Conclusion

The Syrian conflict can appear dizzyingly complicated, but grasping its underlying logic can help make sense of it all. The uprising was concentrated in rural towns that were marginalized by the regime’s neoliberal economic opening after 2000; in contrast, wealthy metropoles like western Aleppo and Damascus never wavered in their support for the regime. Within the marginalized rural towns, the Syrian opposition broadly fell into two camps: a relatively wealthy merchant and landowning elite who had historic links to the Muslim Brotherhood, and poor Syrians primarily engaged in informal labor. The merchant elite formed a cohesive network with transnational ties to foreign states; after 2011, they became the primary clients of the Qatar–Turkey axis. Because this network was cohesive, built on long-standing ties of trust, and displayed relative ideological coherence, they were easier for outside powers to control. Thus Qatar enjoyed significant capacity to influence battlefield dynamics. This proved most evident in the pivotal summer months of 2012, when a Turkish–Qatari push helped expel the regime from swathes of northern Syria, and pushed countryside rebels to invade and capture portions of Aleppo city. The poorer segment of the opposition, on the other hand, lacked strong pre-2011 ties beyond those of immediate kinship and neighborhood. There were few long-standing ties of trust between poor FSA rebels in, say, Idlib than those in Manbij. Moreover, they lacked pre-2011 ties to foreign powers. Finally, this milieu had little by way of ideological coherence. These factors together made it more difficult for outside powers to direct their behavior.

Yet to highlight the role of Syrian social structure in shaping patron capacity is not to reduce battlefield developments solely to patron-client dynamics. As the case of Manbij shows, the wealth and network divides among the opposition was central to shaping the trajectory of the revolution. Across eastern Syria, ISIS was able to exploit these divides, ultimately overthrowing both tendencies and destroying the opposition altogether. In the end, the question of class and network cohesion is pivotal to understanding both what happened internally in the uprising, and how these internal dynamics linked to the designs of foreign powers. While many commentators have pointed to the lack of cohesion of the FSA, they usually treat this as purely a strategic deficiency. Instead, the lack of cohesion stemmed from the nature of pre-2011 social structure in Syria. Rebels could not be expected to cohere under the trying conditions of the conflict when the social prerequisites for doing so simply did not exist. Ultimately, it was the policies of the Assad dictatorship itself that, over decades, ensured that the type of networks that could have grown into a cohesive insurgency never came into being.