THE SYRIAN JIHAD

Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Evolution of an Insurgency

By Charles R. Lister

500 pp. Oxford University Press. Paper, $24.95.

When I last visited Syria in July 2011, four months after the protests had begun, around 2,000 Syrians had already died. The Syrians I spoke to during that visit were confident that their country would not collapse into civil war as Iraq had. Today, the death toll in Syria stands at over a quarter of a million, and half the population has been displaced from their homes. In “The Syrian Jihad,” Charles R. Lister explains how a popular revolution calling for justice and better government metamorphosed into an intractable civil war with a prominent role for jihadists.

When Bashar al-Assad became president on the death of his father, Hafez, in 2000, there was initial optimism that the youthful leader would bring about reform. And in the first few years of his rule, attempts were made to liberalize the country both politically and economically. Assad increased the representation of Sunnis, Christians and Druze within his Alawite-dominated regime, and won the loyalty of Damascus’s business elite with a partial opening up of the economy. The beneficiaries, however, turned out largely to be Assad’s cronies, while inequality increased. Rising fuel prices and reduced access to water resulted in lower living standards for the middle class, and drought forced many farmers to migrate from the countryside to the cities, where they struggled to make a living.

Meanwhile, Assad maintained a pervasive security apparatus. He continued his father’s strategy of “infiltrating and exporting internal threats,” perhaps fearful of retaliation for the 1982 massacre of an estimated 10,000-40,000 Sunnis in the Muslim Brotherhood stronghold of Hama. And after 2003, he facilitated the entry of jihadis into Iraq to join the resistance against the American occupation.

In March 2011, the detention and torture of children in the southern town of Deraa sparked peaceful protests, but the government responded with brutal repression. This had a reverse effect, with Syrians forming militias to protect themselves, and leading to the rise of the Free Syrian Army, the so-called moderate armed opposition.

From the outset, Assad sought to portray the insurgents as Islamist terrorists in order to undermine them in the eyes of the international community. He consciously released Syrian jihadis from his jails so that they would assume prominent roles in the opposition.

But as the insurgents succeeded in taking more ground, Assad’s army found itself stretched to the breaking point. Although it was led by an Alawite officer corps, a considerable number of the foot soldiers were Sunni and therefore regarded as unreliable. By 2013, Assad was forced to turn to his closest allies, Iran and Hezbollah, for extra manpower, further sectarianizing the conflict.

Lister painstakingly tracks the evolution of the insurgency month by month, from March 2011 to September 2015. With granular detail, he describes the myriad armed groups and how they compete against one another, attract outside support, change alliances and sometimes cooperate or fight among themselves. He argues that the rise of violent jihadi groups was due to the failure of the international community to back the moderates. But he also says that the Islamist groups were more successful at attracting recruits because they were better organized, more committed and better financed. He contrasts them with the Free Syrian Army, whose leadership was based outside the country in southern Turkey, and whose financial support came from different donors with different interests, leading to factions competing against one another.

Lister dates the arrival of ISIS to spring 2013. In Iraq, the failure of the international community to uphold the 2010 election results, and the support of both Iran and the United States for a second premiership for the sectarian Shiite Nouri al-Maliki, had devastating consequences for the region. Maliki accused Sunni politicians of terrorism and drove them out of the political process. He stopped paying the salaries of the Sahwa (Sunni awakening) that, fighting alongside American forces during the 2007 surge, had defeated Al Qaeda in Iraq. He arrested Sunnis en masse. This created the environment that enabled ISIS to rise from the ashes of Al Qaeda in Iraq, presenting itself as the defender of the Sunnis — and then expanding into Syria.

As Lister describes it, ISIS was particularly fearful of being stabbed in the back again by Sahwa, and through violent intimidation it attempted to suppress any potential opposition. Yet, at the same time, ISIS sought to hold and govern territory by winning the “hearts and minds” of the local population. In Aleppo, for example, it held “fun days” where “both children and adults were encouraged to take part in interactive games. Children were challenged to speedily eat ice creams and watermelon, and also quizzed on their knowledge of the Quran, with prizes presented to winners. Adult men, meanwhile, took part in games of musical chairs, arm wrestling and tugs of war.”

Assad was able to benefit greatly from the opposition’s internal rivalries. The infighting in Syria between ISIS and the Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra (or the Nusra Front), for instance, led to their split and to Al Qaeda’s disavowal of ISIS in February 2014. Lister also describes how in 2014 “the extremists and the moderates were now at each other’s throats and the fight against the regime was temporarily demoted to second rank.”

Lister’s knowledge of the various groups is impressive. A visiting fellow at the Brookings Doha Center, he has met with the leaders of over a hundred opposition groups. He estimates that there are at least 150,000 insurgents spread across 1,500 groups. And over the course of the civil war, he calculates that at least 30,000 foreign fighters from over 100 countries have come to Syria to fight.

“The Syrian Jihad” is not easy going, mainly because of its level of detail. It is not for the general reader seeking an overall understanding of the Syrian civil war. But it is an indispensable guide to the different jihadi factions. It will also be invaluable to students of comparative civil wars, who will recognize the familiar patterns of how individuals mobilize; how regimes respond; how groups are formed, organized and financed; what motivates people to join them and the war-fighting tactics they use.

What lesson should the United States draw from Syria? Surely not that the primary driver of the conflict is “ancient hatreds” dating back to the schism in Islam in the seventh century. Lister comments that the rise of ISIS and its expansion has “revealed the real threat that political instability and state collapse represents.” The civil war is taking place in an environment where the legitimacy of regimes is contested, and in the midst of a larger geopolitical struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which make use of religion to mobilize support.

As with Iraq, the United States has missed many missed opportunities to help influence better outcomes in Syria. While the Obama administration weighed the cost of intervention, Lister laments that it never honestly examined the potential consequences of failing to back the moderate armed opposition. Nonetheless, the greatest blame must be laid at the feet of Assad himself, who was unwilling or unable to reform, while portraying himself as the only alternative to ISIS amid the chaos he helped engineer. Tragically, it is the Syrian people who continue to pay the price.