Out of the Mountains

by David Kilcullen

  The immediate trigger for the protests was the arrest and beating of three teenage boys, inspired by protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere, who tagged a building with anti-regime graffiti. Several hundred people rallied to demand the boys’ release, and the protests turned violent after security forces fired on the crowd.143 Riot police killed more than four hundred protestors, particularly targeting mourners at protestors’ funerals, in the first three months of clashes in Daraa alone. They attempted to seal off Daraa from the outside world, but as in the other uprisings, thousands of demonstrators across the country subsequently took to the streets, and the demonstrations quickly spread to towns across Syria in March and April 2011. Activists used cellphones and social media to connect with each other and with international supporters, and human networks linked urban dwellers in Damascus and Aleppo (Syria’s two largest cities) to people in rural areas experiencing unrest. By early May, hundreds had been killed or detained in massive riots, and the army had deployed tanks and thousands of troops in Homs and Daraa to suppress what was now morphing into an armed uprising.144

  Pro-regime militias, known in Syria as shabiha, “ghosts,” committed massacres in several towns, and secret police arrested (and in many cases tortured, killed, or “disappeared”) dissidents across the country as the conflict escalated in May and June.145 The shabiha, in a pattern that mirrors the other examples we have explored, were drawn largely from gangs of marginalized street youth, criminal networks, and organized thugs who operated in poor, marginalized “garrison districts” in Syrian cities and often had close patron-client relationships with regime officials. As the uprising escalated, the shabiha became a key irregular auxiliary force, which the regime regularly employed in order to intimidate the population.146

  Learning from the experience of the Egyptian and Libyan regimes, the Syrian government under President Bashar al-Assad quickly offered a series of compromises and concessions, but none of these offers to relax regime restrictions and introduce limited democratic freedoms was enough to appease the protestors. Assad initially left the Internet and phone networks up and quickly mobilized an Iranian-supported Electronic Army to harass activists, hack opposition websites, and undermine anti-regime cohesion by spreading confusing messages.147 More sophisticated than the government in Egypt, the Syrian regime had created an extremely effective system of wiretapping, cellphone interception, and Internet surveillance, and so the security forces’ instinct at first was to allow unrestricted use of these tools as a way of gathering information on the protestors. When protestors began using cellphones to post updates on Twitter, however, and using cellphone cameras to gather and broadcast images of regime brutality, this caught the security services by surprise, forcing a rethink.148

  Over the preceding decade, there’d been an explosion in digital connectivity and information access in Syria. Hafez al-Assad, Syria’s dictator from 1971 until his death in 2000, had enforced extremely tight restrictions on information and connectivity—allowing no international media, satellite television, cellphones, or Internet access whatsoever.149 However, his son and successor, Bashar al-Assad, was something of a computer geek, taking an active role as the head of the Syrian Computer Society after his brother Basel died in 1994. On his accession as president in 2000, Bashar al-Assad initially made efforts to modernize Syria, tolerating a limited amount of political dissent during a short-lived period known as the Damascus Spring, and opening up electronic connectivity to ordinary Syrians, to include satellite and cable television, cellphone networks, and open Internet access.150

  Despite occasional crackdowns—the regime banned YouTube, for example, in April 2007 after the site uploaded a clip of President Assad’s wife, Asma, with her underwear exposed in a gust of wind151—Syrians generally had excellent access to digital connectivity, and Internet penetration and cellphone usage rates in Syria were vastly higher than in any other country affected by the Arab Awakening. According to World Bank data, between 2002 and 2012, Syrian cellphone usage rates “shot up by 2,347 percent (by contrast, they increased by 83 percent in the US during the same time period). This was almost double that of similarly repressive environments in Egypt and Tunisia at the time. What is perhaps even more incredible is Syria’s Internet penetration growth rates, which shot up by 883 percent, greater than Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia (for comparison, Internet penetration only increased by 27 percent in the US during the same time period).”152

  But by June 4, 2011, the regime was forced to suspend Internet access in an attempt to stanch the flow of damaging images and video clips documenting regime brutality, which were being posted on the Internet and broadcast on satellite television. Another reason for the ban on land-based Internet may have been that this enabled the regime’s security services to detect who was still using satellite-based Internet in the country, and thus to locate and target dissidents and guerrilla groups.153 As in the other uprisings, when the regime banned the Internet, Syrians improvised mesh networks, smuggled videos out to Lebanon to be uploaded there, and jury-rigged their own satellite uplinks (a traditional pastime—under Hafez al-Assad’s ban, the Syrian army had run a lucrative side business in black market sales of satellite dishes so that people could access banned satellite television channels).154 At the same time, international activists (including Anonymous, once again, with #OpSyria) and a network of diaspora supporters and social media networks stepped into the breach.

  By July, cities across the country—including Damascus, Aleppo, Daraa, Idlib, Homs, and Hama, together representing almost 40 percent of Syria’s population of just under 21 million—were experiencing violent unrest. Protestors were arming themselves, guerrilla groups were forming, and the regime had lost control of many outlying towns and cities. As in Libya, a civilian democracy movement was emerging in parallel with a diverse armed resistance that included jihadist groups, secular nationalists, ethnic separatists, military defectors, and tribal groups. On the ground in Syria, leaders of armed groups rapidly marginalized and overshadowed the unarmed pro-democracy movement as the violence spread, emphasizing the importance (which we noted in the last chapter) of coercive means as the underlying enabler for competitive control over populations: armed groups could always outcompete unarmed groups at the coercive end of the spectrum of control, and thus rapidly became dominant on the ground.

  At the same time, liberated areas formed district and neighborhood councils to administer their areas and provide essential services once the regime had withdrawn. Relations between the armed resistance and these local administrative councils were often complex and fractious, with armed groups trying to co-opt or intimidate the councils, and civilians trying to manipulate armed groups to further their own interests and minimize risk. The situation stabilized somewhat after September 25, when military defectors (many of whom were Sunni officers of the Syrian army) formally announced an armed insurrection against the regime and formed the Free Syrian Army. A week later, on October 2, civilian opposition groups formed the Syrian National Council, similar to Libya’s National Transition Council, and sought to impose order on a chaotic set of military and political actors opposing the regime. In this effort, the rebel movement was (consciously or unconsciously) acting to create the kind of wide-spectrum competitive control system that we discussed in Chapter 3, adding persuasive and administrative capabilities to their existing coercive capabilities in order to give them more resiliency and a stronger capacity to control territory and population.

  Unlike in Libya, however, there has so far been no NATO intervention in Syria, so the regime has enjoyed virtually uncontested control of the sea and air throughout the conflict, and (apart from some shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles and light anti-aircraft guns) the rebels haven’t been able to challenge the regime in these domains at all. For this reason, and because Syria is much less littoralized than the other countries we’ve examined, the fighting in Syria has been just as urban, but much less coastal, t
han in Libya, Tunisia, or Egypt. Weapons and humanitarian supplies, instead of being smuggled in via sea as in Libya, must come in overland. For example, Libyan supporters of the Free Syrian Army, some of the most active international supporters of the uprising, have to send shipments by ship or cargo plane from Libya via a circuitous route to Q atar, then by air into Turkey, then into Syria by truck across rebel-controlled border crossings, such as Bab al-Hawa in northwestern Syria.155 Attempts by international supporters to encourage the rebels to capture and thus unlock part of Syria’s Mediterranean coastline, so as to open up a direct sea-based supply route, have failed to date, and the regime continues to control the ports and coastal areas.156

  As well as sectarian tension between Syria’s pro-regime Alawite and Shiite minorities (which account for about 15 percent of Syria’s population and dominate the mountainous areas overlooking Syria’s coastline) and the Sunni majority (75 percent of the population, mostly centered further inland), a strong urban-rural dynamic had emerged by late 2011. The regime held Damascus and other major urban centers but was increasingly ceding control of Syria’s rural hinterland, and many smaller towns, to the rebellion. In part, this reflected small-town opposition to the regime that was brought on by a feeling of neglect and relative deprivation (as with Benghazi residents in Libya), but unlike in Libya and Egypt, the major fault line in Syria emerged between rural and small-town residents, who felt marginalized at the expense of Damascus, and big-city populations, some of whom were pro-regime for economic and political reasons or were part of the same Alawite minority as President al-Assad. Syria is thus, in many ways, a war of the peripheral and marginalized against the dominant center, a fact that’s reflected in the spatial pattern of the violence, with the regime holding urban cores and major public areas and the rebels operating in city outskirts, periurban areas, some marginalized big-city districts, and rural zones.

  Underlying these tensions, however, were dynamics similar to those we’ve observed in other examples: cities under stress, marginalized urban and periurban populations, high youth unemployment, and lack of carrying capacity in a society experiencing significant population growth and urbanization but limited economic expansion over the past generation. The strongest areas of opposition to the regime were Syria’s poorer, more radical Sunni areas (the so-called “poor, pious and rural”).157 These included districts such as al-Ghuta in Damascus, Baba Amr in Homs, and Bustan al-Basha in Aleppo, places where some of the largest initial anti-regime protests broke out, and where the demonstrations first became militarized. There was also extremely strong anti-regime activity in cities with high levels of poverty, including Daraa and Homs, and in drought-affected urban districts in cities such as Deir ez-Zor that had experienced water shortages before the uprising.

  The regime’s economic policies—including economic liberalization under President Bashar al-Assad in the early 2000s—had benefited only a small minority of the Syrian population. This created income inequalities and a perception of favoritism, unfairness, and social injustice, and it spurred in many Syrians a sense of relative deprivation. Businessmen and urban elites closely connected with the government, along with merchants in Damascus and Aleppo, were the prime beneficiaries of the government’s economic policies, and these populations tended to support the regime (as did recently arrived Iraqi refugees, who depended on government handouts). By early 2011, however, the rest of Syria’s population was experiencing a falling standard of living, declines in government subsidies for food and fuel, water shortages, and extremely high youth unemployment brought on by a massive youth bulge.158 This economically and politically marginalized population tended to be heavily anti-regime, and it included Syria’s large population of Palestinian refugees, many of whom had been in the country since 1948, living in periurban refugee camps such as Yarmouk and in the poorer districts of major cities.

  As the conflict escalated through 2011–12 with battles in Aleppo and Damascus, increasing numbers of combatants, atrocities on both sides, and a series of failed cease-fire attempts, most of the fighting centered in urban areas (as in the other examples we have looked at), but there was very little coastal fighting, probably because the dominant population groups in coastal areas (Alawites and Shiites) tended to support the regime, and Syria’s largest cities, Aleppo and Damascus, weren’t on coastlines. In mid-August, there was some littoral maneuver and coastal shelling by regime forces, including ships offshore, as the regime used gunboats and tanks in an effort to maintain control of the Sunni-majority port city of Latakia, but in the absence of international intervention, government forces quickly regained control of the city, cementing their dominance over Syria’s coastline.159

  As we noted in Chapter 2, the Free Syrian Army and other groups developed a suite of “do-it-yourself” weapons, drawing on the technical skills of Syria’s urbanized population and access to industrial facilities. These weapons included low-tech but effective slingshots, catapults, and trebuchets used to lob homemade bombs and shells over the rooftops of urban areas such as Aleppo, as well as prefabricated launch stands to allow individual rockets to be fired electrically.160 At the high-tech end of the scale, fighters built an armored vehicle around a car chassis, including a remotely controlled machine gun operated by the driver using a Game Boy videogame console, externally mounted video cameras, and a flat-screen TV.161 The Free Syrian Army repurposed a factory in Aleppo that had previously manufactured iron and steel into a mortar bomb production line, and produced grenades, bombs, shells, and rockets in similar factories. As in Libya, they mounted heavy machine guns and anti-aircraft weapons on pickup trucks to create technicals, manufactured improvised mortars and rocket launchers, and fitted improvised armor to cars to create makeshift tanks.162 They produced homemade explosives, pipe bombs, and missiles, and created rifle-launched grenades that could be fired over rooftops from street to street in urban areas. As in the other conflicts we’ve studied, the rebels relied on a technically skilled and capable urban population, plus access to urban areas that contained workshops and industrial facilities, to enable this kind of homegrown DIY warfare.

  In 1998, a group of RAND researchers led by John Arquilla, David Ronfeldt, Melissa Fuller, and Graham Fuller identified the potential for what they called “social netwar,” arguing that

  the information revolution is favoring and strengthening network forms of organization, while simultaneously making life difficult for old hierarchical forms. The rise of networks—especially “all-channel” networks, in which every node is connected to every other node—means that power is migrating to non-state actors, who are able to organize into sprawling multi-organizational networks more readily than traditional, hierarchical, state actors can. This means that conflicts will increasingly be waged by “networks,” perhaps more than by “hierarchies.” It also means that whoever masters the network form stands to gain major advantages.163

  All the examples I have cited from Syria tend to suggest that although the war is far from over, it’s showing many similarities to the other Arab Spring conflicts we’ve examined in this chapter. In particular, enhanced digital connectivity—along with urbanization, the democratization of both weapons technology and communications technology, and the emergence of virtual theaters made possible by social networks and the Internet—seems to be enabling something approaching full-scale social netwar in Syria.

  III. Networked Connectivity and Urban Conflict

  One morning in Baghdad in early 2006, I was in a meeting with members of the Iraqi prime minister’s national security council. U.S. vice president Dick Cheney had visited Iraq in mid-December 2005, and one of the Iraqi security advisers was unhappy about a press conference he had given. “Your vice president comes here, he sits with us,” the official said, “and he says, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll stand with you, we won’t leave Iraq till you’re ready, we’re with you.’ Then he flies to Paris, he gives a press conference, and he says, ‘Don’t worry, we�
�re leaving Iraq, we’ll have our troops out of there in a year.’ Do you think we don’t have satellite TV? Do you think we can’t speak French? If you tell us one thing, and you tell other people something else, do you think we won’t find out? How stupid do think we are?”164

  The same thing these Iraqi officials complained of is affecting regimes across the region today, but even more so. A report by the International Crisis Group in July 2011, for example, quoted a Syrian regime insider as saying: “They [the regime] believe that some of the methods used in the early 1980s still apply. Today, every Syrian with a mobile phone can turn himself into a live satellite television broadcaster. How can we resort to such means when we are facing 24 million satellite televisions in our midst?”165 The explosion in electronic connectivity—not just satellite television, but also Internet, cellphones, and social media—that we’ve discussed in this chapter is merely one aspect of the broader megatrend of enhanced connectedness, which will affect how most people on the planet will be living within the next generation. The Iraq war—with the kind of connectivity this Iraqi official described, with its urban fighting, and with its technically skilled population able to repurpose garage door openers, TV remote controls, cellphones, and satellite dishes as weapons of war—was just a mild foretaste of what conflict will be like in the connected cities of the future. The Arab uprisings, particularly the Libyan and Syrian civil wars, are another, and remote warfare capabilities (drones and cyberweapons, but also crowd-sourced logistics and intelligence and the involvement of global networks in local conflicts) are yet another.

  Hafez al-Assad denied his population virtually all access to digital media, but when his son Bashar reversed the policy in 2000 there was an explosion of connectivity in Syria, at an even faster pace than in the rest of the world. When Muammar Gaddafi opened up to the outside world in 2003, Libyans experienced a similar sudden increase in situational awareness that transformed ordinary people’s understanding—people in Benghazi could suddenly see how they were being shortchanged, people in Syria could see what was going on in the rest of the Arab world, and when the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt succeeded, it was only a matter of time before Libyans rose up as well. The same connectivity enabled the Syrian uprising and is creating pathways that now allow Libyan groups to provide material and political support to Syrians as they fight their own regime.