Introduction: A Network View of Syria’s Proxy War

The Syrian conflict began as a mass uprising, with protesters gathering in one small town after the next, demanding the end of the Assad family’s 40-year dictatorship. The demonstrators linked arms, chanting “Peaceful! Peaceful!” waving placards with slogans championing liberal values and human rights. Within months, however, the movement for democratic reform mutated into an armed struggle to oust President Assad. The hand of regional powers could be seen and felt everywhere. The conflict became many things at once: an inspiring revolution, a devastating civil war, a magnet for Islamist radicals, and, especially, one of the most complicated and wide-ranging proxy wars in modern history. The United States, Jordan, Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia were all, to varying degrees, supporting the rebel movement, while Russia, Iran, Hizbullah, Iraqi, and Afghan militias stood behind the Assad regime.

With its hundreds of factions and dozens of foreign actors, the Syrian battlefield can seem numbingly complex, but underneath it all lies a logic. To grasp this logic, we must turn the analysis of the war on its head; Most studies of proxy war prioritize the interests of outside sponsors and the degree of control they hold over their proxies. While important, this misses the other side of the story: how such outside interests interact with the intimate forms of life on the ground, such as preexisting political currents, economic interests, cultural mores, religious practices, and, above all, the mosaic of friendships and rivalries that help form the fabric of everyday life.

In a proxy-client relationship, the aim of a local actor is to leverage outside support to pursue local objectives, and the aim of a patron is to enroll local actors in the pursuit of external interests. The patron’s interest in directing client behavior is distinct from its capacity to do so. Patron capacity depends on levels of financial support, but other factors can play a role as well, including:

• the strength of ties between patron and client,
• the internal cohesion of the client actors, and
• the client’s ability to secure alternative or independent means of support.

All three factors crucially depend on the features of social life before the conflict. Individuals form a number of stable relationship patterns, including those based on marriage, kinship, joint economic activity, shared geographic origins, shared political membership, and shared religious activity. Social networks such as these represent an important way through which individuals engage in collective action; people occupy squares, join armed groups, and track down funding through their friends, relatives, business partners, political allies and coreligionists. An often overlooked factor in network formation is class, because an individual’s economic position not only influences their worldview, it also defines the horizons for obtaining resources.

Social networks and class played a key role in determining which segments of the Syrian rebellion were more susceptible to forming transnational linkages, and when those linkages allowed foreign patrons to effectively control their proxies.

The rebel movement against the Assad regime broadly fell into two camps—a U.S.-Saudi-Jordanian axis, and a Turkish-Qatari axis. Generally, the U.S.-Saudi alliance backed three types of actors in the uprising: liberals, loyalist Salafis, and tribal figures. Early in the rebellion, it was “liberals”—secular activists emphasizing human rights and democratic freedoms—who played the leading role in nearly every rebelling town and city, where they formed collectives called local coordinating committees (LCCs). Though the LCCs played a pivotal role in organizing peaceful protests, they were not a cohesive national network that could undertake unified political action. Instead, most LCCs were limited to the towns and cities where they had been founded.¹ This is because most LCC members did not have pre-2011 ties, making coordination amid violent regime crackdown difficult. The revolutionary liberals also lacked pre-2011 ties to foreign actors, with the exception of nongovernmental organizations—and Western NGOs typically sought to depoliticize those they supported, diverting their activity into technocratic tasks like grant making or conducting workshops.² In many towns, the cultural elite consisted of liberals, but lacked the capital to function as an economic elite, so they were unable to use patronage to achieve coherency in their networks.³

Tribal elites, the second major group backed by the U.S.-Saudi alliance, did not form cohesive cross-tribe networks by the very nature of tribal structure, which is fragmented and fractal-like.⁴ Moreover, tribal sheikhs owe their authority to their ability to dispense patronage, which required that they maintain access to state power.⁵ As a result, those sheikhs who were relatively disadvantaged under the Assad regime also lacked significant revenue to cohere national and international networks.⁶

Finally, loyalist Salafis, referring here to a strain of Salafism that did not oppose the Saudi monarchy, did not constitute a cohesive nationwide network with access to wealth to the extent that other Salafis did⁷ Moreover, such Salafis were far too few in number to provide a base for nationwide mobilization. Rival strands of Salafism were able to play such a role, but they were opposed to Riyadh. In short, the United States and Saudi Arabia failed to mold their proxies into an effective force because they backed actors who lacked an extensive network of pre-2011 ties as well as access to revenues to sustain and cohere themselves in the early period of the uprising.

In contrast, Qatar and Turkey chose to back Islamist forces that were built upon, or descended from, networks related to the Muslim Brotherhood.⁸ In addition to the Brotherhood themselves, these Islamists included so-called activist Salafis, who represented a hybrid of Brotherhood-style political beliefs with a Wahhabi-influenced theology. Historically, the Brotherhood attracted support from Sunni merchant and landowning classes, in large part because their anti-socialist worldview resonated with the economic interests of these elites.⁹

After the insurgency of the 1980s was crushed, many Brotherhood members fled for the Gulf and opened businesses. A transnational merchant network developed, based partly on kinship and partly on business ties.¹⁰ Thus, the link between the Muslim Brotherhood and the “provincial bourgeoisie”—traders and capitalists from rural towns—was pivotal in the group’s ability to survive the 1980s defeat and appear on the stage in 2011 as one of the few organized and politically conscious segments of Syrian society. In some cases, individuals in this network maintained business and political ties with foreign states, such as Qatar. After 2011, Qatar leveraged these preexisting ties to mobilize a cohesive network—in effect, its capacity was actually a reflection of the nature of the network it chose to support.

Saudi-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) groups, such as Jamal Maʿrouf’s Syria Martyrs Brigade, had few preexisting networks outside of kinship, meaning that as the group expanded beyond Maʿrouf’s kinsmen it proved difficult to control. As aid fluctuated, the group fragmented and relied on banditry to fund themselves.¹¹ Qatar-backed Islamist groups, on the other hand, emerged from cohesive preexisting networks and were well-resourced because of their links to the provincial bourgeoisie, so were less likely to resort to banditry. Moreover, unlike their liberal counterparts, they maintained longstanding ties to foreign states. This holds an important, and counter-intuitive lesson about patron capacity: While U.S.-Saudi proxies were generally poorer (prior to infusions of funding) than Qatar’s proxies, that did not mean that Riyadh or Washington could more easily buy allegiance or their ability to act as an effective proxy. Instead the relative wealth and cohesion of Qatar’s proxies helped Qatar exercise influence.

In summary, because the nature of prewar social networks differed, the capacities of patron states differed. The remainder of this report is divided into five sections that explore this phenomenon in depth. The next section examines the nature of the key networks in Syria’s war, detailing the role that class played in their formation. Section III turns to the question of patron interests, examining the Gulf states’ motivations for intervention. Section IV narrates a history of the Syrian war through the proxy lens, focusing on how patron capacities intersected with local social structure. In Section V, we apply these concepts to a micro-historical case study of the northern city of Manbij. The conclusion places the issue of social networks and class within the broader context of Syrian history.