cent) and Christians (12 per cent) were significant minorities.⁶⁵ Shiites, in contrast, accounted for no more than one percent.⁶⁶ In large part as a result of the Regime’s displacement activities, the governorate’s population decreased from 1,803,000 in 2011 to 1,052,000 five years later, a fall of more than 42 per cent. The governorate’s demographic profile also changed dramatically – the Sunni population fell by more than half (from 43 per cent to 19 per cent) and the Shiite (seven-fold increase), Alawite (from 25 per cent to 37 per cent), Christian (from 8 per cent to 13 per cent) and Ismaili (from 0.2 per cent to 0.3 per cent) population increased.⁶⁷

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In rejecting the Regime’s depiction of sectarianism, which was often thoughtlessly reproduced by external observers, this article insists that sectarianism should be understood ‘as a function of authoritarian politics and not irreconcilable theological differences between Sunnis and Shias’.⁶⁸ It therefore aligns with Rabi and Friedman (2017) and Mahon (2019),⁶⁹ who have respectively developed the concepts of ‘weaponized sectarianism’ and ‘Sectarianization’. It also comes into the orbit of Sami Zubeida’s work, and more specifically his concept of ‘sectarian entrepreneurs’, which foregrounds the insight that sectarian divisions are produced through ‘political manoeuvring by state actors and sectarian entrepreneurs’.⁷⁰

These important contributions present sectarianism as an instrument that is used in pursuit of particular political aims and objectives. In contrast, when observers such as Abdo speak of tensions being ‘reawakened’⁷¹ they overlook the essential point that sectarianism does not ‘exist’ outside the conflict but is instead directly implicated in military and political strategies⁷² applied by the Regime and, to a lesser extent, by ISIS, al-Qaeda affiliates and foreign Shia militias.⁷³ This article argues that displacement has become a defining feature of Regime strategy, both during the initial stages of the uprising and then during the conflict itself.⁷⁴

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Darayya region is strategically significant because it is close to the Republican Palace, the Army Fourth Division and the Mazzeh military airport.⁷⁷ After popular protests against the Regime broke out in March 2011, most residents in the towns of Western Ghouta in the Damascus rural governorate joined them. The Regime responded by bombing most of the towns, hitting both residential buildings and civilian infrastructure.⁷⁸ Bombing was part of the Regime’s ‘scorched earth’ campaign in Darayya that was waged with Russian support in Sunni majority or mixed areas with the aim of uprooting the resident population, as part of a ‘biting the limbs’ approach that sought to isolate Darayya from Damascus and other regions. Strategic bombing was first used in Darayya City, where civilians paid the highest cost.⁷⁹ The entire population, estimated at 250,000, was forcibly displaced by barrel bombs, missiles, cylinders, and rockets, resulting in the destruction of nearly the entire city (90 per cent).⁸⁰ Indiscriminate air attacks became a regular occurrence as ‘the most significant instrument in the [R]egime’s efforts to displace populations’,⁸¹ destroying at least 40 per cent of the country’s infrastructure and substantially impacting displacement patterns across the country.⁸² In a 2017 HANDICAP International survey, just over one-third (36 per cent) of respondents cited aerial attacks as the most important factor in their decision to relocate⁸³

As the Civil War developed, aerial assaults completely replaced ground offensives,⁸⁴ and Darayya City was subsequently renamed ‘barrel bomb city’ after it was subjected to heavy bombing, including with barrels, burning napalm, chlorine gas, ‘elephant’ ground missiles, explosives, gas cylinders (loaded with incendiary and high explosive materials), shells and vacuum bombs. These assaults aimed to undermine the Opposition’s governance capacity by damaging vital infrastructure, fostering divisions between rebel factions and the local populace, and undermining Opposition efforts to establish a functional counter-state,⁸⁵ and were therefore underpinned by a clear strategic rationale and justification. These attacks destroyed just over three-quarters (80 per cent) of Darayya city’s infrastructure, displacing most inhabitants.⁸⁶

The Syrian military, and the army, police, security forces and NDF (National Defence Forces) in particular, repeatedly launched indiscriminate attacks on densely populated opposition-held urban areas.⁸⁷ In Daraa (southern Syria) the Regime razed large sections of rebel-occupied neighbourhoods, again displacing residents, some of whom had already been displaced on multiple occasions.⁸⁸ Indiscriminate bombardment often used ‘imprecise and unguided munitions with wide-area effects’⁸⁹ and therefore offered an economical way of capturing or annexing territory, removing the need to worry about traditional counter-insurgency requirements, such as eliciting compliance from non-combatants.⁹⁰ Chemical weapons were also used in these attacks.⁹¹ In August 2013, the Regime allegedly launched a Sarin gas attack on Ghouta that killed more than 1400 civilians,⁹² sparking international condemnation and raising the prospect of international intervention.

Bombardment of civilian areas occurred in both Sunni majority and mixed areas, which underlined that targeting did not purely reflect sectarian identity. Aerial bombardment essentially aimed to depopulate Opposition-held areas, with the aim of separating Opposition fighters from the general population. This was reiterated by the fact that, in some cases, bombardment occurred in the apparent absence of an immediate military justification. Bombardment actually therefore basically served as a filtering mechanism, in which it was presumed those who remained were, by virtue of their failure to flee in the face of bombardment, Opposition supporters and sympathisers.

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The Regime found siege to be a logical choice, as it demanded fewer resources and a reduced number of trained military personnel. After 2012, Aleppo was divided between a Regime-controlled west and an Opposition (including the FSA and various Islamist groups)-controlled east.⁹³ In November 2015, Regime and Regime-allied forces imposed a partial siege on the east of the city, which at the time had a population of 250–275,000, depriving it of food, medicine and other essential supplies.⁹⁴ The Regime’s strategic focus eventually came to rest on provincial capitals and other strategic population centres in the governorate. In September 2016, with the support of the Russians and pro-Regime militia, it turned the partial siege of Aleppo into a total siege. In this final period of the siege, almost 37,000 civilians were crammed into around 2 km of the city.⁹⁵ By December 2016, The Regime controlled most of Aleppo’s eastern neighbourhoods.⁹⁶

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After the Opposition seized control of various cities across the country, the Regime responded by broadly applying siege tactics.⁹⁷ Approximately 2.5 million Syrians, equivalent to over 10 per cent of the pre-war population, experienced living in siege or siege-like conditions at some stage during the civil war.⁹⁸ Whereas in some locations, the Regime imposed a ‘tight’ siege, in others it imposed ‘partial’ sieges that allowed some residents (not men of military age) to leave and supplies to enter. This variation in siege techniques mapped onto a broader variation in which patterns of Regime violence varied in accordance with the level of resistance encountered.

The initial significant sieges commenced in 2012 with the establishment of Regime checkpoints that aimed to methodically manage and govern the movement of people and goods into specific neighbourhoods, and these restrictions were gradually tightened in the following year.⁹⁹ Russia’s entrance into the war in September 2015¹⁰⁰ resulted in further tightening, producing severe starvation. Siege tactics were also combined with artillery and aerial bombardment that effectively levelled entire neighbourhoods,¹⁰¹ serving to again reiterate that the emptying of contested areas was a key Regime aim and objective.

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Explosive shelling and concussive missiles were directed at heavily populated zones, as well as water facilities such as the Bab al-Nairab station and the water company in the Suleiman al-Halaby neighbourhood, along with critical transformers essential for power supply.¹⁰² In March 2017, the World Bank claimed that between half and 80 per cent of the public and service sector in Aleppo, Hama and Idlib was out of service.¹⁰³ However, as Todman notes, the deliberate targeting of public infrastructure emerged as a relatively ‘late’ development in the Regime’s siege strategy – in the initial stages of the Civil War, the Regime appeared content to merely ‘contain’ populations, in the expectation they would turn against armed actors.¹⁰⁴ This and other variations in the Regime’s use of indiscriminate violence confirmed its ability to adjust in response to conflict exigencies.

In the Syrian Civil War, starvation has mainly occurred in cities, which have been the most contested locations.¹⁰⁵ In developing its ‘Kneel or Starve’ policy, the Regime incorporated starvation into its siege tactics in both Zabadani and Madaya.¹⁰⁶ While the tactic of starvation was primarily employed as a favoured substitute for direct intervention, it was also sometimes used for revenge. Although it was applied in all of the country’s governorates, its use was most obvious in rural Damascus and, in particular, in the Zabadani region, which is no more than 45 km from Damascus – its western, southern and northern border Lebanon, and it is a major Hezbollah supply line.

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The first demonstration in this part of the country occurred on 25 March 2011, in response to mass Regime arrests.¹⁰⁷ Al-Zabadani¹⁰⁸ was the first city in the countryside to the west of Damascus to be liberated from Regime control (in February 2012) and was also the first city to the west of Damascus that was FSA-controlled.¹⁰⁹ The Regime tried to deter others from following its example¹¹⁰ and deliberately used starvation to collectively punish the resident population¹¹¹ and prevent civilians from leaving besieged areas, which are both war crimes under international law.¹¹²The Regime used starvation to contain the targeted area, and burned surrounding crops, a particularly callous and cruel action in an agriculture-dependent area.¹¹³ In strategic terms, this tactic would however make it possible to minimise Regime casualties and extract concessions from Opposition fighters trapped in the city. The government also blocked the entry of electricity, fuel, medicine, and water. Inhabitants had no other option but to eat grass, weeds, and cats,¹¹⁴ resulting in malnourishment and, in the most extreme cases, death.¹¹⁵ Hezbollah forces besieging the camps ignored requests for assistance and/or evacuation. The cost of basic food items soared, and new-born babies died because their mothers were unable to breastfeed them.

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Homs was one of the first governorates to rise against the Regime, and in 2011 was even dubbed as ‘the capital of the Syrian revolution’,¹¹⁸ which increased the likelihood that it would be targeted by Regime violence.¹¹⁹ Acts of ‘cleansing’ were predominantly executed through direct violence, involving both individual and mass executions, beatings, and physical intimidation.¹²⁰ Murder, mutilation, rape and torture were inflicted on bodies, and left deep and lasting psychological scars. These attacks were carried out by Regime-allied militia and, of the three forms of violence, it was the one that had the clearest and most obvious sectarian overtones.

In mid-October 2011, many demonstrators were indiscriminately killed in the Jandali neighbourhood. Meanwhile, in the Khalidiya neighbourhood massacre on the second of February 2012, at least 100 inhabitants were killed and 500 injured.¹²¹ On 11 February 2012, in a massacre in the Sabil neighbourhood, Shabiha stabbed whole families to death.¹²² In the Karm Alzaytoun massacre on 9–11 March 2012, 47 civilians were killed and militia used knives to mutilate their bodies.¹²³ And in the Bab Amr neighbourhood massacre on 3 February 2012, Regime forces besieged a few farmers for a month before then killing them and destroying most buildings in the area.¹²⁴ The Regime used heavy artillery to indiscriminately bomb entire Sunni neighbourhoods, and, in just two months (January – February 2012), between 50,000–60,000 were displaced from Homs City.¹²⁵ Some of this displacement was consistent with cleansing,¹²⁶ including, for example, the use of militias (shabiha)¹²⁷ and, more specifically, the Regime’s clearly demonstrated desire to use them to stoke sectarian tensions.¹²⁸ The Regime’s armoured vehicles, tanks and troop carriers supported the Shabiha and armed Alawites when they carried out massacres.

The Houla (Tel Taldo) massacre occurred on 25 May 2012. Regime security forces killed 108, including 39 children (under ten-years-of-age) and 32 women. The massacre sparked international outrage, and the U.S. and some European countries¹²⁹ expelled Syrian ambassadors.¹³⁰ Sexual violence also emerged as an important feature of subsequent shabiha massacres.¹³¹ The massacres in the city predominantly took place in Sunni neighbourhoods that were adjacent to Alawite enclaves,¹³² and observers noted that they appeared ‘to be conducted as part of a state policy’ that deliberately sought to displace civilians.¹³³ The decision to flee was typically driven by fears for security and even survival.¹³⁴ In almost every case, Sunnis were targeted. In contrast to the other two forms of violence, massacres were underpinned by a clear sectarian logic and deliberately targeted a particular group (Sunni Muslims) on the basis of a pre-established identity. In the other two cases, the fact that Sunnis were disproportionately affected essentially reflected the fact that they were disproportionately represented in the Opposition.

In the case of massacres, however, the Regime deliberately sought to create an atmosphere in which communities turned against each other, and minorities were effectively forced to side with the Regime. In such instances, massacres more closely correlated with the logic of ‘ethnic cleansing’ than in the other instances. However, even here it must be stressed that sectarianism was not an ‘organic’ outgrowth of the conflict but was instead artificially cultivated by a specific actor. In massacres, the violence was far cruder (than in the other two displacement practices), including extensive sexual violence and the mutilation of dead bodies. The Regime’s intention was to inculcate a sense of fear and terror, with the aim of undermining popular support for the opposition. In the cases of both bombardment and siege, in contrast, the loyalties and sentiments of the civilian population were effectively irrelevant, as by remaining in place, they were presumed to be opponents of the Regime, and therefore as appropriate targets for indiscriminate violence.

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The sectarian character of the Syrian Civil War has frequently been taken-for-granted by external observers and so have a number of related beliefs, including that indiscriminate violence is inflicted on adversaries on the basis of sect or religious group membership/identity. Amongst other things, this reinforces the belief that this violence is an irrational ‘excess’. This article has sought to challenge this (mis)representation by demonstrating how indiscriminate violence and sectarianism have become established as part of a Regime ‘coercive’ strategy that seeks to uproot and relocate whole populations in key strategic areas across the country. This strategy simultaneously seeks to ‘pull in’ and ‘push out’. Massacres instil fear and terror and cause residents to flee in fear for their life, while sieges concentrate residents in tight and confined spaces where they experience both direct (bombardment) and indirect (starvation) violence. This Regime strategy does not engage with populations as a resource and nor does it seek to elicit information from them; rather, it takes their guilt for granted and equates them with the ‘enemy’ that is to be destroyed. Merely by failing to flee, they are presumed to have indicated their loyalties and are accordingly punished.

As a key part of this strategy, a ‘weaponised’ sectarianism has been mobilised and instrumentalised in key areas of struggle for very specific political purposes. This underlines the ‘artificial’ character of this sectarianism, and, by implication the fact that it has been manipulated, and to a substantial extent generated, by assorted conflict actors (predominantly, although not exclusively, the Regime).

This article has therefore asserted that three aspects of the conflict need to be reassessed and reconsidered. First, sectarianism, which has been inaccurately portrayed as a ‘natural’ feature and ‘driver’ of the conflict. Second, indiscriminate violence, which has been misconceived as an ‘excess’; and third, displacement, which in being equated with collateral displacement, has largely been engaged and treated as a consequence of violent conflict, with the result that its strategic dimensions and attributes have been consistently overlooked. This produces three important analytical shifts – first, sectarianism is implicated within the conflict, and therefore understood as a resource or instrument that is exploited by different conflict actors; second, indiscriminate violence is viewed as targeted and defined in relation to the aims and objectives that it seeks to achieve; and third, displacement is assessed and understood in the wider context of a military and political strategy.

Resource (VI): Paulo Gabriel Hilu Pinto, “The Shattered Nation: The Sectarianization of the Syrian Conflict,” in Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel (eds.), Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017):123-142.

In this chapter I map the sectarianization of the Syrian conflict, a process that has unfolded on multiple levels: top-down (state generated); bottom-up (socially generated); outside-in (fueled by regional forces); and inside-out (the spread of Syria’s conflict into neighboring states).

The appalling violence of the Syrian war, distributed along largely sectarian lines; the Assad regime’s claim that it is protecting “religious minorities” from a Sunni Islamist uprising; and the consolidation of openly sectarian groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra (the Nusra front) and, in a more dramatic way, ISIS, as key actors in the conflict—all of these factors have led to the consolidation of sectarianism, for many observers and participants, as the interpretive key to the Syrian tragedy. Upon closer observation, however, the situation appears much more complex and indeterminate than the narratives about the “inherent hostility” between a radicalized Sunni majority and the other religious groups in the country allow.

While it is undeniable that the Syrian protesters mobilized religious references from the beginning of the uprising, they did it within the discursive limits of a religious nationalism that was elaborated and fostered by Bashar al-Assad’s government itself. Their early demands were framed in universalistic political terms, such as the reform—or the end—of the Bashar al-Assad’s rule, the restoration of freedom (huriyya) and “dignity” (karama). To be sure, sectarian tensions were not unknown in Syria and, indeed, had been on the rise since 2006, due mainly to the impact of the sectarian violence ravaging neighboring Iraq on the growing discontent of Syrian Sunni Muslims with Bashar al-Assad’s religious policies. But sectarian tensions are not the same as sectarianism, which can be defined as the political mobilization of religious differences as a framework for the distribution of rights, privileges, and/or violence among a certain population.¹ “Sectarianism” thus has no explanatory power to make sense of the Syrian conflict. It is, rather, a political tool that was shaped and fostered by many actors in the conflict. To analyze how sectarianism emerged as a discursive and practical framework in the Syrian conflict, I will examine the religious context upon which it was constructed; the agents of sectarianism and their strategies of fostering it in order to get or maintain power; and the political and social context that enabled sectarianism to become a major idiom through which political projects were expressed and violence was distributed in a situation of generalized armed conflict.

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When it began in 2011, the popular uprising against the regime mobilized the regions of the country that had been marginalized and impoverished by the decade of neoliberal economic reforms fostered by Bashar al-Assad: the agricultural regions (Euphrates, Hawran, Idlib, and Hama), the coastal areas (Baniyas, Latakiya), and the industrial city of Homs. While anti-government protests did take place in Damascus and Aleppo in February and March of 2011, both cities remained relatively calm during the first year of the uprising, even becoming the stage of several pro-Bashar demonstrations.² As early as January 2011 there were demonstrations of discontent with the Assad regime,³ such as episodes of civil disobedience and even self-immolations.⁴ In February 2011 hundreds of people protested in Damascus, chanting “The Syrian people will not be humiliated” after traffic police officers assaulted the son of a merchant in the Hariqa district.⁵ Throughout that month, anti-government protests were violently dispersed by the security forces. The first episodes of civil unrest were met by both violence from the security forces and nonchalant scorn from Bashar al-Assad himself. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal at the end of January 2011, Assad compared the protesters in the Arab world with “microbes” and assured the interviewer that Syria was “stable” because, according to him, the government was “closely linked” to the people’s beliefs.⁶ Ironically, it was exactly the overzealous repression by the security forces that ignited an uprising on a national scale. The arrest and torture in March 2011 of fifteen students, between ten and fifteen years old, for writing the slogan of the Tunisian revolution—“al-Sha‘b yurid isqat al-nizam” (the people want the downfall of the regime)—on their school’s wall in the southern town of Der‘a sparked a series of mass protests that are widely considered to mark the “beginning” of the Syrian uprising. In a rapid succession of events, local solidarity with the families affected by the arrests transformed personal grievances against the state into political indignation against the Assad regime. By March 25 the whole central area of the town was under the control of the protesters. The Syrian army only regained control after a large military operation at the end of April.

Once Der‘a fell back under the regime’s control, other towns and cities—such as Baniyas, Jeble, Latakiya, Idlib, Hama, Homs, Raqqah, and Dayr al-Zur—became centers of anti-government civil protest, sometimes even escaping governmental control and becoming self-ruled areas. After a cautious beginning, the demands for “reform” were displaced by more emphatic demands for dignity (karama) and freedom (huriyya). In this process, the Syrian protesters appropriated the slogans of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, and started to create their own vocabulary for demanding political change and the end of the authoritarian rule of the Assad regime.

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The accession of Bashar al-Assad saw a new religious nationalism, and the construction of a “pious” persona for the Syrian dictator. Images of Bashar praying, holding a Qur’an, and kissing it became conspicuous not only in the official media, but throughout the country’s urban landscape. The regime’s deployment of religious symbols and vocabulary led to a reconfiguration of the nationalist discourse fostered by the Syrian state. Billboards displaying a picture of Bashar al-Assad with a map of Syria with the colors of the national flag and the sentence “Allah yahmiki ya Suriya” (God protects you, O Syria) were erected all over the country. Assad uttered this phrase during a speech at the University of Damascus, and it became part of the official state discourse with the aim of whipping up nationalistic feelings in the population. Indeed, the fusion of Islamic references and nationalistic discourse allowed this slogan to capture the imagination of a variety of social actors, well beyond the groups that participated in the Ba‘athist system of governance.⁷ During the first year of the uprising the religious references mobilized by the protesters were seen as having an inclusive potential by many non-Sunnis, in part because of their similarity to the religious nationalism that developed during Bashar al-Assad’s presidency. Thus, both Sunnis and members of the other religious groups, such as Christians, ‘Alawis, Druze, and Ismailis, could be seen in protests that were, nevertheless, full of Islamic references. For example, in 2012 protesters in al-Qusayr, a town near Homs, started to perform body movements imitating a Sufi dhikr⁸ while chanting anti-government slogans. Notwithstanding the obvious evocation of a Sunni Muslim ritual, there were Christians taking part in the protest as well.⁹ Even the use of mosques as spaces of protest had a multilayered symbolic dimension that went beyond the simple affirmation of Sunni Muslim identities or Islamic values. The symbolic importance acquired by the Umayyad mosques of Damascus, Aleppo,¹⁰ and Der‘a during the protests reflected not only their significance as religious spaces, but also their construction by the Assad regime as sites of memory (lieux de mémoire)¹¹ of the Syrian nation.

Despite the complexity of these symbolic references and their clear association with a religious nationalism fostered by the Assad regime itself, from the outset of the uprising the Syrian government pointed to the importance of mosques and the religious vocabulary of the protests as “proof ” that the protesters were Salafi radicals or members of the Muslim Brotherhood. In a speech in January 2012 Bashar al-Assad identified the protesters with the al-Qaeda terrorists of 9/11, saying:

What we are doing now is similar to what the West did against Islam in the wake of 9/11. … We say that there is a great religion—Islam, and there are terrorists taking cover under Islam. … If we go back to the 1970s and 1980s, when the devil’s brothers [Muslim Brothers], who covered themselves with Islam, carried out their terrorist acts in Syria. In the beginning there were many Syrians who were misguided. … The question is a race between the terrorism and reform.¹²

From the outset, the regime aimed to present the protesters as violent jihadists, isolating them from other groups in Syrian society and legitimizing the brutal repression of the protests through the international narrative of the American-led “War on Terror.” Also, by presenting terrorism or the regime as the only possible choices, Assad’s discourse made clear that the regime would in no way take the political demands of the protests into account.

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While the geography of the protests partially overlapped with the regions where the Salafiyya¹³ had a stronger presence in Syria—the Hauran, the Euphrates valley, Idlib, and the outskirts of the big cities—this does not by itself prove that radical Muslim groups were driving the protests.¹⁴ The Salafi milieus in Syria were heavily influenced by Nasir al-Din al-Albani (1914–1999), who preached a quietist and apolitical form of Islam,¹⁵ and they lacked the forms of organization that could allow them to shape the dynamics of the protests. The only Islamist militant organization that had an organized presence in Syria was Hizb al-Tahrir, which is not jihadist, with a membership estimated at a thousand followers in Homs.¹⁶ The influence of this non-political version of Salafism could be seen in the constant denunciation by Salafi protestors themselves of jihadists or, as they were called in Syria, takfiris (those who accuse others of apostasy), as “foreign agents.” A participant in the uprising in the region of Homs explained his rejection of the regime’s accusations to a journalist as follows:

The Muslims of the land of Sham [Syria] follow the path of moderation. To live well, they follow the example of the pious ancestors. … That is the original meaning of Salafist. The other meaning, the Takfirist, jihadist, terrorist version, is a creation of the Americans and Israelis. It has nothing to do with us.¹⁷

Despite the presence of Salafis among the protesters, when looking at the images of the demonstrations in places such as Hama and Homs until 2011, it’s impossible not to notice that the carnival-like style of the protests—with dabke dancing and satirical songs—did not square with any pattern of radicalized Salafism, as it usually rejects such behavior.

The accusations of Sunni sectarianism and radicalism coming from the regime were refuted with irony by the protesters, who stressed the participation of non-Sunnis and non-Muslims in the demonstrations. A poster in a protest in the coastal city of Baniyas in 2011 read: “Hal al-shahid Hatim Hanna massihi salafi?” (Was the martyr Hatem Hanna a Salafi Christian?), a reference to a Christian protester killed by the security forces.¹⁸ In the same year, a banner in a demonstration in Zabadani, near Damascus, stated: “La salafi wa la ikhwani … ana ta’ifati al-huriyya” (Neither Salafi, nor [Muslim] Brother … My Sect is Freedom).¹⁹ Similarly, in ethnically or religiously mixed areas such as the Kurdish regions of northern Syria or the Sunni/Christian/‘Alawi cities of the coast, the chanting of “Wahid, Wahid, Wahid, al-Sh‘ab al-Suri Wahid” (One, One, One, the Syrian People are One) became a common practice in the protests in 2011 and 2012.

Yet despite the efforts of the protesters to develop a counter-sectarian discourse inspired by inclusive definitions of Syrian nationalism, the regime’s continuous propaganda had some success in deepening religious tensions in the society. Jonathan Littell documented several instances in 2012 of hostility toward the ‘Alawi community²⁰—to which the Assad family and a large part of the regime’s inner core belong—among the protesters in Homs and al-Qusayr. One anti-government rebel told him: “The Army is corrupt, it’s an army of thieves. … All it does is make the Alawite community grow fatter.”²¹ Another one explained that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian jihadist who founded al-Qaeda in Iraq, was his idol, “because he came to Iraq to confront Iran and the Shiites.” However, his companion added: “But here, in Syria, it’s not the same at all.”²²

These examples reflect that by 2012, while sectarian tensions were not entirely absent from the protests, many members of the opposition made considerable efforts to reject and contain these tendencies, and attempted to forge a more inclusive and open, post-Ba‘athist vision of the Syrian nation. By presenting the protesters as sectarian, the regime aimed to exacerbate these tensions and delegitimize their demands, thus fracturing the opposition along sectarian lines in order to rally the country’s religious minorities behind the regime. This strategy of sectarianization was hardly foreign to the regime: since Hafez al-Assad’s rise to power in 1970, social divisions—sectarian, ethnic, and class—were continuously manipulated through unequal policies of cooptation and repression to shore up the regime and impose authoritarian forms of governance over Syrian society.²³

With the repression of secular political parties, the Muslim Brotherhood became the main opposition to the Assad regime. After 1976 they engaged in an armed conflict against it.²⁴ By 1979 other Islamic groups had formed, and in 1980 the Islamic opposition was unified in the Islamic Front in Syria (al-Jabhat al-Islamiyya fi Suriya), under the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood’s key documents from 1980, The Manifesto of the Islamic Revolution of Syria and The Programs of the Islamic Revolution,²⁵ presented their project as aiming to create a political system inclusive of all Syrian citizens and respectful of the rights of individuals as well as Syria’s religious and ethnic minorities. But the documents also portrayed the Assad regime as anti-Islamic, sectarian, and ‘Alawi dominated, and appealed to the ‘Alawi community to stop its “attempt to force its oppressive domination over the great majority of the population.”²⁶ The depiction of Assad’s government as an “‘Alawi regime,” the vilification of the ‘Alawis as un-Islamic, polytheistic traitors to the nation in several writings of the Islamic opposition,²⁷ and acts of violence committed against ‘Alawis go back to the early 1980s. It was perceived as Sunni sectarianism, and thus strengthened the regime and prevented the Islamic Front from attracting support among religious minorities and secular Sunnis. The cycle of violence and radicalization culminated in a military showdown in 1982 in which the Syrian army destroyed most of Hama after the Muslim Brothers managed to take control of the city.²⁸

After the bloody events in Hama, the Assad regime and the Sunni religious establishment began to seek accommodation to maintain the political status quo. The Muslim Brotherhood was banned in Syria and its leadership went into exile. Political Islam declined as an idiom for social grievances. The sectarian animosity of the period between 1979 and 1982 impacted Syrian society and politics, leading to its decline as a framework for expressing political or social discontent. However, after a long period of accommodation, sectarian tensions began to rise again under the presidency of Bashar al-Assad, as many Sunni Syrians started to express their discontent with the Shi‘a appropriation of Syria’s holy sites and with what they perceived as special privileges granted to Shi‘a to the detriment of Sunnis. Bashar al-Assad was building on a legacy of legitimizing Shi‘a Islam in the Syrian religious landscape. The Syrian state and its Iranian counterpart joined forces to promote holy sites in Syria as destinations for Shi‘a pilgrims. The establishment of a Shi‘a pilgrimage route linking Iran to Syria gave a religious dimension to the geopolitical alliance between the two countries, and this new visibility of Shi‘ism in Syria helped bolster the Islamic credentials of the ‘Alawi community and the Assad regime.

However, the new religious and political realities created by the 2003 Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq, such as the clashes between Sunni and Shi‘a militias and political groups in an openly sectarian civil war between 2005 and 2008, fueled religious tensions in Syria. These reached new levels during the worst phase of the sectarian violence in Iraq between 2006 and 2008, when masses of refugees flocked into Syria. They were both Sunnis and Shi‘a, but the increasing political power of the Shi‘a in Iraq after 2003, together with the alliance of some Shi‘a political leaders with the Americans, led to a sense among Sunni Syrians that the Shi‘a were some sort of “fifth column” driven by sectarian hatred against both Sunnism and Arab nationalism. Stories of the violence unleashed by Shi‘a militias against Sunnis in Iraq confirmed the worst fears of many Syrians about Shi‘a expansion.²⁹ For Sunni Syrians the issue was to reclaim their sacred spaces and sites of memory, such as the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, from religious actors they perceived as “foreign.” The tension between Sunnis and Shi‘a thus also came to be perceived as between “Syrians” and “foreigners,” allowing an oblique critique of the Assad regime for privileging outsiders over its own citizens. At this point there was no explicit amalgam between the ‘Alawi community and the Shi‘a pilgrims who constituted the religious “other” in the discontented Sunni imaginary.

Ironically, the conditions for deploying religious idioms to express grievances about the relation between the state and its citizens were created by the religious nationalism fostered by Bashar al-Assad’s government. This process led the Assad regime to change its policy from one of allowing greater visibility of Shi‘ism in Syria’s religious landscape to one of control and containment of public expressions of Shi‘a religiosity after 2008. However, from the beginning of the protests in 2011 the regime did not hesitate to exploit religious tensions, with the aim of injecting a sectarian dimension into the uprising. Bashar al-Assad hoped to overcome his crisis of legitimacy by mobilizing the support of religious minorities in Syria and discrediting the protesters as intolerant and violent fanatics who could not be negotiated with, but had to be defeated.

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Five years after the beginning of the uprising, it is clear that the Assad regime has largely succeeded in inscribing a sectarian narrative into the Syrian conflict. However, it is important to understand those elements in the internal dynamics of the protests that allowed this to happen, and the social actors who contributed to this process. The continuous investment of discrete political, religious, and national imaginaries in the cultural idiom of anti-regime protests led to its saturation,³⁰ a process in which the capacity of the protests to provide cultural equivalence to the discrete and, sometimes, divergent meanings that were being expressed through them reached its limits.³¹

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Throughout 2011 and 2012, as a result of the sectarian frameworks mobilized by both the regime and the opposition, the participants in the protests became more homogeneously Sunni Muslim. Many Christians and ‘Alawis refrained from participating, and identified less and less with the uprising and the political future it offered. Beyond that, the impact of massive state repression and the emergence of armed groups among the opposition created a context conducive to social and political fragmentation.⁴⁶ The hypersaturated idiom of anti-regime protest gradually precipitated along various social fault lines—sectarian, class, rural/urban, regional—into divergent social and political projects for Syria.

The dynamics of repression and the regime’s strategic uses of violence were central to the sectarianization process. The repressive tactics deployed by the regime were in many ways a revival of those used in the time of the confrontation with the Islamic opposition in 1979–1982. The regime also used a selective distribution of violence in order to deepen sectarian fault lines among the protesters, dividing and isolating them. Whenever the protests occurred in mixed Sunni/‘Alawi or Sunni/‘Alawi/Christian cities, such as Latakiya and Baniyas, even when members from all communities took part in the protests, military and paramilitary violence was directed mainly to Sunni neighborhoods. An interlocutor who was in Latakiya in July 2011 told me: “During the day there would be protests in all neighborhoods, but at night only our [Sunni] streets were attacked by the army and the shabiha [ultra-violent pro-regime paramilitary gangs].”⁴⁷

Not that the protesters from other religious communities were spared from violence, but instead of using military and paramilitary forces to deal with them, the regime used its security apparatus to mobilize internal repressive mechanisms under the threat that the entire community would be targeted if the actions of certain individuals were not suppressed. ‘Alawi, Christian, and Druze protesters faced repression and violence from within their own groups, sometimes even from their own families.⁴⁸ This pattern of mobilization of community or family mechanisms of repression against non-Sunni protesters was described by the ‘Alawi actress Fadwa Sulayman, who, after joining the uprising in Homs, declared in an interview in 2011 that:

families from minority groups exert a lot of pressure on the individuals who dissent. Many splits within families are happening because of this. … People cannot voice their opposition because the government is even more brutal on dissidents belonging to minority groups than those from the majority Sunni Muslims. They threaten them and their families and children even before they decide to protest.⁴⁹

There was thus a clear strategy of enhancing the visibility of the violence directed against Sunnis, rendering invisible the violence directed against non-Sunni groups. This fed into the regime’s discourse that the uprising was led by Sunni militants and that the Assad regime was overwhelmingly supported by all the other religious groups, as their “protector” against Sunni radicalism. The resentment and suspicion created by the unequal distribution of violence between the various communities created a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the violence that the state claimed was necessary to crush sectarianism became the very mechanism through which sectarian tensions were inscribed or enhanced in the social fabric.

The regime also aimed to reinstate fear as an instrument of governance, as it had following the massacre in Hama in 1982. Paramilitary gangs known as shabiha (lit. “ghosts”/“shadows”) were created by recruiting ‘Alawi youth from impoverished areas, but also local mafias and convicts that Assad released from jail.⁵⁰ These gangs, together with regular security forces, carried out arrests, torture, mutilations, and executions in the areas that held protests against the government. The army and the shabiha jointly perpetrated several massacres throughout Syria. One of the largest of them happened in Hula, a village near Homs, where 108 people, including children and women, were slaughtered in May 2012 by the shabiha, who apparently came from nearby ‘Alawi villages.⁵¹ This trend spread through the countryside, where religious and local identities became territorialized as villages and towns organized defense forces along sectarian lines. In religiously mixed regions, such as the Ghab, near Hama, killings and clashes between armed groups from different villages allowed sectarian and political stereotypes, such as ‘Alawi–Christian/pro-government and Sunni/anti-Ba‘athist opposition, to acquire social reality by resignifying and reorganizing a variety of social conflicts that were recovered by and expressed through these categories. Arms smuggled from Lebanon fed this process of territorialization and militarization of locally produced configurations of regional, political, and sectarian identities,⁵² creating a pattern of diffuse sectarian violence throughout central Syria.

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Better armed, more tightly disciplined, and hell-bent on establishing their vision of public order, jihadist groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS offered some semblance of stability to populations left to the mercy of unbounded state brutality, with barrel bombings and murderous incursions of the Syrian army and the shabiha, or the racketeering of rogue militia elements. This stability, however, came with a high price, as these groups had a strong sectarian character, accusing of disbelief (kufr) other Muslims with a different understanding and practice of Islam. Thus, in the territories under its control, ISIS fined, physically punished, or killed “impious” Sunnis; executed social “deviants” (homosexuals, adulterers, prostitutes); allowed the killing and enslavement of groups considered as “apostates,” such as the Yazidis; created a mass exodus of Christians after imposing on them the status of dhimmi; and destroyed “pagan” cultural heritage, such as the Roman temples in Palmyra, and “impious” monuments, such as the tombs of saints and Shi‘a shrines in Raqqah. Jabhat al-Nusra has a less gruesome record, but also engaged in sectarian persecution of non-Sunni groups, such as the imposition of Sunni religiosity over a series of Druze villages near Idlib.⁶³

The high level of sectarian violence of the jihadist groups is also related to the presence of foreign fighters among them, for they did not know or understand the cultural dynamics of Sunni Islam in Syria. While many jihadists are Syrians, there are a large number of those who crossed from Iraq or were released from jail by Assad, or came directly from Europe, North Africa, or the Caucasus. This is particularly true in ISIS, where foreign fighters are present at all levels in the chain of command.⁶⁴ Thus, despite its initial ease in conquering territories, ISIS faced growing resistance from the local populations to its religious policies.

In June 2013 a fifteen-year-old boy who sold coffee in the streets of a well-known neighborhood in Aleppo was executed for blasphemy. He had replied to a customer, probably a fighter, who wanted free coffee with characteristic Aleppine irony, saying, “Even if Prophet Muhammad comes down from heaven, I will not give you my coffee for free.” This execution caused a major uproar in Aleppo and, even if ISIS never claimed responsibility, the episode mobilized the population to help a coalition of the FSA and the Salafi group Ahrar al-Sham to expel it from Aleppo in January 2014.⁶⁵ Furthermore, in 2013 the population of Dana, east of the city, revolted against the efforts of ISIS to impose its version of Islam on the villagers.⁶⁶ In Aleppo, Sufis organized themselves in order to protect their zawiyas (ritual lodges) from destruction by the jihadist/takfiri groups, who usually considered Sufi beliefs and practices to be un-Islamic.⁶⁷ These examples of civil resistance to the sectarian policies of the jihadist groups showed that their acceptance by the local population was due more to their capacity for restoring public order than the embracing of their worldview.

The consolidation of sectarianism via the political idiom of jihadism was not exclusive to the opposition, for Bashar al-Assad also resorted to religiously motivated paramilitary forces to reconquer lost territories. The growing number of defections from the army during 2011 and 2012 sapped the trust that the regime had in its own troops, creating a military disadvantage that was only reversed with the entrance of Hezbollah, Iraqi volunteers, and Iranian brigades into the Syrian conflict. While the constitution of these forces reflected strategic alliances among political players in the geopolitics of the Middle East, the reality on the ground was also shaped by sectarian overtones. This fed the perception among many Sunnis that the Assad regime was being propped up by a foreign/transnational web of Shi‘a (and, in the case of Iran, Persian) forces. While the Shi‘a identity of Hezbollah was still blended with a pan-Arab nationalist discourse, the pro-Assad brigades created to absorb the foreign fighters who came to defend the regime had a clear Shi‘a sectarian framework with references to Shi‘a religious figures. Thus, the Abu al-Fadl al-‘Abbas Brigade gathered Shi‘a foreign fighters and has its headquarters near the Shi‘a pilgrimage shrine of Sayyida Zaynab, in a suburb of Damascus. The influx of Lebanese, Iraqi, Iranian, Yemeni, Afghan, and Pakistani Shi‘a volunteers also led to the constitution of a brigade named Dhu al-Fiqar, after the sword of Imam ‘Ali, the first Shi‘a imam.⁶⁸ As they reconquered territories that were previously controlled by the opposition, these Shi‘a brigades proceeded to repress and eliminate all forms of Sunni piety that they considered reflections of Salafi tendencies. Therefore, both sides of the conflict were territorializing religious identities and producing a more homogeneous religious landscape, inscribing their sectarian dynamic in the social reality through violence, dispossession, and expulsion of parts of the local populations. Tragically, the logic of violence and revenge is tearing apart the social fabric of the nation that all sides in the conflict claim they want to save.

Topic 4: Although the geopolitical strategy of Iran is complex, it has a sectarian dimension.

Resource (VII): Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, “Strategic Depth, Counterinsurgency, and the Logic of Sectarianization: The Islamic Republic of Iran’s Security Doctrine and its Regional Implications,” in Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel (eds.), Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017):159-184.

I will argue that, rather than uniquely aggressive and sectarian, the Islamic Republic should be understood as a “regional middle power” whose foreign policy has been shaped in the context of the systemic insecurity of a regional system penetrated by hegemonic Great Powers.⁷ The historical development of post-revolutionary Iran’s security policies, which are intimately intertwined with its espousal of asymmetric “strategies of opposition,” has often taken the form of financial and military support for politically responsive co-sectarians. These processes have dovetailed with crises of security, trust, and legitimacy in weak states, ultimately galvanizing the logic of sectarianization in local and region-wide conflicts. To frame this in terms of a putatively unyielding drive for the incorporation of Arab capitals into a Shi‘a-Persian empire for the twenty-first century will be shown to be a gross oversimplification. By contrast, I will try to show through an examination of the manifold interactions between system-level and meso-level dynamics of securitization, with particular attention to the examples of Iraq and Syria, that the Islamic Republic’s engagement in these conflicts varies widely and depends on a host of variables, many of which lie beyond its immediate control.

…

Following Raymond Hinnebusch and Anoushiravan Ehteshami, I will contend that the Islamic Republic of Iran should be viewed as a “regional middle power.” That is, a state that is decisive to the regional balance of power and harbors a credible deterrent capability, which, through the deployment of both hard and soft power, is able to resist coalitions of adversarial regional states against it. While regional middle powers are middle powers on a global scale, they are key actors within the regional system in which they figure.⁸ Such powers assert regional leadership in the name of more general interests, but are nevertheless economically and technologically constrained by the core, which has traditionally sought to prevent any single power from organizing the regional system.

Moreover, following Barry Buzan and Ole Waever, I view the regional security complex (RSC) as a key factor:⁹ the security of regional states is sufficiently intertwined that they cannot be considered in isolation from one another.¹⁰ The Middle East’s geostrategic location¹¹ and vast oil wealth, as well as the presence of the Israeli state, have ensured that throughout the second half of the twentieth century it has been subject to constant penetration by Great Powers.¹² Adam Hanieh has made a compelling case regarding the entwined and mutually reinforcing processes of energy flows to the core and the internationalization of capital underwriting the American presence in the Persian Gulf since the 1970s. The “petrodollar flows from the Gulf, particularly from Saudi Arabia, played a critical role in strengthening both the financialization of the system as a whole and the specific role of the United States as the dominant power.”¹³

The region’s fully fledged incorporation into the world economy, and the sometimes tacit, but often explicit, quid pro quo between amenable regional elites and the US government, has historically entailed security guarantees, foreign aid, technology and knowledge transfers in exchange for the steady, secure flow of energy to Western markets. It is no surprise that these dynamics have proven decisive in shaping the character of regional alignments, military campaigns, and security agreements in preceding decades (the Gulf War of 1990–1991, the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003). Such a perspective undercuts claims about unmitigated sovereignty in unalloyed Realist theory.¹⁴ Middle regional powers cannot completely insulate themselves from the military penetration of global powers or from entanglement in the complex web of the world capitalist system, which, following World War II, progressively forged a set of economic and security interests that bound regional and Great Power elites together. Under such circumstances, middle regional states such as Iran can merely attempt to minimize their vulnerability by diversifying their economic relations and, if possible, leveraging multi-polarity and Great Power rivalry to augment their bargaining power.¹⁵ Another possibility is the pursuit of “internal balancing” and what Stephen Walt calls “strategies of opposition,” which I will discuss in further detail below.

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Though by no means strictly defined along institutional lines, it is unsurprising that Iran’s military and diplomatic corps, as well as disparate political factions, compete over which view of national security ought to prevail in the formulation and execution of diplomacy and national security policy.¹⁷ For example, in numerous instances Ayatollah Khamene’i has specifically insisted, in keeping with his broad strategic oversight, on Tehran’s support for Bashar al-Assad remaining in power in the face of Western demands that he step aside.¹⁸ Meanwhile, some in the Iranian diplomatic corps have considered proposals that Assad step down in favor of a regime insider less visibly associated with the bloody repression of the last several years—above all, the deployment of chemical weapons.

In keeping with their Weltanschauungen, skill set, capital, and the division of labor within the regime apparatus, these institutions qua institutions manage distinct if intimately interconnected aspects of various conflicts. In this way, Iran’s Foreign Ministry can propose diplomatic initiatives calling for a political resolution to an ongoing conflict, while Revolutionary Guard commanders simultaneously proceed to supervise and train militias in hotspots across Iraq and Syria. While the president or foreign minister might forcefully denounce sectarianism, IRGC commanders managing co-sectarian assets on the ground may express geopolitical rivalry in thinly veiled sectarian rhetoric—for example, by overtly attacking Wahhabism in the context of ongoing conflicts in Iraq or Syria, and indirect conflict with the Saudi kingdom and its allies. Another rhetorical device deployed in recent years across almost all state institutions is the virtual conflation of all groups at war with allies in either Syria or Iraq as “terrorists.” In this way, Iranian politicians and military personnel can eschew the severe repercussions of invoking openly sectarian language, and instead espouse the post-9/11 lingua franca of the “War on Terror,” which both Western and non-Western Great Powers are less inclined to dismiss out of hand. These modi operandi comprise the twin elements of a fundamentally political strategy marrying persuasion and brute force, soft and hard power, domination and hegemony. In this way, the Islamic Republic can avail itself of, and adduce the norms and laws regulating, international relations, while partaking in internal balancing and irregular warfare, which I will discuss in some detail below.

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US imperial overstretch during the presidency of George W. Bush (2001–2009), and the caution that characterized his successor,¹⁹ have contributed to a situation in which middle regional powers can take advantage of opportunities to exercise varying degrees of autonomy and increase their power within the bounds of the regional system without fear of swift, disproportionate reprisal. The Islamic Republic has proven willing to exploit the diminished state capacity of regional states racked by civil conflicts to protect and, in certain instances, deepen what high-ranking Iranian officials, including the Supreme Leader himself, have referred to as Iran’s “strategic depth” (‘omq-e rahbordi).²⁰ This of course allows the Islamic Republic to keep instability and encroaching threats emanating from its antagonists at a safe distance, while ensuring that relative quiet prevails at home.²¹

On the regional scale, strategic depth can also be viewed in terms of the logic of “offensive realism,”²² “look[ing] for opportunities to alter the balance of power by acquiring additional increments of power at the expense of potential rivals,” in the formulation of John Mearsheimer,²³ while in defensive fashion leveraging the cost of US regional penetration, which has been perceived by powerful individuals and institutions as a major threat to regime survival since the 1979 revolution.

Though the Islamic Republic has sought to expand trade, cultural, and religious ties in both Syria and Iraq,²⁴ its most potent tool for power projection is its support for a cornucopia of paramilitary organizations. As opposed to soft or economic power, its relationships with militias form the centerpiece of its manifold “strategies of opposition” vis-à-vis regional and external adversaries. Weaker states play this game of “internal balancing”: mobilizing their internal resources in terms of an asymmetric strategy, shifting their competition with more powerful states to those arenas where the imbalance of power is less starkly felt.²⁵ Balancing of this sort is complemented by a range of strategies such as balking, or deliberate non-cooperation; binding, which entails the entanglement of self-avowed liberal states in the framework of international law and rules; blackmail, whereby dividends are extorted by threats or pressure; and delegitimation, where the legitimacy of rival regimes is persistently undermined in the international arena.²⁶

The Islamic Republic’s security doctrine has developed in the context of this threat posed by Great Power penetration, as further reflected in the country’s official defense budget, which stands at approximately $12–14 billion (2014), including support for foreign non-state actors.²⁷ The Islamic Republic’s conventional military forces continue to rely heavily upon arms procured under the Shah, while the US arms embargo has ensured that in the wake of the revolution the Iranian state has been severely hampered in its ability to modernize its military or acquire new state-of-the-art military technology. This of course stands in stark contrast to several of Iran’s Arab Gulf neighbors. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the military spending of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia in 2014 stood at around $22.7 billion and $80.7 billion, respectively.²⁸ There are discernible reasons why the sale of billions of dollars in military hardware to Iran’s chief regional competitors, in tandem with the Clinton-era policy of “containment,” have reinforced the Islamic Republic’s calculus vis-à-vis the indispensability of support for non-state political-paramilitary actors to its security. Rather than directly engaging in conventional conflicts, since the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) the Revolutionary Guard has honed its conduct of asymmetrical and irregular warfare, fighting protracted wars of attrition on multiple fronts to both deter and accumulate political influence and leverage.

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Iran’s asymmetric strategies in the post-Khomeini era are best understood as emerging from its security dilemma as opposed to territorial ambitions or the intractable need to perpetually export its Islamic revolution. That being said, it is undeniable that the Supreme Leader and Commanders of the Revolutionary Guard regularly distinguish between the state (dowlat, hokumat) and the regime (nezam): the former is geographically and temporally bound, and conforms to the boundaries of the Iranian nation-state, while the nezam is held to be irreducible to the state, and embodies a commitment to ideological and sociopolitical revolution which is total and uncompromising in scope.³⁰ As should be clear by now, I hold the latter to have largely dissipated with the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988 and the death of Ayatollah Khomeini the following year, even while it remains an important means of framing mobilizations both at home and abroad,³¹ and is on occasion deployed to undermine the legitimacy of the ruling executive on the domestic front. Furthermore, a disproportionate emphasis on this ideological aspect of Iranian state discourse serves to obscure our understanding of the state’s actual behavior, given its structural constraints, and fuels value-laden and sensationalist characterizations of the latter.

The Islamic Republic’s profound lack of technological edge, and the dated nature of its military hardware due to international isolation and the US arms embargo, make any notion of its ambitions to dominate manifold Arab states and incorporate them into some Persian imperial order an entirely untenable proposition. The inflammatory comments of certain politicians and military personnel—most notably those of ‘Ali-Reza Zakani, a prominent conservative parliamentarian, who bombastically claimed that Iran controls four Arab capitals³²—are best interpreted in terms of the dilemma faced by weaker regional powers trying to deter stronger ones by exaggerating their capabilities and misrepresenting their own strength.³³ It also serves to inflate Iran’s role in regional conflicts, where its reach and influence are highly qualified. This is most apparent in the case of Yemen, where certain Iranian politicians cheer every Houthi victory, thereby enraging regional adversaries and embroiling Saudi armed forces ever more deeply in the conflict, to the point where “meaningful victory” becomes hard to discern. This is not to deny that certain personages in the Iranian state might aspire to such a role, but systemic pressures, hard and soft power constraints, and elite cleavages fundamentally preclude its realization.

The sectarianization of regional conflicts has been at least in part a secondary process and an outcome of Iran and other regional players engaging in balancing strategies through support for receptive co-sectarians; but sectarian identity by no means exclusively determines these political alliances. This is merely one of several processes by which civil conflicts in the Middle East have become sectarianized. Transnational solidarities and support revolving around the regional power balance have proven decisive to the construction of alliances between sub-state and foreign state actors, while the increasing salience of sectarianism, both discursively and in terms of the character of civil violence, can make such alliances across confessional lines increasingly costly to substate organizations, dependent as they are on foreign patronage. Hamas’s effort to distance itself from Tehran in the aftermath of the Syrian uprising and the Assad regime’s violent repression of it appositely illustrate this.³⁴

The Islamic Republic’s policy of politicizing ascriptive group identities has its antecedents in the Iranian Islamist movement preceding the revolution, and Tehran’s subsequent politico-ideological relationships with co-sectarian political organizations such as Hezbollah and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) date back to the revolution’s first decade.³⁵ To ascribe such resilience exclusively to the sectarian factor would be quite misleading, given that there is a complex web of political and economic interests which determine the nature and preponderance of these relationships. In a similar vein, it is not sufficient to explain why such relationships have been able to endure and in certain instances flourish.

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Instead of upgrading its conventional military capabilities, for which it had only limited means as a result of the US arms embargo, the Islamic Republic has sought to harness, channel, and discursively frame the sociopolitical and armed mobilizations of politically receptive elements in weak states, which has given Tehran asymmetrical capabilities and strategic depth against both regional adversaries and perceived superpower threats. Weak states, broadly speaking, are those that for manifold reasons come to lack significant autonomy, i.e. the ability to perform basic tasks independently of social groups, and capacity, i.e. the ability of the state to execute its programs and decisions.³⁶ Weak states thus become staging grounds for inter-state and Great Power competition.

It naturally follows that these two constraints fundamentally circumscribe the state’s ability to exercise a monopoly, or even the semblance of a monopoly, on violence and coercion. Under conditions of state weakness, political receptivity and the pool from which such sociopolitical movements can effectively recruit are in turn related to people’s perceptions of security and insecurity, or what Barry Posen calls “emerging anarchy.”³⁷ The Islamic Republic’s own Revolutionary Guards and Basij Forces—whose very name means “mobilization”—were born at the juncture of a major social revolution and inter-state (Iran-Iraq) war, just as Lebanon’s Hezbollah emerged from the battleground of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990) and the Israeli invasion and occupation of Beirut in 1982. It was in the course of this process that the Islamic Republic was able to forge a model of political, social, and armed mobilization that proved remarkably durable, and which it has turned to, time and again, over the course of some three decades. Most recently, these resources and know-how have been deployed in the internecine conflicts of post-2003 Iraq and the post-2011 Syrian civil war, in both cases to support regional allies experiencing challenges to their legitimacy from armed political opponents.

The nature of Iranian engagement, however, is intimately bound up with several interrelated factors, the most important of which are state weakness and highly dysfunctional state institutions. From these, several corollaries arguably follow:

• the presence of ascriptive identity groups sceptical of state neutrality
• poor or absent welfare provision³⁸
• a pool of political entrepreneurs and violence specialists ready to ally themselves with strong external states to further their immediate political and material goals
• a political economy riddled with politicized patronage networks and afflicted by deep-seated inequality and structural unemployment

State weakness in the case of Iraq, however, did not simply appear in a vacuum. American imperialism not only destroyed the Ba‘athist state and the last vestiges of Iraqi associational life, but also played a decisive role in the new state’s reconstitution and the effective institutionalization of the ethno-sectarian constitutional order. While it would be disingenuous to claim that sectarianism in Iraq began with the American invasion and occupation, there are strong grounds to contend that the new political-constitutional order, often euphemistically referred to as “consociational democracy,” generated unprecedented modes of sectarian identification and competition—novel in Iraq’s history—and incentivized political actors’ recourse to sectarian-laden (or sect-centric, in Fanar Haddad’s phrase) discourses and forms of mobilization. Thus, as Anne Alexander has commented, “sectarian ‘balance’—and therefore its corollary, sectarian competition—was enshrined in America’s Iraq from the start. The practice of muhasasa, or the use of a sectarian quota system for appointments, was implemented by political parties whose survival was bound up with entrenching sectarianism.”³⁹

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“Militias” have been a key vehicle for the extension of Iranian influence. Militias can be thought of as armed and politicized social action—or, in Charles Tilly’s formulation, a form of contentious politics.⁴⁴ But a genuine problem associated with the use of the term “militia” is that it often obscures the social-embeddedness of certain armed sub-state organizations and the fact that they are ultimately political organizations pursuing political aims. It is, however, necessary to concede that not all, or even the majority, of the organizations patronized by the Islamic Republic in Iraq and Syria emanated from broad-based social movements. In fact, it often seems to be quite the opposite, insofar as a number of political actors with close-knit relations to Tehran were first founded as politico-military organizations only to begin the process of establishing social, cultural, and welfare networks later down the line. This is observable in the case of Syria, but certain militias in Iraq (such as Kata’ib Hizbullah and Saraya al-Khorasani) present a similar problem. That being said, those organizations that Iranian state operatives have had a direct hand in establishing are only a fraction of the multitude of groups currently embroiled in these conflicts. Without becoming preoccupied with this issue, which is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is essential to acknowledge, following Melani Cammett, that “where public welfare functions are underdeveloped and religious or ethnic organizations provide social protection, the provision of social services both constitute and reproduces the politics of sectarianism.”⁴⁵

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An important factor in Iran’s security doctrine in the cases of Iraq and Syria has been said to reside in a combination of defensive and offensive realism, depending on whether it is the international or regional scale. According to John Mearsheimer, offensive realism maintains that states strive to become the hegemon of the anarchic system of which they form a part,⁴⁸ and this ultimately stems from the drive to increase their chances of survival. Defensive realism, as initially theorized by Kenneth Waltz, instead focused on how states under conditions of anarchy are primarily occupied with deterring threats and balancing against those threats to their security. Defensive realism contends that states achieve this by acting defensively and maintaining the extant balance of power, rather than seeking to overturn it.⁴⁹ Thus, while defensive realism argues that states tend to reinforce the status quo, offensive realism holds that anarchy leads states to “seek more power to maximize the odds of survival,” making for more “aggressive” and robust security competition.⁵⁰ But a combination of these two models, namely a defensive realism taken up with respect to extra-regional hegemonic powers (say, the United States) and offensive realism vis-à-vis fellow regional powers, will not suffice as an explanation, since it merely affords insight into the broader structural factors and dynamics that shape Iran’s behavior. Moreover, it should be acknowledged that offensive realism was originally developed by Mearsheimer for analyzing the behavior of “Great Powers” on a global scale. The framework of my analysis is a complex of regional states in which security is highly interdependent⁵¹—a regional security complex—in this case, one that is overdetermined by Great Power penetration, a fact that has an obvious impact on the calculations of powerful states in the region, such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.

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Iran’s relationship with Syria dates to the Iranian revolution of 1978–1979. It was initially based on balancing against the rival Ba‘athist regime in Iraq—a mutual foe of Iran and Syria—and its efforts to cast itself in the role of aspiring regional hegemon following the collapse of the Shah’s regime.⁵⁴ But this argument, which Ehteshami and Hinnebusch have also advanced,⁵⁵ could not envisage how enduring the Tehran-Damascus alliance would prove, despite the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the subsequent emergence of a Tehran-friendly regime in Baghdad, which has provoked a seismic shift in the region’s political landscape. The overthrow of the Ba‘athist regime in Iraq induced a regional shift from multipolarity to bipolarity, where Iran and Saudi Arabia remain the only two formidable powers in the Gulf⁵⁶—which in turn has ushered in a watershed transformation in the dynamics of securitization.

The Tehran-Damascus alliance has generally been seen to rest upon geostrategic considerations, such as opposition to US and Israeli policies in the region and the pivotal role played by Hezbollah in bulwarking the influence of both countries in Lebanon. But as the Syrian uprising escalated into full-blown civil war, besides the aforementioned geostrategic considerations, the issue of omnibalancing had become especially acute: the Syrian regime had to assess whether the greatest threat emanated from foreign or domestic sources.⁵⁷ The existential threat to the Assad regime itself in light of the challenge posed by the armed opposition galvanized the Tehran-Damascus alliance and compelled the Assad regime to accept a host of encroachments,⁵⁸ many of which it would not have previously countenanced.

By contrast, Tehran’s present-day alliance with Baghdad originates in the US invasion and occupation of Iraq and the effective liquidation of many of the erstwhile institutions of the former regime. The neoconservative architects of that war had convinced themselves it would result in a democratic, pro-Western polity that would stand as an exemplar to the region and tilt the regional balance against Tehran and Damascus. As we know today, the exact opposite occurred. Indeed, it was the burgeoning alliance between Iran and several powerful political forces within Iraq’s new ruling elite that led Jordan’s King Abdullah II to resort to the ideologically loaded image of a “Shi‘a Crescent.” It is worth recalling that in the months immediately following the invasion of Iraq, Sadeq Kharazi, Iran’s former ambassador to France and a relative-by-marriage of the Supreme Leader, sent a proposal to Washington via the Swiss embassy. It pledged that there would be “no Iranian endeavours to develop or possess WMD” and “full cooperation with IAEA,” but also to demobilize Lebanese Hezbollah, transforming it into a strictly political party.⁵⁹ Whether such an offer would ever have come to fruition had the Bush administration chosen to indulge its Iranian counterparts at that critical juncture is open to debate. But what subsequently happened during the catastrophic viceroyship of Paul Bremer and the now infamous policy of de-Ba‘athification undertaken by the Coalition Provisional Authority guaranteed that it would remain a counterfactual left to the judgment of posterity.

The fierce Iraqi insurgency against the occupation, which cut across sectarian lines, provided the conditions under which the Islamic Republic and the Syrian regime could employ a slew of strategies of opposition to increase the cost of the American occupation, and thus help instigate the circumstances of its eventual withdrawal. The Assad regime’s intentional neglect of Syria’s shared border facilitated a mass influx of Sunni jihadists into Iraq to fight US occupying forces,⁶⁰ while the Islamic Republic supported and trained groups with a shared stake in vanquishing the Americans, and cultivated clients such as the Badr Organization, which progressively took over elements of the state apparatus itself.⁶¹ These strategies can be interpreted as classic cases of “internal balancing” undertaken by asymmetric powers. In the years that followed, the Islamic Republic cultivated its relationships with numerous Shi‘a factions, and in several cases set itself up as patron and arbiter, as was seen in the intra-Shi‘a conflicts in Karbala in 2007⁶² and Basra in March 2008.⁶³

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The Shi‘a paramilitary organizations that have developed over the course of the last several years in Iraq, and the predominantly (though by no means exclusively) Alawite/Christian NDF in Syria, have been the subject of considerable debate and controversy.⁷⁶ In certain instances (especially in Iraq) these irregular armed groups have been commended for fighting in the name of the homeland (the watan), particularly in the aftermath of Mosul’s fall to ISIS in June 2014, an event that was widely depicted as an existential threat to the Iraqi polity itself. Indeed, the overwhelmingly Shi‘a Popular Mobilization Units (Hashd al-Sha‘bi), which were formed in the aftermath of Grand Ayatollah Sistani’s fatwa (wajib al-kifa’i) calling on Iraqis to defend “their country and their people and their holy places,” have now received formal legal recognition and have in principle been made accountable to, and are funded by, the prime minister’s office, in an effort to diminish the downward spiral into what one commentator has described as a “militia state.”⁷⁷

In the face of the Iraqi army’s rapid disintegration, the opportunity structure was such that a significant swathe of the Shi‘a community mobilized in reaction to the perceived threat not only to their holy places but to their lives on an individual and communal basis.⁷⁸ The emergence of ISIS has introduced a new dynamic into regional power calculations and the valencies of sectarianism. The signifier takfiri,⁷⁹ largely used by the Islamic Republic and allies such as Hezbollah, eschews outright sectarian denunciation, whereas jihadi Salafists openly espouse the excommunication of Shi‘a as rawafidh (“rejectionists”). The negation of the other is integral to their identity in a way that it clearly is not in the case of Iranian Islamism and its radical Shi‘a counterparts in Iraq, Lebanon, and elsewhere. The Islamic Republic’s pan-Islamist commitments and post-colonial imbrications—and the minority status of Shi‘a in the broader region—mitigate its overt resort to and exploitation of sectarian rhetoric and symbols. There is, nonetheless, a relational and co-constitutive discursive process at work: when Iran deploys sectarianism at the discursive level, it is not other-centered in the way one finds in the language of ISIS and its cognates. That is, a negation of Sunni Islam is not integral to Iran’s self-image and ideological projection. Rather, the Islamic Republic assertively brandishes markers of Shi‘a identity in ways that have been abjured not only by Sunni Islamists but also by pan-Arabists and secularists in the Middle East.⁸⁰

Apart from Sistani’s fatwa and his office’s role in encouraging and religiously legitimizing the mobilization, the financing, training, and operational coordination was a joint effort of the Iraqi government, the Shi‘a tribes (though it should be noted that many tribes cut across sect), local governments and shrines, established militias (the most powerful of which have strong ties with the Islamic Republic of Iran), and other members of the Shi‘a religious establishment.⁸¹ This was a juncture at which the Iraqi central government struggled to exercise control and in certain respects engendered a scenario in which foreign states such as Iran could further enmesh their allies and clients within the fabric of the putatively national security apparatus. This is what had already effectively taken place during the peak of sectarian violence in 2006–2007, when the Badr Organization—which was at the time still the armed wing of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI)—had infiltrated the Interior Ministry and its police forces and relied on the veneer of officialdom to partake in retaliatory attacks against sectarian and co-sectarian adversaries and even assassinate former Iraqi pilots allegedly responsible for bombing Iranian cities in the Iran-Iraq war.⁸²

Nonetheless, it is now difficult to deny that the Popular Mobilization Units—as the interior minister, Mohammed al-Ghabban (himself a member of the Badr Organization), has contended—is “an inseparable element of Iraq’s fabric,” with a differentiated set of social bases and revenue streams.⁸³ Neither can one ignore the fact that many of the men heading its polycephalous paramilitary organizations—figures such as al-‘Ameri, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, Qays al-Khaz‘ali, and Muqtada al-Sadr—comprise part of Iraq’s political elite and acquire their ability to act as power-brokers by virtue of their social constituencies and/or the armed men they command. These factors—their own domestic resources and constituencies—temper their relationship with the Iranian state, whose support they regard as a mixed blessing. While they are grateful in view of the common threat they face, suspicion looms over Iranian penetration, given the prominence of individuals such al-‘Ameri and al-Muhandis, who were formerly based in and solely reliant on Tehran.

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The dynamic in Syria is fundamentally different, for several reasons. The Badr Organization are redoubtable Twelver Shi‘a Islamists⁸⁵ (with a view to my typology, they are largely ideologically aligned, though differences remain). They are comparable to their one-time Iranian patrons, and were organized along similar lines to Iran’s own Basij paramilitary forces, cultivating highly integrated political and organizational relationships between the two over the course of some three decades. The first decade revolved around fighting under the broader tutelage of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards against the Iraqi army, both harboring the shared aim of toppling Saddam Hussein’s Ba‘athist regime.⁸⁶ More recently, Badr’s commander-in-chief, Hadi al-‘Ameri, was not only pictured on the battle front with the Quds Force’s Major-General Qassem Soleimani, driving the campaign to free Amerli from ISIS control, but has repeatedly attested to the fraternal and longstanding nature of their relationship, and his approbation of Khamene’i’s leadership of the Islamic umma.⁸⁷

The nature of the Badr Organization (especially its experienced cadres), and the role of Iranian personnel in training thousands of Iraqi volunteers with the coordination of the Baghdad government, has obviously placed the Islamic Republic’s allies in a favorable position within the umbrella of the Popular Mobilization Units. But this should not be thought of as synonymous with control by the external power, because one needs to consider the volunteer nature of the initial surge in membership, not to mention the sheer number of political, social, and religious actors embroiled in the organization’s ranks, which see themselves as defending Iraq’s national interest—albeit mediated and inflected through a Shi‘a-majoritarian lens. Moreover, training can be understood in terms of fraternal solidarity and political alliance, without implying obedience, or even control, since there is a convergence of interests between the political entrepreneurs inside Iraq and the Iranian state in consolidating their power in the battle against ISIS.

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The Syrian NDF, by contrast, was only founded in late 2012, and was born largely of necessity, as members of the mostly conscripted army began to either defect to opposition forces such as the Free Syrian Army (FSA) or abscond altogether. Reflecting the character of the Iran-Syria relationship itself, the NDF is the outcome of an exercise in knowledge transfer between two authoritarian allies overlaying a domestic security dilemma as individuals and groups invested in the survival of the Assad regime, or fearing the outcome of the regime’s collapse, as well as elements looking to exploit the vacuum resulting from state withdrawal, organized themselves with the aid of an external actor, namely the Islamic Republic. The NDF has little to no sectarian or ideological affinity with the Islamic Republic, and does not possess a longstanding relationship with the external power that played a role in its initial training and organization. In this instance, the Islamic Republic acted as a facilitator, helping train, streamline, and organize the pro-regime Popular Committees,⁸⁹ which had answered Bashar al-Assad’s call to take responsibility for security on behalf of the regime and to police dissent within their local communities.⁹⁰ There is very little ideological affinity at work; the relationship is defined partially in fiscal terms, and partly in terms of knowledge transfer and training.

Insofar as “sectarianization” was at all a factor, it might be said to be one of the repercussions of a far more profound political antagonism at the domestic level: the ruling Alawite families’ (not Alawites tout court) and their tribal allies’ repression of the predominantly (but by no means exclusively) Sunni opposition and the militarization of this political conflict,⁹¹ not an ideational one binding Syria’s ruling clan to the Islamic Republic’s political elite. As Thomas Pierret has argued, a key element underlying regime resilience in Syria is the kinship/sectarian ties that define its elite security apparatus and military forces.⁹²

By contrast, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have grown frustrated with Syria’s NDF—which, according to numerous accounts, is manned, at least in part, by semi-criminal thugs, often disparagingly referred to simply as the shabiha,⁹³ who had become notorious in previous decades for smuggling, looting, extortion, and brazen corruption. Some of these behaviors have carried through to the present, often alienating the communities within which they were supposed to maintain order.⁹⁴ But, as Aron Lund has argued, one needs to be careful not to gloss over the actual diversity and local nature of such pro-Assad armed groups fighting in Syria, which have included “plain-clothes police, intelligence personnel, Ba‘ath Party members and paramilitary groups, government-linked tribal figures, and young men recruited for money by intelligence contacts or pro-regime businessmen.”⁹⁵ In short, local dynamics are absolutely key to understanding the composition of pro-Assad forces and their alliances in disparate regions across Syria.

Furthermore, in the case of Syria’s NDF, questions remain about the extent to which the Assad regime is able to control these myriad and highly decentralized paramilitary groups. It is for this reason that the Islamic Republic has played an integral part in organizing, mobilizing, and arming numerous, predominantly foreign, militias and collaborated with trusted partners such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Badr Organization, and more recently established organizations such as the Iraqi Kata’ib Sayyid al-Shuhada, Liwa Abu al-Fadl al-‘Abbas, and Kata’ib Hizbullah to fight Assad’s adversaries. In comparison to Syria’s NDF, a case in which ideological affinity is negligible, Hezbollah, Badr, and the other Iraqi groups harbor a significant degree of overlap, even while financial and other material incentives certainly continue to play a role. The nature of Iranian engagement is thus intimately intertwined with the nature and characteristics of the regimes in power (in both the Iraqi and Syrian cases an ally), their social base and client networks, and the variegated regional-demographic balances of the societies—but also, to be sure, the confessional distribution across state institutions, especially those endowed with the capacity for coercion.

Moreover, while the Iranian-Syrian alliance neither originated in nor fundamentally rests on sectarian considerations, the Islamic Republic has, curiously, relied upon a “sectarian” explanation for the presence of IRGC personnel in Syria, while repeatedly denying participation in the wider conflict, claiming instead that the latter were in Syria in a purely advisory capacity. The official, “sectarian,” explanation offered for the presence of alleged retirees and active members of the IRGC in Syria has been the defense of the Sayyida Zaynab and Sayyida Ruqayya shrines in suburban Damascus, under the banner of the so-called Defenders of the Sayyida Zaynab Shrine. In this way, the Iranian authorities seek to portray their role as strictly delimited in geographical terms—the “sacred geography” of the shrines—while disavowing the larger and unmistakably political purpose behind sending advisors and senior personnel to directly partake in the defense of strategic locations along the Syrian-Lebanese border: Hezbollah’s logistical support channels, or key cities such as Homs and Aleppo, vital to the very feasibility and survival of the Assad regime.⁹⁶

While one prominent IRGC commander, Brigadier-General Hossein Hamedani, went as far as to claim that Iran had established a “second Hezbollah” in Syria,⁹⁷ the command structure and the esprit de corps differ dramatically from those that have traditionally bound Hezbollah to its Iranian patron. It is for this reason that the Islamic Republic has essentially subcontracted a great deal of the fighting in Syria to Iraqi, Afghan, and Pakistani co-sectarians. This is not merely a matter of retaining plausible deniability, but also, in the bluntest of terms, reducing the costs, both political and economic, of Iranian involvement. The Iranian state is not accountable in the same way to its own social base or the wider public when it comes to the death of foreign Shi‘a fighters hailing from Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan. When senior members of the Revolutionary Guards are killed in action their deaths must be accounted for, commemorated, and sacralized in the public sphere. This fact had, until October 2015, constrained the extent of the Islamic Republic’s commitment to placing Iranian “boots on the ground,” to use a hackneyed phrase. The analogy with Vietnam invoked by some pundits is thus off base, since Iran, after four years of conflict, had proven highly reluctant to commit large numbers of ground troops, instead preferring to retain its forces’ suppleness and versatility through advising and overseeing pro-Assad Syrian militias and foreign co-sectarians. In this instance, therefore, it can be said that the Islamic Republic has contributed to the framing of political mobilizations in “sectarian” terms.

As of June 2015, estimates are that close to 400 Iranian and Afghan fighters have been killed in Syria since 2011,⁹⁸ and despite the death of several senior personnel in quick succession in October 2015, the figure remains relatively modest in the overall scheme of things, even while official denials of Iranian involvement have long lost any semblance of credibility. The introduction of Russian troops and aerial sorties against Syrian opposition forces—that is, Great Power cover—has increased Iran’s willingness to employ Iranian members of the IRGC in ground campaigns. This, however, has and will in all likelihood remain relatively measured. Given the demographic balance, there is no prospect of a mass mobilization along the lines of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units, by means of which Iran could position allies within a larger sociopolitical movement.

Topic 5: Although the geopolitical strategy of Saudi Arabia is complex, it has a sectarian dimension.

Resource (VIII): Madawi al-Rasheed, “Sectarianism as Counter-Revolution: Saudi Responses to the Arab Spring,” in Nader Hashemi and Danny Postel (eds.), Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017):143-158

Saudi Arabia is a wealthy oil-producing country with a small population not exceeding 28 million, one-third of whom are foreigners. The authoritarian Al Saud ruling family has controlled the country since 1932.² Historically, the Saudi rentier state used economic largesse in return for loyalty to the regime.³ Yet the literature on the rentier state does not highlight other strategies that are often deployed to gain loyalty and force the population into submission. Sectarianism as a regime strategy is often ignored in the literature on the rentier state, especially in countries where there is religious diversity.⁴

In response to the Arab Spring, sectarianism became a preemptive counter-revolutionary strategy that the Saudi regime deployed to exaggerate religious difference and hatred and prevent the development of national non-sectarian politics. Through religious discourse and practices, sectarianism in the Saudi context involves not only politicizing religious differences, but also creating a rift between the majority Sunnis and the Shi‘a minority. At the political level, the rift means that Sunnis and Shi‘a are unable to create joint platforms for political mobilization. Neither essentialist arguments about the resilience of sects nor historical references to seventh-century Sunni-Shi‘a battles over the Caliphate can explain the persistence of antagonism and lack of common political platforms among Sunnis and Shi‘a in a country like Saudi Arabia.⁵ Sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shi‘a can never be understood without taking into account the role played by an agency much more powerful than the sects themselves: the authoritarian regime.

In addition to massive oil rents, the Saudi regime has at its disposal a potent religious ideology, commonly known as Wahhabism, renowned for its historical rejection of the Shi‘a as a legitimate Islamic community.⁶ The Saudi regime’s oppression of the Shi‘a minority in turn contributes to the consolidation of that minority’s sectarian identity: the sectarianization process at work. But it is too simplistic to reduce relations between the regime and the Shi‘a minority to oppression alone. The Saudi authoritarian regime deploys multiple strategies when it comes to its religious minorities and their leadership. Wholesale systematic discrimination against the Shi‘a may be a characteristic of one particular historical moment, but this can be reversed. A political situation may require alternatives to repression. Sometimes repression is combined with co-optation and even promotion of minority interests and rights. Furthermore, the regime may repress the Shi‘a in order to address issues relevant to the Sunni majority, for example to appease them, respond to their grievances, or simply seek their loyalty at a time when this cannot be taken for granted. Therefore, it is important to note that there is no regular and predictable strategy deployed by Saudi authoritarianism against the Shi‘a. Each historical moment requires a particular response toward this community, ranging from straightforward repression to cooptation and concession.

The Arab Spring and its potential impact on the country pushed the regime to reinvigorate sectarian discourse against the Shi‘a in order to renew the loyalty of the Sunni majority. In this chapter I explain how the Saudi regime used sectarian divisions to widen the gap between the two communities during the Arab Spring. The regime claimed that external agents were determined to undermine the country’s stability and security. It called upon Wahhabi religious interpretations—in particular, sectarian discourse against the very politically active Shi‘a minority, estimated at 2 million—in order to abort the development of “national politics” that crosses sectarian, regional, ideological, and tribal boundaries.⁷ By constructing calls for demonstrations on the “Day of Rage” on March 11, 2011 as a Shi‘a conspiracy against the Sunni majority with the objective of spreading Iran’s influence in the Sunni homeland, the regime deepened sectarian tension and undermined efforts to mobilize the youth in various cities, including those where the Shi‘a live.

The Saudi regime frightened its own Sunni majority by exaggerating the Iranian expansionist project in the region and its rising influence among the Shi‘a of the Arab world, including Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries. The regime propaganda succeeded in thwarting protest that by all expectations would not have amounted to an Egyptian-style fully fledged revolution. Instead, the very minor peaceful protests that started in 2011 in Saudi cities would merely have marked the beginning of political mobilization without amounting to a revolution. Even without the preconditions for a revolution in Saudi Arabia, an authoritarian regime was bound to take preemptive counter-revolutionary measures in anticipation of the domino effect of the Arab Spring.

Recent Saudi sectarianism must also be understood in light of events in the neighboring island of Bahrain, where a Sunni royal family rules over a Shi‘a majority.⁸ Sectarian discourse proved to be successful in suppressing the Bahraini pro-democracy movement. Saudi troops moved into Bahrain in February 2011 in support of the ruling Al Khalifa family against the protestors. This allowed the Saudi regime to send strong signals not only to its own politically agitated Shi‘a minority, many of whom have religious, social, and kinship ties with the Bahrainis, but also more importantly to the Sunni majority inside Saudi Arabia. The regime compelled its Sunni majority, long brought up on a sectarian discourse that denounces the Shi‘a as heretics, to consider their government as a protector against Shi‘a conspiracies and foreign agents allegedly acting in the name of Iran, a rival regional power. The regime hoped that the Sunni majority would abandon calls for political change, at least at this critical moment of the Arab Spring. Under the pressures of a tense regional context and internal virtual and real mobilization, it seems that many Saudis have postponed their confrontation with the regime but continue to call for political reform. Moreover, the economic benefits distributed by the king in March 2011 seem to have satisfied the immediate economic and social grievances of the population, without addressing political reform.

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Since the 1970s a large Sunni and Shi‘a Islamist trend has replaced earlier limited politicization, which invoked secular nationalist and leftist ideologies in Saudi Arabia. This was in line with other Arab countries, where secular leftists and nationalist movements have declined and Islamism has been on the rise. Both Saudi Sunnis and Shi‘a found in Islamism inspiration for oppositional politics and mobilization. The two communities remained divided in their political opposition, and neither was able to cross the sectarian divide and include the other group. The only exception was the brief period of the 1950s and 1960s when labor mobilization in the oil region resulted in protest not only across the Saudi sectarian, tribal, and regional divides, but also across nationalities, since the oil industry attracted laborers from all over the Arab world.¹⁰ Following these early and short-lived labor protests, the government banned trade unions and demonstrations. From the 1970s onward no labor mobilization was possible under the increased appeal of Sunni and Shi‘a Islamism.

This was a product of a combination of factors. The Iranian revolution of 1979, after which Islamism triumphed in Iran, and the Saudi regime’s promotion of Islamism as a counter-ideology to nationalism and leftist political trends, led to the strengthening of political Islam not only in Saudi Arabia but also across the Arab world. National politics and mobilization across the Sunni-Shi‘a divide became impossible with the rise of Islamism and the weakening of the nationalist and leftist opposition groups. Inspired by the success of the revolution in Iran in 1979, Saudi Shi‘a mobilized themselves as a repressed and discriminated-against religious minority. They were highly active in demanding religious, political, and economic rights and an end to discrimination in employment and education. For a long time they were denied religious freedom and access to a wide range of professions in education and the military. Their religious jurisprudence was not represented at the level of the judiciary. They had greater experience in staging demonstrations than the Sunni majority, as some of their activists had been involved in leftist and nationalist agitations in the Eastern Province in the 1950s and 1960s. Encouraged by the success of the Iranian revolution and the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979, Saudi Shi‘a started an uprising that was brutally suppressed.¹¹ Many of their opposition leaders went into exile following a wave of repression in the Eastern Province where they lived.

In 1993 there was reconciliation with the government, followed by the return of the main exiled Shi‘a opposition figures.¹² The reconciliation took place after the government promised to allow the Shi‘a more religious freedom and increase their economic integration. There remained, however, a group of Shi‘a activists abroad who continued to mobilize their followers inside Saudi Arabia. Inspired by the Arab Spring, the exiled Shi‘a opposition, together with religious scholars and activists inside the country, called for demonstrations demanding the release of political prisoners. They also called for support for the Bahraini pro-democracy movement in its struggle against the Bahraini Sunni regime and the withdrawal of Saudi troops from Bahrain. While the Shi‘a are a minority in Saudi Arabia, they are a majority in Bahrain.

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Sectarianism as an eternal and primordial disposition of the societies of the Middle East fails to explain the current turmoil in the Arab world. Rather, it is the instrumentalization of religious differences, diversity, and pluralism in political struggles of regimes against their constituencies that ignite the lethal sectarianism witnessed across the region. In fact, the sectarian lens of the alleged Sunni-Shi‘a divide obscures rather than illuminates complex realities on the ground. It masks the challenging political and economic changes that have swept the region, not to mention the ongoing foreign interventions and their impacts. Depicting the power struggles in the region as sectarian wars masks deep-rooted economic deprivation and inequality, resulting from decades of rural–urban migration, impoverishment of the countryside, and the appropriation of land by new elites in the cities. Added to this is the regional rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia, two important countries, each of which claims to support the interests of its co-religionists. The political rivalry between the two countries, and competition over spheres of influence in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain, and more recently, Yemen, have made sectarianism a powerful narrative concealing real political, economic, and social injustices and rivalries between groups, states, and powerful non-state actors.

It is true that religious identities continue to be prominent, but sectarianism is something totally different: the deadly politicization of these religious identities. To assess why most of the Arab world is increasingly becoming a wasteland torn apart by violence committed in the name of sectarian identity and solidarity, we must turn to hidden realities that most observers refuse to see. One of these is the continuing ascendency of unpopular and brutal clan-type presidents and kings. Despite the election of presidents and the crowning of old kings and emirs, Middle East leaders have resisted real inclusion and continued to pursue politics by either force or bribery. They all came to realize that their narrow legitimacy can only be enhanced if they turn sections of the population into clients, benefiting from lavish economic opportunities in return for total loyalty.

Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, brought in Christians to represent him abroad, while many Shi‘a dominated his Ba‘ath Party, leaving security and intelligence matters in the hands of his most loyal Sunni kin. Alawite President Bashar al-Assad of Syria retains high-ranking posts in the air force and intelligence services for his loyal clan, while allowing new merchant Sunni families to benefit from neoliberal economic openings. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt entertained the idea of speaking in the name of Sunnis before he was ousted, but in reality his concerns centered on turning his small family into a powerful clan along the lines of his contemporaries among Arab presidents and kings. Such clan-like leadership cannot be easily considered sectarian. The rulers have no sectarian identity nor affiliation, but both their opponents—often the excluded masses—and the outside world want to see them through a sectarian lens. These presidents worked on the assumption that to maintain control one has to classify the people as belonging to different primordial and eternal units, playing one group against another in a long and brutal political game. Ruling elites have not always been charitable toward their own co-religionists, and cannot be automatically considered loyal to their own sects. In reality, they worshiped their own clans and rewarded clients regardless of their sectarian identity.

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But individual Saudi kings are manipulative political actors, driven by survival rather than sectarian solidarity. Take King Faisal, who in the 1960s supported the Shi‘a Zaydi monarchists in Yemen against the republicans, who were backed by Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt.³¹ Domestically, King Abdullah and his governor in the oil-rich Eastern Province manipulated various Shi‘a notables and religious scholars, who were occasionally summoned to pledge allegiance to the king after the sporadic demonstrations and eruptions of violence. The king used the Shi‘a and the violence in the area to frighten the majority and deter it from demanding any political changes. Every time the Shi‘a demonstrated, the majority was fed the discourse of being targeted by outside forces and their local agents. When Salman replaced King Abdullah in 2015 he immediately launched a war on Yemen, dubbed Operation Decisive Storm, to absorb the domestic tension and dissatisfaction over his predecessor’s policies, which appeared weak and stagnant. The Saudi narrative about this ongoing war continues to be articulated in sectarian language as it is projected as an attempt to destroy Iran’s influence in the Arabian Peninsula and its surrogates, the Zaydi Houthis in Yemen, thus demonstrating the leadership’s credentials as an upholder of Sunni interests.

Topic 6: The geopolitical strategy of ISIS is maximally sectarian.

Resource (IX): Hasan Hasan, “The Sectarianism of the Islamic State: Ideological Roots and Political Context.” in Frederic Wehrey (ed.), Beyond Sunni and Shia: The Roots of Sectarianism in a Changing Middle East (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017):39-60

Since the self-proclaimed Islamic State swept through large swaths of northwestern Iraq and eastern Syria in the summer of 2014, the origins of its sectarian and ultra-extremist ideology have been debated in the region and beyond.¹ The enslavement of hundreds of Yazidi women in Sinjar, the slaughter of at least 1,500 Shia soldiers in Tikrit and hundreds of Sunni tribesmen in Syria and Iraq, and the beheading of Western hostages and Syrian and Iraqi civilians triggered a collective soul-searching that soon turned into a religious and political blame game.² A Saudi commentator typified the debate when he said on Twitter that the Islamic State’s “actions are but an epitome of what we have studied in our school curriculum. If the curriculum is sound, then [the Islamic State] is right, and if it is wrong, then who bears responsibility?”³

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Takfirism to the extreme

The Islamic State is part of a legacy of takfiri schools and ideas to emerge from al-Qaeda. But while the Islamic State was once affiliated with al-Qaeda, the two groups have ideologically parted ways. Comparing the Islamic State’s vision with al-Qaeda’s, and noting where their paths diverged, helps to shed light on the evolution of the Islamic State’s sectarian ideology.

Differences between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State can be traced back to early encounters between Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Bin Laden and al-Zarqawi differed when they were in Afghanistan in the 1980s, as their successors do today, on the use of extreme violence and the targeting of Shia civilians.³⁴ According to the Islamic State, the worst enemies of Islam are the enemies within. The group argues that focusing on the far enemy (the West) and ignoring the near enemy (Muslim enemies in the region, especially Shia) is ineffective. Under the Islamic State’s vision, the far enemy will be dragged into the region as Osama bin Laden planned, but by attacking the near enemy. This scenario has, in fact, played out since Islamic State fighters took over the northern Iraqi city of Mosul in June 2014, drawing more than sixty countries to the fight against the group.

The Iraq war of 2003 provided space for al-Zarqawi to spread his sectarian vision. Iraq’s distinctly cross-sectarian familial bonds had previously made it largely resistant to sectarianism. Yet, al-Zarqawi’s followers succeeded in kindling a civil war after bombing the Shia Askari Shrine in Samarra in 2006. Extremist ideas brought to Iraq by al-Qaeda after 2003 became entrenched as al-Zarqawi’s jihadi group evolved into a local movement under the leadership of Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, who ruled the Islamic State in Iraq from 2006 to 2010, and his successor, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who currently leads the group.

For al-Qaeda, such a focus on Shia would distract from the fight against the West. Furthermore, mainstream Sunni clergy reject a genocidal attitude toward the Shia public. Al-Qaeda’s central leadership has admonished the Islamic State (and its earlier incarnations) against attacking Shia civilians. Bin Laden reportedly favored an alliance between Shia and Sunni groups that would position them for a joint attack on the West.³⁵

According to a letter published by the US State Department, al-Zarqawi urged bin Laden to focus on Shia. He wrote: “If you agree with us on [targeting Shia] … we will be your readied soldiers…. If things appear otherwise to you, we are brothers, and the disagreement will not spoil [our] friendship.”³⁶ The Islamic State’s current leaders have criticized al-Qaeda’s mellow stance, as they call it, toward Shia,³⁷ and in May 2014 Islamic State spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani said that al-Qaeda was deliberately avoiding confrontation with Iran and Shia.

In July 2005, current al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri addressed al-Qaeda’s position on Shia in a letter he sent to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He cited religious and practical reasons for al-Qaeda in Iraq to steer clear of targeting the Shia public and places of worship. Referencing Ibn Taymiyyah, he wrote that “such acts affect the protected blood of women, children, and noncombatant Shia public, who are protected because they are excused for their ignorance [of true religious doctrine, unlike Shia clerics]. This is the consensus of the Sunni toward the Shia public and ignorant followers.”³⁸

Al-Qaeda officially disassociated itself from the Islamic State in February 2014. Generally, outside Islamic State-held territories, the Islamic State has failed to win the support of any prominent jihadi ideologues, with the exception of a few jihadi clerics. Most jihadi ideologues have criticized the group’s indiscriminate violence and sectarian bent. Al-Zarqawi’s old mentor Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi has described the group as “deviant,” and has criticized its public beheadings and alienation of local Muslim communities and armed groups in Syria.³⁹

The Islamic State’s ideological divergence from al-Qaeda is discernible in its outlook and actions toward clerics and leaders as well. The rigidity of the Islamic State’s ideology stands out even in a jihadi landscape marked by rigidity. Its refusal to bend creates a culture of takfirism within takfirism, where any leniency is forbidden.

In a video interview posted online in October 2013, Sami al-Aridi—the top cleric of the al-Qaeda-linked Nusra Front—explained some of the ideas that differentiate the Islamic State from other jihadi groups, including al-Qaeda. In contrast to the Islamic State, al-Aridi cited as legitimate scholars mainstream Wahhabi clerics, such as Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti Abd al-Aziz Al al-Sheikh and prominent theologian Abd al-Aziz Ibn Baz.⁴⁰ He noted that al-Qaeda adheres to the four Sunni schools of jurisprudence and is more accommodating than the Islamic State of Muslim clerics, often engaging them.⁴¹

In contrast, the Islamic State considers clerics a key factor in the persistence of tyrannical, illegitimate governments in the Muslim world. The Islamic State believes that tabayun (a process of investigation) is sometimes needed to determine whether a person is a true Muslim. According to al-Aridi, the Islamic State declares a Muslim to be kafir (an infidel or unbeliever) based on intuitive suspicion, consequentiality, and vagueness.⁴²

For the Islamic State, ordinary Muslims receive their religious education from clerics who are aligned with corrupt Muslim rulers who perpetuate Western hegemony. Accordingly, the Islamic State prioritizes the fight against clerics and rulers over the fight against the West.⁴³

The Islamic State’s particular sectarian outlook is also characterized by the tendency to emphasize sunna (the Prophet’s traditions) as integral to the faith—a departure from mainstream clerics who consider them non-obligatory secondary practices that only strengthen faith. The Islamic State deems a person who adheres to these traditions to be respectful of the Prophet and those who do not adhere to the traditions to be disrespectful. Abu Mariya al-Qahtani, who served as the Nusra Front’s chief cleric before he was replaced by al-Aridi, wrote in February 2014 that the Islamic State distinctly integrated these traditions into Islamic jurisprudence, changing terms from “optional” and “recommended” to “obligatory” and “duty.”⁴⁴

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The Islamic State is also extreme in its application of the Salafi concept of nawaqid al-Islam, or nullifiers of Islam. These are a set of conditions with which doctrinaire Salafists believe all Muslims must comply. The founder of Wahhabism narrowed nullifiers to ten acts: engaging in shirk (polytheistic practices); accepting intermediaries in worship; failing to deem infidels as infidels, or doubting or justifying infidels’ unbelief; mocking religious practices; believing that there is better guidance or rules than those of the Prophet; despising a practice ordained by the Prophet; exercising or accepting black magic; allying with infidels against Muslims; believing some people can do without sharia; and deliberately avoiding learning about or practicing religion.

While some clerics insist that there are degrees of faithlessness and that a sinner does not necessarily become an infidel by committing certain acts, the Islamic State generally rejects gradation and believes that all acts of unbelief are effectively equal. In the same vein, it believes that a Muslim has a religious duty to identify and label infidels or apostates, and failure to do so can lead one to become an infidel or apostate himself.

According to the Islamic State, a Muslim becomes an infidel if he fails to declare as an infidel another person worthy of being declared as such. The group declared al-Qaeda leader al-Zawahiri to be an infidel because he sympathized with ousted Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi, who endorsed democracy. The Islamic State considers members of the Nusra Front as apostates because they fight alongside foreign-backed groups.

This view and its implications are particularly pronounced among adherents of a movement in the Islamic State known as the Hazmiyya. At least some Islamic State members believe that some Hazmiyya teachings permit them to kill and rob Muslims who have committed any degree of unbelief.⁴⁶ But this could mean most of the population under their control.⁴⁷ The Hazmiyya misinterpreted a fatwa issued by Saudi cleric Omar bin Ahmed al-Hazimi, who is also identified as a member of the Sahwa generation that merged Islamist ideas with Salafi concepts. The fatwa, which al-Hazimi later recanted, forbade “the excuse of ignorance” in matters of faith, suggesting that a Muslim would be accountable for an act of disbelief even if that person did not intend to do so.⁴⁸ “Hazmiyya say that ignorance is not an excuse,” Sheikh Hassan al-Dagheem, a prominent Syrian cleric, said in an interview.⁴⁹ In December 2014, the Islamic State produced a video showing the execution of four of its members on suspicion of extremism because they had plotted to rebel against the group for failing to implement the full scope of sharia as it preaches the doctrine.⁵⁰

The question of not excusing ignorance in matters of excommunication was at the heart of a major controversy that swept the Islamic State throughout the first half of 2017. Clerics sympathetic to the hardline view seemed to have infiltrated the highest oversight body under al-Baghdadi, namely the Delegated Committee. In May, the committee issued a directive in which it unequivocally declared that Muslims who failed to declare certain fellow Muslims as non-believers would themselves be subject to excommunication. Muslims who qualify as apostates include ordinary Muslims who vote or run for elections. For the Delegated Committee, Muslims who run for elections are claimants of divinity.

The fatwa in May was widely circulated in outlets affiliated with the group’s central media body, which indicate the influence of these ideas was common in the Islamic State’s highest institutions below the so-called caliph. Binali emerged as pivotal to the crisis: shortly after the Delegated Committee’s directive was made, he issued a 20-page response in which he pointed out that the fatwa deviated from the consensus of Islamic jurists, especially the point that excommunication is a foundation of Islam which the edict suggested must take precedence over learning how to pray. Binali was announced dead a month after the fatwa was released, something that added to the intensity of the internal controversy since some of the group’s followers considered his last treatise as a dying will. In the following September, the Delegated Committee retracted the edit it had issued in May, and admitted it had inconsistencies and religious errors. It then issued two recordings clarifying the Islamic State’s creed, insisting that it would continue to apostasize fellow Muslim who accept democratic tools, but it would refrain from calling the exercise an unquestionable fundamental part of Islam since jurists differed about it.