In the decades that followed, both the tribes of the Syrian desert – the Bedouin – as well as the Kurdish people – also tribal – continued to maintain their cultural integrity, despite modern borders and artificial frontiers. Syria’s northern border with Iraq and Turkey was a land of Kurds who were able to move back and forth across mountainous border terrain difficult to monitor. Over time, as Kurds in these border regions opposed Turkish policy, they increasingly took refuge in Syria or in Iraq. They established and maintained social and political ties across borders and were often able to establish links that gave them, even if unofficial, laissez-passers across the Syrian–Turkish, Syrian–Iraqi and Iranian–Turkish borders superimposed over their rugged homeland.
The Bedouin of Syria once largely inhabited the Syrian badia, raising herds of camel, sheep and goat. They are social groups based on kinship – segmentary lineages with membership maintained by behaviour appropriate to tribal identity, including institutions of stylised generosity and hospitality. The greatest confederation of these tribes cut across Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt/Sinai. Among these were the Aneza, the most powerful tribes in Syria, and the Shammar, though the latter were largely in Iraq after the Sykes–Picot divisions. Both were closely tied to the house of Al Saud, the ruling family in Saudi Arabia since at least the last century, through marriage – this created social and political ties which led in turn to the provision of refuge, support and salaries. Camel-raising tribes were considered the elite of these groupings, as they maintained long-range migrations that took them deep into Arabia, where their blood ties to the house of Al Saud meant that they had powerful protectors during times of strife in Syria. The second rung, so to speak, were the traditional sheep herders, who kept to the borders of the desert and maintained close relations with the larger cities on their periphery. These sheep-herding groups also formed themselves into lineages and tribes and could also protect or threaten local agricultural settlements.
Map of Arabia (Map prepared by Michael Atherton, Bodleian Library, for author)
Over the past sixty years many Bedouin have settled, turning to agriculture and herding, or giving up their herding practices altogether. The lines between the elite and the more common tribes have begun to blur as more camel-raising tribes turned to sheep herding instead. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, about 15 per cent of the entire population of Syria self-identified as Bedouin. As the Syrian uprising unfolded in 2011, many of the leaders of Bedouin groups joined the peaceful demonstrations and called for greater freedoms, dignity and respect. But when the government replied with live fire, it was the Bedouin who took out their small arms – still in their possession – and began to fire back. Along a string of towns and villages from Aleppo, Hama and Homs to Deraa, Bedouin formed local self-defence units, protecting their neighbourhoods and traditional territory. At first the Assad government tried to bribe the Bedouin to stay quiet. In late summer 2011, at the end of the month of fasting (Ramadan), it was reported that the government paid individual tribesmen $100 to come out and greet Bashar al-Assad on his visit to the region near Raqqa. By 2012, many tribal leaders, like other Syrians, had left the country, but they continued to use social media – individual websites – to keep their tribesmen informed and to support their efforts to survive and resist. A tribal gathering in Mafraq, Jordan, of the main Bedouin tribal confederations, Aneza, Shammar and Baggara, and Kurdish tribes as well as Druze representatives, agreed to continue to press to protect their local rural communities and to keep services operating while at the same time opposing the Assad government.
When Syria became independent in 1943, the newly elected parliament tried to curb the powers of the Bedouin tribes. In 1956 it adopted an aggressive national policy to abolish all the tribal privileges that the French had bestowed upon the Bedouin between 1920 and 1943, during their League of Nations Mandate over the country. But the new Law of the Tribes of 1956 (Decree no. 124) continued to permit the Bedouin to carry arms in the badia. Land reform and government confiscation of large swathes of the badia saw many of the tribal leaders leaving the country for Saudi Arabia and Jordan. However, by the 1970s, Hafez al-Assad, on taking over the Baath Party in an internal coup d’état, recalled the tribal leaders who had left the decade earlier and encouraged them to return to a form of ‘self-governance’ in the desert areas of Syria. Over time this policy saw increasing numbers of Syrians of rural origin self-identifying as Bedouin. Belonging to a tribe was coming to be seen as impressive and important in securing protection from outsiders. With this enhanced ‘self-governance’, many tribes increased their movement across borders. Certainly during the years after the 2003 Anglo-American attack on Iraq, many Shammar Bedouin moved their herds and their families into Syria. The smaller, less mobile tribes moved into Lebanon and also benefited from the Syrian security presence in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon.
As the Syrian uprising turned violent, Bedouin sought to protect their neighbourhoods and settlements using their small arms as well as new weaponry smuggled into Syria following traditional migration lines into Saudi Arabia. Bedouin tribes originally engaged with the uprising as self-defence units, but over time they began to take sides. The Aneza tribes had strong links to Saudi Arabia so largely supported the opposition to Assad’s government, while the traditional sheep-herding tribes, with links to Syria’s former Ministry of Interior activity in Lebanon, tended to support the government.
By 2012, forced migrants started to flood out of Syria. The Christian communities, however, largely stayed put, not feeling threatened with ‘ethnic cleansing’ in areas of government control. Perhaps, as well, the government had made it a point to show the world how civilised it was in the way that it protected its minority religious groups, especially its Christians. Along the southern border with Jordan, most of the forced migrants were rural and largely settled Bedouin. They were crossing the artificially created Sykes–Picot borders to seek refuge and shelter often with fellow tribesmen who were Jordanian nationals. The flight over the border to the west into Lebanon was again largely kinsmen seeking kinsmen. Many of those who fled to Lebanon had relatives or social networks in the country to help them find succour. Even on Syria’s northern border the forced migration was of like to like. The first wave of migration was to the Hatay – a former region of Syria given to Turkey in 1938 while under French Mandate. Thus there was a mosaic of religious, linguistic and ethnic communities – a microcosm of Syria – Arab Alevis (Alawites), Arabic-speaking Sunnis, Turkish-speaking Sunnis, Kurds, Turkmen, Circassians, Orthodox Christians, Jewish communities and the last surviving Armenian village in Turkey. They all had relatives in Syria and these relatives came to them seeking refuge.
The Kurds of Syria were the last to become forced migrants, largely because they protected their communities from attack successfully until 2014, when some extremist jihadi groups, along with the Islamic State, attacked Kurdish communities in both Syria and Iraq and set off an evacuation of civilians from these conflict zones. Fortunately, most Kurds have found refuge within Iraqi Kurdistan: Syrian Kurds are now refugees in the Kurdish Regional Government of Iraq; some Iraqi Kurds (Yazidis) first found refuge in Syria but have since moved on to the Kurdish Regional Government, where they have become internally displaced (IDPs). The labels may change but the ties among Kurdish communities remain.
Both the Kurds and the Bedouin were marginalised at the end of the First World War, when the British and the French divided the Levant into spheres of influence. The Kurds were dispossessed without being moved and the Bedouin’s mobility was severely curtailed. Both Kurds and Bedouin, however, were able to maintain their social cohesion through codes of behaviour and beliefs that upheld their tribal identity. As Syria collapsed into civil war, both these groups emerged stronger, protecting their communities and territories through local civil defence units and broader tribal alliances and connections with Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iraq. The Syrian Kurdish fighters’ (Peshmergas) efforts t
o save the Yazidi population exposed on Mount Sinjar in the summer of 2014 resulted in a great tide of public support and sympathy for Kurds in general. The Bedouin have not had such public acclaim, but their continued low-key efforts to maintain services in local communities and their brave resistance to ISIL in regions of Syria near Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor along the Euphrates River is sure to continue. Once the Iraqi Bedouin tribes of Anbar – those who fought with the US-led Awakening campaign in 2008/9 which sought to mobilise Sunni tribes against al-Qaeda – rise up against ISIL (or join the more conciliatory government of Baghdad) they will be followed by the Bedouin in Syria. Those who are in Syria today are increasingly restive. Fear is holding back some initiatives, but time is on their side and it is very likely that in the next few years a coalition of Bedouin tribes and Kurds will be a major force in bringing this episode of death and destruction in the Levant to a close. The lines drawn on the map by Sir Mark Sykes may no longer hold, but the pre-existing social and cultural groups of the Levant, with their multitude of ethno-religious belongings, will remain.
SYRIA SEEN AND REPRESENTED
Robin Yassin-Kassab
I’VE VISITED SYRIA twice, in June and December 2013, since the revolution erupted in the early spring of 2011. Neither visit took me to a country or a people recognisable from Western media reports.
During the first visit, I spent a week leading storytelling workshops with refugee children in the Atmeh camp, which is just inside Syria; it hugs the barbed-wire Turkish border. We were only five people – four Syrian-Americans and me – and we taught our workshops at the Return School in Atmeh. We were working in difficult conditions, dust in our mouths, in tents flapping high-volume in a hot wind, crammed in with dozens of children – girls in one aisle, boys in another – who hadn’t been to school for two years, some of whom were clearly traumatised by their experience. Our workshops supplemented the labours of full-time teachers who were refugees too, and who weren’t being paid.
On that first visit, it was easy to go beyond Atmeh and deep into liberated Syria. I was frightened of the regime bombs I heard exploding in the distance, marked by the occasional plume of smoke, but not of the checkpoints operated by men in either military fatigues or tracksuits, bearded or clean-shaven, sitting under the freedom flag or Islamic banners, who smilingly waved us on. We stopped in Saraqeb, where the al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra was running a sharia court, and walked around unmolested – an unveiled Syrian woman (the writer Amal Hanano) was with us, and an English photographer – in the restaurants and streets. We travelled through Maaret al-Nowman to Kafranbel in Southern Idlib province – once an unheard-of backwater town, now one of Syria’s revolutionary capitals – where people socialised in pool halls, cafés and private homes until the early hours of the morning, smoking, drinking tea and debating any issue that came to mind. At the media committee building, Raed Faris and others were planning and painting the slogans and cartoons for the Friday demonstration. That time the addressee was Obama (Obama! You Send Us Weapons Only to Continue This Conflict?! Send Us Weapons to Win Our Revolution Once and for All!), but Kafranbel’s targets have included, as well as the Assad regime, the opposition’s military and political leaderships, extremist Islamists, Russia and Iran, even North Korea (Kim Jong-un! Your Attempts to Protect Assad by Diverting the World’s Attention to You Is Childish: You’ll Be Spanked for That!). I sat on the terrace with activists, some local and some escaped from regime-controlled areas, visiting expatriate Syrians, including a human rights lawyer and an Italian journalist. The commander of the local Free Army militia dropped by and agreed with Raed’s plan to keep weapons off the town’s streets, ‘for the children’s sake’. I got talking with Manar Ankeer, a young man from a village further south whose entire family had fled to the Gulf. He stayed on under daily bombardment to run a free bakery that fed the villages round about.
On the terrace I shivered to the missile launchers rumbling from the regime base at Wadi Deif (the locals were very used to it and didn’t once flinch). The towns we’d passed through were full of bullet holes and crumpled buildings, shutters buckled by vacuum bombs and children scarred or with missing limbs. Families who had fled from even worse towns were living with rats in demolished or half-built structures. Whether inside the country or across the borders, a journalist doesn’t need a fixer to find him somebody with a story, because every single man, woman and child has a terrible tale to tell. All the horror of war and social breakdown was present and very real. Yet despite everything, this part of Syria did actually feel liberated. My visit showed me a country entirely different from the one I’d known before 2011 – because people expressed themselves freely, and criticised everything, and were struggling to build something for themselves. It was also a Syria entirely unrelated to the landscape evoked by the Western media – populated in the main not by mad-eyed jihadists or sects fated by blood to eternal warfare but by human beings in transformation, sometimes truly remarkable ones.
Many of the activists I met there and later are now wanted by ‘the two states’ – both the Baathist and the Islamic. Pressed on all sides, these are people who have truly made history, enough to compete with and, for a moment, to drown the savage history made by states. This is the generation (working class and rural as well as bourgeois and urban, and religious as well as secular) that produced the non-sectarian freedom movement of 2011 and 2012, and that guards its principles still. These are the youths who established the Local Coordination Committees – nationally interlinked neighbourhood cells of five or seven full-time revolutionaries each, who organised protests and workshops to discuss the kind of society that freedom might bring. As state repression intensified, the LCCs kept count of the murdered, wounded and detained, filmed protests and regime violence, uploading these films to the internet, and provided aid to besieged areas. Later, when the state withdrew or was driven out of revolutionary areas, Revolutionary Councils were set up to administer field hospitals and basic health care, to run bakeries, to provide basic education, electricity supply, rubbish collection and so on. The concept of the LCCs and particularly the Revolutionary Councils was greatly influenced by the work of anarchist thinker Omar Aziz, who believed that radical change couldn’t be brought about by protest alone, but needed the development of alternative structures to the oppressive, hierarchical state. Aziz died in regime detention in February 2013. Syria’s revolutionary experiments in self-government are today beset by Assad’s scorched-earth policy, by Daesh’s religious brand of fascism and by the splintering of an armed opposition that is starved for arms. The focus of the councils is currently limited to community survival. Still, what they have achieved, and continue to achieve, in the most difficult of circumstances, is as worthy of celebration as it is absent from media accounts. In many councils, officials are chosen by election. These are the first real elections to have happened in Syria in half a century.
Alongside massacres and ethnic cleansing, Syrians have also experienced a veritable cultural revolution. Syrian arts are no longer delivered from the top down, from a state-sanctioned elite to a passive audience, but bottom up, or, like the LCCs organisation, horizontally. The evidence of this is in the slogans, cartoons, songs and dances of mass protest, in the graffiti and poster art, in the new hip hop and heavy metal, or in the unorthodox ‘internet poetry’ of Aboud Saeed and others. Most impressive is the plethora of independent TV and radio stations and the publication of more than sixty free newspapers. For instance, the women of Darayya – a suburb of Damascus subjected to siege and daily assault, where people have starved to death – produce and distribute their own newspaper, Aneb Biladi. The culture has also changed in terms of tribal and family relationships. Women’s centres have proliferated in the liberated areas (even areas dominated by Jabhat al-Nusra); conservative women have left their homes to protest, to deliver aid and ammunition, to film and record, even to fight. Such social change, even in the midst of contrary developments, is too great to be erased.
Most of my second visit, in December 2013, was spent on the Turkish side of the border. Our group was much bigger this time, comprising dentists, artists, photographers and football coaches, and our efforts were concentrated on the Salam School for Syrian refugees in Reyhanli, a small frontier town bursting with Syrian schools, charities and orphanages.
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