The Syrian Proxy War: 2011–2016

The four solidarity networks—Brotherhood, activist, loyalist, and jihadi—were the raw “social” material out of which revolutionaries on the ground and powers in the region and beyond fashioned networks of patronage. This process passed through four stages, with the nature of these networks playing a key role in how the stages shifted from one to the next.

From the start of the protests until late 2011, the uprising witnessed diaspora mobilization, in which funds trickled in through family networks, usually comprised wealthy individuals acting in an individual capacity. Because of their prior political orientation, class position, and embeddedness in transnational networks, ex-Syrian Muslim Brotherhood members dominated this phase of funding.

From late 2011 until late 2012, the uprising went through a period of open competition, when various non-Syrian individuals and entities began to channel funds into the country, and foreign states such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia began to intervene. Funding in this stage was distributed widely, driven by revolutionary actors’ ability to traverse various solidarity networks to attract cash and weapons from all possible sources.

By late 2012, the uprising entered a period of structured competition, by which point a sharp distinction had arisen between Qatari and Saudi-backed funding networks, and most factions were forced to orient to this divide.

After 2015, global priorities shifted with the rise of ISIS, while the Russian intervention tilted the balance decisively in the regime’s favor. Gulf funding dried up, leaving Turkey as the main patron, inaugurating an exploitative phase in which the client rebel factions had little room for independent action.

The first protests to oust Bashar al-Assad erupted in the spring of 2011, and by that summer, debates were simmering in activist circles about whether the revolutionary movement should arm itself. Syrian Muslim Brotherhood networks were a major instigator in the pro-arms camp, particularly in expatriate circles in the Gulf and in Europe. Most of these individuals were no longer members of the organization, but their experience in the 1980s convinced them that the regime could not be reformed, while their class position put them in command of revenue that could be transferred through business ties into Syria. An activist from Saraqib, Idlib, recalls:

Someone from Saudi called me, in the beginning of August [2011], and said ‘We’ll raise money to get you weapons.’ He was a former Muslim Brotherhood member, but he had fled Syria in the 1980s. He said, ‘My friends and I are ready to support you if you want to create an armed group to protect the country… we don’t want you to join our party, we just want to support you because we want to return to our country.’ ¹

In some cases, direct descendants of the 1980s Brotherhood uprising joined the revolution and exploited their family links to collect start-up funds for their own brigades. In Saraqib, the ex-Brotherhood member Assad Hilal, who’d served eighteen years in detention, helped form the town’s first Free Syrian Army battalion. In the Idlib town of Taftanaz, members of the Brotherhood-linked Ghazal family did the same.² Despite their Brotherhood origins, both FSA groups were liberal in political orientation. In the Jebel al-Zawiya region of southeast Idlib, on the other hand, the Brotherhood heritage bequeathed a prominent faction with Salafi ideology. In November of 2011, a merchant from the Jebel al-Zawiya town of Sarjeh named Abu ʿIssa al-Sheikh announced the formation of Suqur al-Sham.³ Al-Sheikh came from a Brotherhood family; his father was involved in the 1980s insurgency, and he himself was imprisoned in Sednaya in 2004. After his release in the summer of 2011, he was able to launch Suqur al-Sham with aid he’d procured through his family’s Brotherhood connections.⁴

By autumn 2011, the Syrian cause was stirring hearts across the region. For activist Salafis, the revolution represented more than a struggle for democracy: it was a defense of Sunnis facing extermination at the hands of a sectarian Shiʿa regime. In Kuwait, activist Salafis began to organize donation campaigns, bringing together Syrian expatriate communities with local charities. A leading light in this scene was Shafi al-ʿAjmi, a lecturer at the College of Shariʿa and Islamic Studies at Kuwait University and host of a popular television show.⁵ ʿAjmi took his soapbox demagoguery to Twitter, where his denunciations of Assad’s crimes were laced with vicious sectarianism, and where the screen flashed with bank account information for viewers to donate.⁶ Before long, RIHS and other loyalist Salafi groups also began raising funds. By December, the first donations trickled into Syria. Researcher Elizabeth Dickinson writes:

Each nascent rebel brigade would designate a Syrian representative in Kuwait, who was then responsible for dealing with the individual backers. Sitting for tea at Kuwait’s diwaniyas (home spaces used for public gatherings), the representatives would make their cases for support: ‘The representatives were Syrian, imagine they were from one village or another and creating their armed group. They received monthly payments, which at that time were small, maybe 20,000KD per month [$70,630], just according to the donations we received. … From RIHS, it was 80,000KD per month [$282,540]. At that time, in the creation stage, they didn’t need much money.’ ⁷

With Salafi patrons now intervening in the Syrian conflict, those rebel groups that could tap these networks—while simultaneously drawing from the Brotherhood diaspora—were able to leapfrog other FSA factions. Abu ʿIssa al-Sheikh, for example, could lean on his family’s Brotherhood ties and his own Salafi links cultivated in Sednaya prison to maneuver Suqur al-Sham into becoming a dominant faction in Idlib.⁸ Even more successful was Ahrar al-Sham. Founded in Saraqib, Ahrar al-Sham merged Brotherhood, activist, and jihadi lineages to become the largest Salafi rebel group in the country. Some Ahrar founders, like the aforementioned Abu Anas, were Sahwa-inspired activist Salafis, whereas others, like Hassan ʿAboud, were descended from a Brotherhood family. ʿAboud once said that he belonged to “a generation that grew up in circumstances of oppression, who sought revenge for what happened [in the 1970s and 1980s], and who became proud of their identity, which many of their fathers had struggled to forge.”⁹ A later Ahrar leader, Abu ʿAmmar from Taftanaz, descended from a Brotherhood family but then joined AQAP in Yemen, before returning to Syria sometime before 2011.¹⁰

By early 2012, Ahrar al-Sham became a favored recipient of aid from Shafi al-ʿAjmi and other Kuwaiti activist Salafis.¹¹ At the same time, the group worked its Brotherhood networks to reach Qatari donors. In this way, the Qatari state itself began contributing to the Syrian cause—the first foreign country outside of Turkey to do so. On January 3, 2012, a Qatari Emiri Air Force C-130 touched down in Istanbul, the first arms shipment that had not reached the rebels through the black market.¹² The growth of Ahrar al-Sham coincided with an even more ominous development. In late December 2011, twin car bombings killed 44 people and wounded more than 160 in Damascus’s Kafr Sousa neighborhood. The following week, a suicide car bomb ripped through a bus carrying the regime’s riot police—an attack that was later claimed by a shadowy new Salafi-jihadi group calling itself Jabhat al-Nusra.¹³

Riyadh watched these events with concern. Having previously kept its distance, Saudi Arabia began to wade into the conflict to control the flow of weapons and thwart the growth of Activist and Jihadi Salafi groups. In February 2012, Riyadh began supporting Mustafa al-Sheikh, a defected officer who was attempting to launch an umbrella rebel formation as a secular alternative to Islamist brigades.¹⁴ As private Saudi citizens began to donate to the uprising, loyalist Salafis like the popular satellite television host ʿAdnan ʿArour urged supporters to direct their aid toward al-Sheikh’s group and similar formations.¹⁵

However, Riyadh also began to cautiously and indirectly support Brotherhood formations during this period, both by allowing diaspora networks to fundraise on Saudi soil, and by exploring joint initiatives with Qatar. In March 2012, for example, the two powers launched the so-called Istanbul Room, headed by Lebanese Shia politician Oqab Sakr, a leading figure in Lebanese Prime Minister Saʿad al-Hariri’s Future Movement and a close ally of Saudi Arabia. The goal of the Istanbul Room was to organize rebels across Syria into 16 military councils, representing the country’s regions, which would channel weapons purchased in Libya to rebels on the ground.

The key conduit in this distribution network was the Faruq Brigades, a Free Syrian Army faction from Homs that had earned acclaim for fending off the regime assault on the Baba Amru neighborhood. Under the terms of the Istanbul Room arrangement, the Faruq Brigades were tasked with overseeing distribution, and in exchange were allowed to keep one-third of all weapons passing through the network. While the aim of this arrangement was to streamline distribution, it inadvertently transformed the Faruq Brigades into a corrupt powerbroker, and marked the beginning of the Saudi-Qatari split. The group was accused of hoarding weapons meant for other factions.¹⁶ In some instances, they even clashed with Brotherhood-linked militias. ¹⁷

In response, the Brotherhood leveraged its dominant position within the Syrian National Council (SNC), the Syrian opposition’s official government in exile. Since the SNC’s August 2011 founding, the Brotherhood had steadily taken over the body; in leaked emails from March 2012, SNC Chairman Burhan Ghalioun claimed that, by that point, the Brotherhood had “seized control” of the SNC’s Relief Committee, which was allegedly transferring $1 million every three days from its Qatari bank account into Turkey.¹⁸ Then, the Brotherhood used the SNC to wrest control of the Istanbul Group’s Libya weapons pipeline. Like the SNC, Libya’s interim National Transitional Council (NTC) government contained groupings close to the Libyan Brotherhood. In May 2012, SNC and Brotherhood members led by Haitham al-Rahma and ʿAimad al-Din al-Rashid made several visits to Libya, inking agreements to secure a $20 million grant for the SNC.¹⁹

Before long, activists on the ground began to complain that weapons shipments from Libya were being seized by the Turkish IHH charity and then transported to FSA groups exclusively affiliated with the Brotherhood.²⁰ ʿAimad al-Din al-Rashid, founder of a Brotherhood splinter organization known as the Syrian National Movement, soon became one of the most prominent arms dealers in Syria, selling weapons to FSA groups in the Damascus suburbs, Aleppo province, and to Abu ʿIssa’s Suqur al-Sham.²¹

The Brotherhood’s marginalization of the Faruq Brigades—Saudi Arabia’s preferred proxy—was the first step in unraveling of the Saudi-Qatari alliance. The next blow came in late May, when the Assad regime slaughtered 108 civilians in the town of Taldou.²² The killings, which came to be known as the “Houla Massacre,” awakened many of Saudi Arabia’s leading activist Salafis, who launched a fundraising campaign for Syrian rebels.²³ Fearing a revitalized Sahwa movement, Saudi authorities swiftly cracked down, arresting most of the campaign’s leaders. One of the targeted clerics, Muhammad al-ʿArifi, tweeted:

I have just returned from the building of the Emirate of Riyadh after spending two hours there and signing a pledge not to collect funds for Syria. I ask those who intended to come to the al-Bawardi mosque to donate not to tire themselves.²⁴

Then, in early June 2012, Saudi Arabia’s Senior ʿUlema Council issued a decree outlawing all calls for citizens to “perform jihad” in Syria.²⁵ But the unintended consequence of the Kingdom tightening the reins was that activists began to flock to the Qatari sphere of influence, even making regular fundraising trips to Doha.

A few weeks later, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Muhammad Morsi was elected president of Egypt—again potentially stirring Sahwa passions inside Saudi borders. Riyadh saw the region careening out of its control. Morsi soon compounded these fears by visiting Iran, Saudi Arabia’s arch-rival.²⁶ Saudi proxies like Okab Saqr began to funnel funding to those factions Riyadh perceived as best able to counterbalance Brotherhood and activist networks, such as secular groups (e.g., Jamaal Maʿrouf’s Syria Martyrs Brigade), loyalist Salafis (e.g., Zahran ‘Aloush’s Liwa al-Islam), and tribal factions with historic ties to the kingdom. Before long, loyalist Salafis in Kuwait helped fund the creation of another Saudi-backed collection of rebel groups, the Authenticity and Development Front.²⁷ Riyadh also worked with the U.S. Treasury Department to secure a license for the Syrian Support Group to fundraise for factions outside the influence of the SNC, the Brotherhood, and Qatar.²⁸ It was during this period, early summer 2012, that the CIA established a regular presence in southern Turkey to better monitor weapons flows.

Qatar responded by redoubling support for Brotherhood and Activist networks. A key point man in this effort was Ahmed Ramadan, the leader of the National Action Group, an organization that had emerged as a split from the Brotherhood’s Aleppo wing.²⁹ In early July, Ramadan marshalled funds from the Kuwaiti activist scene in an attempt to catalyze the merger of various factions, such as those close to Ahrar al-Sham.³⁰ His principal success, however, was in bankrolling the unification of Brotherhood-linked groups in the northern Aleppo countryside. On July 9, ʿAbd al-ʿAziz Salama (“Hajji ʿAnadan”) and ʿAbd al-Qadr Saleh (“Hajji Mareʿa”) convened an eight-hour meeting with fifteen other rebel leaders that resulted in the formation of Liwa al-Tawhid, which soon became one of the most important rebel factions in northern Syria. Flush with Ramadan’s funds, Hajja Mareʿ transformed his hometown into a critical hub for dispensing Qatari patronage—so much so that, locally, the town of Mareʿ was dubbed the “Qurdaha” of the north, in reference to the way in which Assad’s hometown had been the ultimate source of all power and resources under the regime. A week after its formation, Liwa al-Tawhid led an assault on Aleppo, a city that was only partially with the revolution; some rebels argued that the attack would be seen by city-dwellers as an invasion by countryside rebels, but Ahmed Ramadan and Turkish intelligence allegedly forced the issue.³¹

In summary, the events of June and July 2012—Morsi’s election in Egypt, Riyadh’s exclusion of Brotherhood and activist networks, and Qatar’s opening of the floodgates in response—radically transformed the battlefield. Towns and cities across northern Syria fell to rebels, including key border crossings like Jarablus and major urban centers like Manbij. A bomb wiped out Assad confidante Asef Shawkat and three other senior officials, and fighting was raging in the Damascus suburbs. The regime seemed on the brink of collapse. ³² The Turkish government eased restrictions on materiel-bearing flights, and before long Qatari Air Force cargo jets were touching down three times a week.³³

The United States grew increasingly concerned with the Qatari intervention—by autumn, Doha’s networks were even supplying small quantities of shoulder-fire anti-aircraft missiles to the Syrian battlefield.³⁴ In fact, by most estimates, Qatari-sourced weapons made up the bulk of the arms pouring into the country, and they were exclusively reinforcing Activist and Brotherhood groups at the expense of secular formations. After Obama’s re-election, the United States finally decided to intervene by throwing its weight behind Saudi Arabia’s efforts. In early December, with American backing, Saudi Arabia organized the Conference for Change in Syria in the coastal Turkish city of Antalya, where 550 Syrian opposition leaders gathered to inaugurate a new mechanism to channel foreign patronage.³⁵ The conference authorized the creation of the Supreme Military Council, under the command Salim Idris, which would oversee action on five military fronts across the country. At the same time, the United States authorized increased Saudi and Jordanian intervention, assisting both countries in sourcing weapons (usually from Croatia), which would then, in theory, be shipped to the SMC.³⁶ The conference marked the first concerted attempt by the United States and Saudi Arabia to sideline Qatar, keep weapons out of the hands of Doha-linked Islamists, and cohere the rebel movement around a single source of patronage.

Unsurprisingly, Qatar soon retaliated by sponsoring a rival formation around Ahrar al-Sham that called itself the Syrian Islamic Front.³⁷ Unlike liberal rebel groups, the cadre of Ahrar al-Sham had decades of political experience garnered through their associations in prison or from their families’ Muslim Brotherhood background. Together with Ahrar’s ability to tap into complementary networks—Brotherhood and activist—as well as the sheer scale of material support flooding in from Qatari and Kuwaiti donors, SIF quickly became the most important rebel alliance in the country. The Syrian battlefield was now split between an U.S.-Saudi-Jordanian axis on the one hand, and a Qatari-Turkish axis on the other. Nearly every faction was forced to orient to this divide, inaugurating a period of structured competition within the rebel movement.

In the opening months of 2013, it was Saudi Arabia that enjoyed the advantage over Qatar in the battlefield. The United States was supplying the SMC with non-lethal aid, including armor and night vision equipment, and even provided intelligence to select rebel groups. At President Obama’s request, senior Saudi figures like Prince Salman bin Sultan and his brother, intelligence chief Prince Bandar, began to personally oversee the arms network.³⁸ For example, in March, Salman provided SMC rebels with 120 tons of explosives, directing them to “light up Damascus” and “flatten” the airport.³⁹

Then, on April 9, Jabhat al-Nusra officially split from its parent organization in Iraq. Thousands of fighters, including many foreigners, decided to stay with the parent organization, which was now called ISIS. Overnight, ISIS found itself in control of vast swathes of territory in eastern Syria. Qatar’s reckless policy of flooding Syria with weapons now took on an even more dangerous edge, as some of these weapons may have inadvertently wound up—through rebel realignments, theft, and transfers—first in the arsenal of Nusra and now ISIS. On April 23, two weeks after the Nusra-ISIS split, Obama met with Qatari Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani and allegedly warned Doha that its weapons were falling into the wrong hands. ⁴⁰

The United States also supported Saudi efforts to purge the Syrian National Council of its Brotherhood influence, especially with respect to the president, Ghassan Hitto, who was close to Doha. ⁴¹ By July, the Saudis had politicked and cajoled their way to influence within the SNC, resulting in the election of Ahmed al-Jarba, a Shammar tribal leader with close ties to the kingdom. This would be Riyadh’s crowning move; prominent Brotherhood figures who had been critical nodes in the Qatari patronage network, like Nazir al-Hakim and Ahmed Ramadan, began to realign themselves with Saudi Arabia.⁴² Even Liwa al-Tawhid, the powerful Brotherhood faction from northern Aleppo, would momentarily drift into the Saudi orbit.⁴³

But it was a pyrrhic victory. Though the United States and United Kingdom pledged to provide the SMC with $500 million as part of the shift towards Saudi networks, only small amounts were actually released, as receiving aid required a long vetting process that had not been in place for factions under Qatari stewardship. SMC commander Salim Idriss regularly complained that he had a hard time integrating the largest factions, such as Liwa al-Tawhid, Ahrar al-Sham and Suqur al-Sham, into his fighting structure.

For the moment, the battlefield hung in the balance between the Saudi and Qatari axes. When the turning point came in May 2013, it was neither Qatar nor Saudi that seized the advantage—it was the Assad regime. Assad’s forces attacked Qusayr, a strategic rebel-held town linking Damascus and Homs. This was the first significant military engagement overseen and financed almost entirely by Saudi Arabia and the SMC. For weeks, the rebels held off the regime advance, but—also a first—Assad relied heavily on Hizbullah from Lebanon, and managed to seize the town. The Battle of Qusayr marked the most significant inflection point on the battlefield since the war began; now, with Hizbullah’s forces by its side and willing to die in large numbers, the regime had halted the rebels’ momentum—and the rebels would never regain it.⁴⁴

By late summer 2013, Qatar began to sharply reduce its aid. Meanwhile, ISIS was steadily expanding.⁴⁵ Despite this, the release of the remainder of the U.S.-Saudi package to the opposition was not forthcoming, as Saudi officials demanded that Syrian opposition groups provide pledges to fight ISIS before aid could be dispersed.⁴⁶ Intimidated by ISIS’s aggressive behavior and unwilling to open a second front that could detract from the fight against the regime, most factions were hesitant to agree. It was not until after the Assad regime’s chemical weapons attack in Douma in the Damascus suburbs, which killed 1,300 people, that the Obama administration released the remainder of its aid package.

The attack also allegedly prompted the United States to finally arm rebels directly.⁴⁷ Under a covert CIA program codenamed Timber Sycamore, the first shipments of light arms began arriving in September to select rebel groups in the Saudi-Jordanian axis.⁴⁸ The CIA provided training, while Riyadh supplied the funds to purchase weapons. But it was not enough. The U.S.-Saudi-backed forces failed to cohere into a potent battlefield force, or offer a viable alternative to the Qatar-backed Islamists. Unlike the Qatari factions, which were built on longstanding Brotherhood networks, most leaders of the U.S.-Saudi factions lacked preexisting ties. They tended to originate from poorer or more tribal backgrounds than their Qatari-backed counterparts, and they lacked access to merchant networks that could supplement the irregular flow of U.S.-Saudi aid.⁴⁹ As a result, groups in this axis, like Jamal Maʿrouf’s Syria Revolutionaries Front, were roundly accused of criminality. Often, these groups were liberal or secular, which opened the door to criticism from Islamists, for whom the criminality was inherently linked to secularism’s supposed lack of values. In reality, these groups did not belong to longstanding cohesive networks like the Brotherhood, so there were few accountability mechanisms to stop rank-and-file members from engaging in predatory behavior. Regardless, by late 2013, these Saudi-backed forces were rapidly losing popular support to more radical factions like ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra.

In the spring of 2014, the United States authorized anti-tank weapons shipments to certain factions, but it was too little too late.⁵⁰ The radicals were now dominating the battlefield; ISIS had captured most of the eastern half of the country. When ISIS seized Mosul and began to threaten Erbil and Baghdad, the United States shifted course and launched an anti-ISIS intervention. The interests of the U.S.-Saudi coalition were never aligned with those of the rebels; Washington preferred a negotiated settlement that removed Assad but preserved the state, whereas most rebels were fighting and dying for the sake of overthrowing the regime. Nonetheless, the two sides had partnered in a marriage of convenience. Now, however, U.S. and rebel aims were directly opposed; the United States began to pressure its proxies to prioritize fighting ISIS to Assad, whereas the rebels insisted on continuing to battle the regime, viewing Assad as the root cause of the Islamic State phenomenon. In the end, the United States not only lacked the capacity to direct rebel behavior, it also had divergent interests. Though it would not be officially shut down for a few more years, by 2015 Timber Sycamore was a dead letter. With it, the Saudi intervention wound down as well. Key Saudi proxies were cut off, leaving them to be routed by al-Nusra or ISIS.

Qatari proxies were suffering major battlefield losses as well. In late 2013, Liwa al-Tawhid’s leader Hajji Marʿe was killed, and the group whittled away until it was a shell of its former self.⁵¹ A half year later, most of the leadership of Ahrar al-Sham was wiped out in a bombing.⁵² In one town after the next, rank-and-file Ahrar al-Sham members were defecting to al-Nusra and ISIS. Meanwhile, Washington was tightening the pressure on Doha to crack down on funding networks. In December 2013, for example, the U.S. Treasury Department accused the Qatari professor ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Nuʿami of supporting terrorist groups (a charge he denies).⁵³ Similar accusations appeared throughout 2014, and were amplified by right wing think tanks like the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.⁵⁴ The combination of external pressure from the U.S. and internal pressure from al-Nusra and ISIS meant that Qatar-backed groups found it ever harder to secure funding lines.

Remaining factions gradually fell under sole Turkish sponsorship. Bereft of grassroots support, and severed from other revenue streams, these groups had little scope for independent action. Turkey’s high capacity also stemmed from its control of the border and the fact that it hosted rebel leaders and millions of refugees on its soil. The Turkish-backed rebels (eventually rechristened as the Syrian National Army) were repurposed into an anti-SDF force, and the fight against Assad was abandoned.