Part Two. Case Studies in Proxy Warfare

Although the rise of IS brought new horrors to Syria’s war, it also gave the U.S. government greater strategic clarity insofar as an obvious enemy had emerged that the United States could confront. American objectives changed in Syria to face this threat. By 2014, for all intents and purposes, the United States ended its support to opposition groups whose intention was to oust Assad in favor of supporting groups who would fight IS instead.¹ This gave rise to a more clearly defined strategy for defeating IS. This shift in approach allows us to compare U.S. efforts to develop proxies in Syria’s war before the rise of IS (from 2011-2014) and after (from 2015-2019). These were, in effect, two separate conflicts within the same war.

This comparison suggests that the United States substantially improved its overall proxy strategy during the counter-IS effort, setting a relatively clear objective of destroying IS, choosing and developing a proxy capable of achieving that objective, developing its capabilities where they proved insufficient, and structuring the relationship in such a way to mitigate management problems (specifically by deploying forces to the battlespace). The U.S. efforts and their success are summarized and assessed in Table 1 and described more fully in this section.

However, the counter-IS coalition continued to wrestle with the broader questions of strategic alignment, most notably with regards to whether the campaign was a high or low priority for the United States. As a low-priority counterterrorism campaign, the effort was successful in destroying IS’s territorial holdings, but that ended up reopening unresolved debates over whether such disruption sustainably and sufficiently addressed American objectives or whether a high priority objective of changing the conditions of governance in the Syrian conflict was necessary.

Sponsor Strategy

When the United States announced on September 10, 2014 that it had formed a multi-national coalition to defeat IS, it was not clear how large that coalition would grow or what ground forces would be involved. That coalition would eventually grow to 80 members, who supplied airstrikes, a deployment of 2,000 ground troops in Syria (mostly American Special Operations Forces), and intelligence and logistical support.² The coalition succeeded beyond most expectations, but in 2017 faced a new administration with unpredictable foreign policy instincts. Thus, when that coalition reclaimed IS’s self-declared caliphate, it was undermined by shifting conceptions about the purpose of a partnership with the SDF, which had until 2019 been an effective model of U.S. proxy warfare. In the end, the U.S.-SDF partnership failed for a number of reasons, not least of which was a lack of strategic clarity on how to conclude that partnership.

President Barack Obama’s September 10th announcement clearly stated the U.S. strategic objective: to “degrade, and ultimately destroy, [IS] through a comprehensive and sustained counterterrorism strategy.”³ Importantly, the strategy did not seek to militarily resolve the broader Syrian conflict but only to destroy IS. IS controlled territory that spanned the Iraqi and Syrian borders and included 12 million people in a territory the size of Great Britain.⁴ To fight IS on the Iraq side of the border, the United States would work with Iraqi government forces, and predominantly Shi’a (and Iranian-backed) Popular Mobilization Forces, to rid the country of IS. U.S. forces would establish “National Guard Units,” composed of Sunni Arab locals in towns recaptured from IS to police and secure their neighborhoods.⁵

In Syria, implementing a “clear-hold-build” counterinsurgency strategy of this kind was more complicated because U.S. forces lacked a partner. Eventually, through connections from Iraqi Kurds, the United States began to partner with the Syrian Kurdish forces known as People’s Protection Units (Yekîneyên Parastina Gel, YPG) and Women’s Protection Units (Yekîneyên Parastina Jin, YPJ). Cooperation began with a joint defense of Kobane, a Syrian Kurdish village on the Turkish border, from September 2014 until February 2015. Surrounded by IS fighters and blocked by Turkish troops preventing them from crossing into Turkey, Kurdish forces withstood a brutal IS assault as U.S. forces started to support the defense with airstrikes. This support led to “the first major battlefield defeat inflicted on Islamic State,” and “provided the template” for U.S. cooperation with the Kurdish forces that would eventually form the nucleus of the SDF, as described by Syria expert Aron Lund.⁶

To “degrade, and ultimately destroy” IS was the strategy that drove coalition efforts for over four years. Inherent in the mission was not only to undermine IS but also to control territory captured from the group, and administer the population so as to prevent a resurgence or return of IS. This set of aims governed the U.S. strategy in Syria until President Trump announced via Twitter that IS had been defeated in December 2018.⁷ IS still controlled a small redoubt in eastern Syria at that time, but after a brutal six-week offensive in February and March 2019, it was fully recaptured.⁸

President Trump’s announcement of IS’s defeat, though premature, raised the long-postponed question: what would U.S. strategy now be toward its SDF proxy in Syria? As it turned out, absent clear leadership, U.S. strategy oscillated between two fundamentally incompatible approaches: a calibrated withdrawal, advocated by then-Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL Brett McGurk, and an indefinite endgame in which the strategy would shift from countering IS to containing Iran, advocated by National Security Advisor John Bolton and Ambassador James Jeffrey, the head of State Department Syria policy by August 2018.⁹

These oscillating political strategies—neither of which took account of President Trump’s frequently and fervently expressed intention to withdraw from Syria as soon as IS was defeated—ultimately doomed the U.S.-SDF partnership. In December 2018, in the face of a withdrawal announcement by the president, McGurk urged the SDF to negotiate with the Syrian government while it still had leverage to secure a permanent political arrangement providing self-governing status.¹⁰ But by January 2019 he had resigned, and his responsibilities were given to Jeffrey. Jeffrey, according to sources in the SDF and at the State Department, supported Bolton’s position, which was to use the SDF to counter Iranian influence in the region.¹¹Jeffrey convinced the SDF not to negotiate a political settlement with the Syrian regime because the United States had longer-term plans to work with the SDF to counter Iranian influence.¹² But, as one special forces officer told one of the authors at the time, President Trump’s mercurial nature, and the fact that neither strategy had been cleared with the president in advance, meant that “this whole operation [is] under the tweet of Damocles.”¹³

Jeffrey managed the U.S.-SDF relationship for all of 2019.¹⁴ The SDF went to Damascus in May 2019 and failed to secure an agreement, likely because both parties felt they were in a strong position and did not feel the need to bargain anything away. The U.S.-SDF partnership endured through several U.S.-Turkey agreements that forced the SDF to dismantle its defenses and give up heavy weapons.¹⁵

SDF commander Mazloum Kobani described the experience as a betrayal: “We are now standing with our chests bare to face the Turkish knives,” he wrote in Foreign Policy.¹⁶ In a letter circulated to coalition commanders on October 7, Mazloum’s chief of staff wrote that “just yesterday, the people of north and east Syria greet you as saviors and torch bearers of freedom. Children gather each time they see you and express joy at the hope you bring to the future of our lands. These same children of Syria now may be dead at any moment.”¹⁷ Within 48 hours, on October 9, 2019, TSK armored columns—led by Turkish-backed proxies—crossed the frontier and began pushing SDF forces back.¹⁸

As of this writing, the future of the U.S.-SDF relationship is unclear. However, it is unlikely that SDF leaders will continue to work with the United States as before. There is “a pretty big chance” that the SDF gets folded into the Syrian government’s army, according to Ilham Ahmed, one of the SDF’s political leaders.¹⁹ The fallout from U.S. actions in northeastern Syria in the fall of 2019 could be enormous, particularly if the Syrian government absorbs the SDF into its own forces. Should it do so, U.S. adversaries such as Iran and Russia could learn U.S. special forces’ actics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) from SDF forces who had worked with U.S. forces in the counter-IS effort.²⁰

The main blunder was not in the way the United States government used the SDF to advance its goals in Syria, but in the lack of a consistent political strategy for the U.S.-SDF relationship after counter-IS operations concluded. While the shifting strategies among advisors in the Obama and Trump administration are more easily understood in Washington D.C., they are far more inscrutable to U.S. allies in the region. Washington’s failure to develop an off-ramp to its relationship with the SDF limited its success.

Proxy Capabilities

The counter-IS coalition relied heavily on the efforts of 50-70,000 in-country proxy force partners under the SDF.²¹ The United States matched its political goals to recapture and hold territory with a proxy that, at its core, was not only an effective fighting force but had the ability to govern territory, administer populations, and provide basic necessities. This made the U.S. political goals of retaking and controlling IS territory possible.

The SDF was the most capable U.S. partner in the Syrian War because it was a coherent force before the conflict began. In the early years of the Syrian war, this group, the Kurdish YPG/YPJ, was focused on controlling its own territory and protecting Kurdish civilians. As the United States began to work with the YPG/YPJ in the fall of 2014, two key problems emerged. First, the group’s coercive capabilities were closely affiliated with the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê‎ (PKK), a designated terrorist group based in Turkey.²² Even if American commanders could legally work with this entity, they would face pressure from Turkish partners to stop enhancing the military capabilities of a terrorist organization that Ankara considered as great a threat as IS.²³ This problem provided a warning about the potential for an eventual misalignment of capabilities and objectives in that the United States, while pursuing a low-priority goal of disrupting IS, was increasing the capabilities of a force in ways that at least some regional actors feared would shift the conflict fundamentally (in effect a high-priority result).

The dilemma was resolved legally but not in terms of the U.S.-Turkish relationship. The United States hoped to rehabilitate the YPG/YPJ by changing it from a terrorist group linked to the PKK into an entirely new force. General Raymond Thomas, former commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, said he insisted the YPG change their “brand.” “What do you want to call yourself besides the YPG?” Thomas asked, “With about a day’s notice, they declared that they were the Syrian Democratic Forces.”²⁴ This rebrand helped U.S. forces skirt the legal ramifications of supporting a group whose leaders were closely aligned with the PKK, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. But the problem was never truly resolved with Turkey, resulting in tensions between the counter-IS coalition and its SDF partners on the one hand, and Turkey’s leadership on the other.

The second problem was ensuring the SDF had the persuasive and administrative capability to control not just Kurdish territory but also Arab-majority areas recaptured from IS. The YPG/YPJ was a Kurdish force, yet the territory the United States wanted to capture from IS was predominantly Arab. To govern this territory without inciting an ethnic war between Arabs and Kurds in eastern Syria, the United States would need to add an Arab force to its Kurdish partners.

To resolve this second issue, U.S. forces embarked on a project to continuously add new Syrian Arab forces to the SDF so that it appeared to be (and would eventually become) a strong coalition of Kurds and Arabs intent on fighting IS and retaking its territory. As Aron Lund explained in December 2015, U.S. forces would use the SDF to “gradually glue more Arab groups onto a Kurdish core force.”²⁵ The United States would not just remotely support this proxy, as in the past, but actively seek to shape its capabilities to deal with the strategic task it was expected to accomplish.

The United States built the governing capability in the SDF through Syrian Arab partners introduced by recommendations from the YPG/YPJ. The SDF “essentially introduced us to some Syrian Arabs whom we thought we might similarly help to fight,” explained then-Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, “and this was a mission to explore that possibility and get to know these people.”²⁶ Over time, the balance of Kurdish and Arab forces started to equalize: many Arabs were frustrated that decision-making ultimately rested with Syrian Kurds,²⁷ but still signed up in order to recapture their homelands while being protected by U.S. air power and special operations forces.²⁸

When the SDF formed in October 2015, it consisted mainly of Syrian Kurdish YPG/YPJ units with some smaller units of Syrian Arabs that had supported the YPG/YPJ before the revolution, including a Syriac Christian militia.²⁹ By 2016, 15-30 percent of the SDF were Syrian Arabs,³⁰ a number that rose to roughly 50 percent in 2017,³¹ and then to over half according to a 2019 study.³² These increases in the proportion of Arab fighters were critical in ensuring that, when SDF recaptured territory in predominantly Arab regions, it had the necessary persuasive and administrative capacity to control that territory for an extended period of time.

Within a short time, given extensive U.S. support and its preexisting persuasive and coercive capabilities, the SDF transformed into a proxy that had a full spectrum of capabilities needed to help defeat IS in Syria and control the territory it captured afterward.

Managing the Relationship

The U.S.-SDF partnership worked well because it matched political strategies with proxy capabilities. It also worked because U.S. in-country deployments and multilateral diplomacy helped mitigate the three challenges of working with a proxy: 1) resolving the information deficit, 2) reducing principal-agent problems, and 3) minimizing international coordination issues.

U.S. forces in northeastern Syria were a “force multiplier” that enhanced the capability of SDF ground troops through air support, mentoring, and technical training. But U.S. forces had also been stationed in northeast Syria to monitor the battlespace in situ. This reduced the information deficit and the possibility of SDF forces acting on their own.

The first deployment arrived in October 2015: 50 troops who would “train, advise, and assist” SDF forces.³³ These troops were designed to provide technical and intelligence support for the SDF, but were also present to ensure that U.S. assistance was going into the right hands and being properly used on the battlefield, minimizing principal-agent problems. By early 2016, the United States had expanded an airstrip in northeastern Syria to resupply the SDF directly.³⁴ By 2017, U.S. deployed forces rose to roughly 2,000, and troops began to embed directly with SDF units, particularly during the offensive to recapture Raqqa, formerly the capital of the IS caliphate.³⁵

Finally, international coordination under the counter-IS coalition was successful insofar as it focused on signing up as many international partners as possible (81 as of this writing) and only asking of them what they could contribute.³⁶ Bringing these partners into the coalition resolved much of the international coordination challenge, reducing the chances that other countries might carry out operations on their own.³⁷

The main criticism of the U.S.-SDF partnership stems from the fact that the biggest limits to the partnership were ignored until they grew too large to overlook. For example, the SDF detained thousands of IS foreign fighters and their families without any plan to prosecute or repatriate them. The United States also dealt with the international coordination issue effectively with every country except Turkey, and the tensions of that relationship finally spilled over in October 2019 when Turkish forces and their Syrian proxies invaded territory captured by the U.S.-backed SDF.³⁸ However, in sum, the counter-IS coalition matched political strategy and partner capability and mitigated all three of the challenges associated with sponsor-proxy relations to such an extent as to defeat IS resoundingly over a large and complex battleground in a relatively short amount of time.³⁹ It was only once coalition forces finished recapturing territory from IS did their lack of political leadership for a clear end state strategy reemerge to undermine the working relationship between the United States and the SDF.

This section analyzes Turkey’s ongoing proxy warfare effort in northern Syria using our framework for assessing the three challenges of proxy warfare. The section assesses Turkey’s Operation Olive Branch (January-March, 2018) and Operation Spring of Peace (October 2019-present). We show how our proxy warfare framework can not only guide policymakers’ own approach, but also can help predict the relative success or failure of proxy warfare efforts by others.

The Turkish intervention established a more coherent strategic objective than the U.S. counter-IS strategy. Turkey consistently held out the twin objectives of waging a counterterrorism campaign to disrupt Kurdish militants and engaging in a larger state-building enterprise to develop a buffer zone to which refugees could return. Unlike the United States’ counter-IS strategy, Turkish strategy envisioned a clear off-ramp of returning territory to Syrian control and developing governance structures in any buffer areas that it might not return, helping address any drift between the low and high priority qualities of the strategy.

However, two key problems are immediately apparent in Turkey’s relationship with its proxies. First, Turkey’s partners lack the capabilities to reshape the social and political landscape of northeastern Syria without significant and protracted effort from Turkish forces. Turkey’s proxies have the capacity to seize territory from their adversaries in northeast Syria but lack the persuasive and administrative capabilities to hold that territory for an extended period of time. Their brittle hold will be tested by Kurdish guerrillas and, possibly, fundamentalist insurgents to such an extent that Turkish forces may need to be deployed in large numbers over a protracted period in order to support their proxies.

Second, Turkey faces challenges in managing its proxies. Turkey’s inability to police the actions of its proxies exemplifies the principal-agent problem. In the short run, Turkish proxies may commit war crimes or human rights abuses that harm Turkey’s reputation. In the long run, divergence between Turkey’s goals and those of its proxies may completely undermine the relationship. Turkey’s proxies see their partnership with Ankara as a means to regain lost territory and continue their fight against Assad.⁴⁰ Turkey sees creating safe zones as a means to reduce the economic, social, and financial burden imposed upon Turkey by the Syrian refugee population, establish a Turkish-protected Arab-majority buffer zone between Turkey’s Kurdish minority population and autonomous Kurdish-controlled areas in Syria and Iraq, and create strategic depth on Turkey’s southern border. If northern Syria were eventually handed over to the Syrian government, as appears to be Turkey’s intent, Turkish-backed militias would likely be considered terrorists by Damascus. At least some proxies would likely transform into guerilla forces which, combined with two million resettled refugees and a flood of IS prison escapees, could form a new hub of fundamentalist insurgency.

Sponsor Strategy

Turkey’s proxy warfare strategy is well-developed and remains a strength in terms of the clarity of its mission and the political end state it envisions. Its goal is to dislodge Syrian Kurdish militants affiliated with the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê‎ (PKK) by capturing territory controlled by Syrian Kurds and relocating Syrian Arab refugees, currently in Turkey, to populate these regions. This would change the demography of northern Syria, shifting it from a population that would most likely support Syrian Kurdish insurgents to one that would be more pro-Turkish—either through ethnic and political inclination, or because its vulnerable position would make it dependent on support from Ankara. The ultimate goal is to create a buffer, preventing the PKK, Turkey’s internal Kurdish insurgency, from using the Syrian side of the border as a safe haven.

The use of irregular proxy forces (often drawn from ethnic or religious minorities dependent on the central state) to secure frontiers and create buffer zones has a long history in Turkey. ⁴¹ In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Hamidiye irregular light cavalry regiments (Hamidiye Hafif Süvari Alayları) were created by Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II for precisely this purpose, enforcing a buffer zone on the empire’s eastern border with Russia. It was along the same Kurdish-Arab ethnic frontier that is a flashpoint today. Ironically, the Ottomans chose the Kurds as their preferred proxy, recruiting from the empire’s Kurdish tribal minority for the Hamidiye and other militias. The goal was to insulate the empire’s Anatolian heartland from restive Arab populations to the south. Thus, the recruitment of local, ethnically-oriented, communitarian militias in this region is nothing new.

In the present day, Turkey’s operations against the Syrian Kurds are driven by a belief that the Syrian conflict is an extension of an ongoing war against Kurdish separatists. Turkey’s current strategy uses a combination of its own regular troops, the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK), and proxy forces to push Syrian Kurdish militants away from its borders, establishing a 20-mile deep “safe zone” on the Syrian side of the border. Per an October 22, 2019 agreement, Moscow and Damascus would eventually take responsibility for northeastern Syria in exchange for allowing the TSK and its proxies to implement Turkey’s safe zone plan.⁴²

The map below shows the deployment of Turkish troops and proxies as of January 2020. Turkey and the United States agreed on a ceasefire arrangement that would move SDF forces 30 kilometers out of the safe zone.⁴³ That safe zone would comprise the region built out of the rectangle connecting Tell Abiad, Ras al-Ain, Tel Tamer, and Ain Issa.

Turkey’s Long Desired Safe Zone

Turkey has pursued a strategy to install a safe zone in northern Syria in some form or another since 2011, though the terms of that safe zone have shifted over time.⁴⁴ At the end of 2011, Turkey floated a proposal for a “buffer zone” in which it, along with NATO allies, would protect Syria’s opposition in a similar manner to the NATO intervention in Libya. This time, instead of using air-to-ground strikes to help Libyans topple Ghaddafi, the buffer zone would be an air protection zone.⁴⁵ The Syrian opposition would be relocated inside this area in preparation for taking over the Syrian government. Turkey, like most countries at the end of 2011, believed that Bashar al-Assad and his government would fall in six months to a year.⁴⁶

Turkey’s safe zone plans had changed by the end of 2014. When Turkish decision-makers no longer felt confident that Assad would be overthrown, their priority shifted to undermining the growing power of Syrian Kurds, who were beginning to receive U.S. counter-IS coalition assistance following their successful defense of Kobane. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan described Turkey’s revised plan in 2014 as “a no-fly zone and a safe zone” that would be an opportunity not only to support the Syrian opposition but also to repatriate Turkey’s 1.5 million, predominantly Arab, Syrian refugees.⁴⁷ Erdogan’s comments elided the key goal of this plan, which was to push Syrian Kurds off the border. This point became clearer when Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu described the geographies in which Turkey’s safe zone would be implemented, which would involve Turkish troops on the Syrian side of the border nearly everywhere along the border, save a small amount of territory near Tell Abiad.⁴⁸

By the end of 2014, Turkey and the United States were locked in an impasse that would last nearly five years. Turkey wanted the United States to help with its safe zone plan, and Washington wanted Ankara to aid its counter-IS mission. Neither party wanted to fully accede to the other’s demands, but since each needed cooperation from the other, both tried to keep the conversation open, mostly through joint exercises and temporary compromises.⁴⁹ Somewhat understandably, frustrations with this kabuki dance would occasionally emerge, such as when President Erdogan accused the United States of being responsible for a “sea of blood” for its support of the SDF.⁵⁰

By 2017, the Russian-Iranian-Hezbollah intervention bolstered the Syrian government to the point that Damascus had effectively won the civil war, rendering Turkey’s original regime-change objective moot. Thinking in Ankara now shifted: Turkish leaders became focused almost exclusively on countering Syrian Kurdish ascension. They assessed that Bashar al-Assad was going to remain in power and that Turkey therefore needed to balance against the YPG/YPJ which, with U.S. support, had taken over most of Syrian territory east of the Euphrates. Turkey started negotiating with Syria, Iran, and Russia over the right to invade Kurdish-held Syrian territory. The TSK launched Operation Euphrates Shield in 2016 to seize territory in northern Syria, and then negotiated some of it back to Syria, Iran, and Russia in 2017 through “de-escalation zones.”⁵¹

Turkey’s 2018 operation, Operation Olive Branch, became possible after Turkey-Russia negotiations, wherein Russia granted approval for Turkish planes to use airspace in northern Syria to launch airstrikes.⁵² Operation Olive Branch would become the model for Turkey’s strategy of invading northeastern Syria in October 2019 in that it involved using frontline ground forces comprised of largely proxy militias and advisers drawn from Turkish Special Forces (Özel Kuvvetler Komutanlığı, OKK), backed up by regular TSK ground troops and supported by artillery and air strikes, to push out YPG/YPJ forces, followed by a repopulation of the territory with displaced Syrian Arabs.⁵³

In December 2018, President Erdogan convinced President Trump to let Turkey carry out its plans, an agreement that Trump walked back after resignations by Secretary of Defense James Mattis and counter-IS coalition head Brett McGurk, and under pressure from Republican leaders.⁵⁴ The United States needed the SDF at that time because IS had not yet been territorially defeated.

But after March 2019, when IS’s last remaining enclaves of physical territory had disappeared, Turkey’s strategy for a safe zone in northeastern Syria was set. On October 7, 2019, in a call with Erdogan, Trump suddenly reversed assurances of continued support to the SDF that U.S. diplomats and military leaders had given until just days before and immediately withdrew U.S. forces from the proposed Safe Zone area, and gave the green light for Turkey’s Operation Spring of Peace, which duly commenced on October 9, 2019.⁵⁵

According to one assessment,⁵⁶ Spring of Peace had four immediate goals:

1. a military objective to seize the territory outlined by the four towns in Figure 2;
2. a public diplomacy objective to shape public opinion that the operation was in self defense and ultimately supported a peaceful end to the Syrian war;⁵⁷
3. a diplomatic objective to gather support for Turkey’s aims through negotiations, primarily with the United Statesand Russia; and
4. a domestic political objective to gain Turkish public support for the operation, although this would mainly be determined by the military success of the operation.

The long term goal of Operation Spring of Peace is to force Syrian Kurdish militants and civilians to flee northeastern Syria so that Turkey can repopulate this territory with one to two million predominantly Syrian Arab refugees living in Turkey.⁵⁸ As with its operation in Afrin, Turkey is likely to issue permits for refugees to return to this territory, in which it plans to build massive new housing complexes, including 200,000 homes, hospitals, mosques, recreation facilities, and schools.⁵⁹

There are areas where Turkey’s strategy is less clear. The reconstruction phase shows the plan’s rough edges, since it is unclear whether the safe zone could support the proposed number of new arrivals,⁶⁰ whether Turkey would force or encourage refugee resettlement (the former being a violation of customary international law),⁶¹ or if the international community would finance the project to begin with.⁶²

Despite these challenges, Turkey has a clear strategic goal and a plan to reach it. Ankara also, unlike Washington with the SDF, has an off-ramp. After a six-hour negotiation between President Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin on October 22 in Sochi, the political end state for Turkey’s operation became clear. In the short run, Russia and the Syrian government would allow Turkey to carry out its operation and, in exchange, Turkey would respect “Syria’s territorial sovereignty” and the country’s “political unity.”⁶³ In other words, the territory Turkey captures will eventually be handed over to the Syrian government, in return for the establishment of Turkey’s desired safe zone.

Turkish leaders have been working on this plan in some form since the Syrian uprising began. While, over time, Turkey’s priority shifted from overthrowing Assad to undermining Syrian Kurdish militants, the safe zone plan is effectively the same: depopulate Turkey’s southern border of Syrian Kurds, replace them with populations less likely to support a Kurdish insurgency, and eventually hand over control of this territory to a Syrian national government. The problems with Turkish proxy strategy—other than the humanitarian implications—lie not with Turkey’s lack of a clear objective but the capability limitations of its chosen proxies and Turkey’s difficulties in managing them.

Proxy Capabilities

No plan survives the first encounter with the enemy. Although the Turkish strategy is well-defined, it is unclear whether Turkey’s proxies are capable of carrying it out.

On the one hand, Turkey’s proxies are well supplied and supported by the TSK, which gives them combat superiority over the SDF. The Turkish operational method—proxy forces in the lead, OKK advisers moving with them, artillery and air support and strong TSK regular units following close behind—is tactically sound and benefits from geographical proximity to Turkey. On the other hand, these forces have consistently demonstrated an inability to work together or to govern and administer territory. This suggests that Turkey’s proxies may have coercive force, but may lack the persuasive or administrative capability to control territory in northeastern Syria over an extended period of time.

The capability to assert control will be tested, especially if Turkish-backed proxies face a persistent guerrilla campaign waged by native Kurdish forces. A preview of the struggles of the Turkish campaign in northeastern Syria can be found in the predominantly Kurdish enclave of Afrin, where a guerrilla campaign opposes Turkish-backed proxies who are accused of looting, rape, and other war atrocities.⁶⁴

For both Operation Spring of Peace and its predecessor, Operation Olive Branch, Turkey assembled a loose coalition of approximately 30 militias under an umbrella group called the “Syrian National Army” (SNA).⁶⁵ These militias, through the SNA, officially report to the Syrian interim government, an anti-Assad political coalition based in northern Syria (see Figure 4 below for the militias involved in the operation).⁶⁶ Turkey’s attempts at organizing the SNA factions yielded formal-sounding battle formations—the SNA has seven corps, which are then divided into brigades—but these titles simply reinforce pre-existing divisions within the force. Sasha al-Alou, a researcher at the Omran Center for Strategic Studies in Istanbul, described the SNA as a “coalition of factions,” explaining that the factions joined the SNA in exchange for agreements to keep their own structure.⁶⁷

Syrians from across the country joined the SNA, making it a foreign force in northeastern Syria. The fact that SNA militias are being deployed to a foreign territory to fight a population that does not share their ethnic background or political goals will make pacifying and controlling the territory complicated. One clear indicator that the local population is not happy with the arrival of the Turkish-backed proxies is the sheer number of civilians who are leaving. “My interviews with locals indicate that the civilians who do not pick up weapons to defend their homes will attempt to flee to the Kurdistan Region of Iraq,” explained Elizabeth Tsurkov, an analyst of the Syrian conflict.⁶⁸

Although the SNA has military police whose official purpose is to protect civilians, civilians in northeast Syria appear not to trust them, or to want their protection. Estimates of population displacement in the wake of the Turkish incursion vary widely, and it will be important to see how many people return once the initial fighting subsides, but UN figures suggest that approximately 180,000 people left their homes in northeastern Syria within the first month of Turkey’s operation.⁶⁹

Aside from its military police, the SNA has little governance capacity. Local governing structures do exist in some areas, and sometimes are still called “Local Councils.”⁷⁰ However, they are essentially platforms to distribute Turkish aid. According to Aymen al-Tamimi, a Syria analyst, it is a “model of governance in which autonomous local councils prefer to work directly with the Turks.”⁷¹ Sasha al-Alou also describes the problems of civilian oversight over the SNA: “the [Syrian] National Army is not subject to any political institution, and institutions of the political opposition have no authority over its formations.”⁷² This lack of oversight from civilian agencies that could perform governance tasks, along with the inability of the militias to govern, combined with their intense factionalism, makes it extremely unlikely that Turkey’s proxies will be able to control northeastern Syria without a large TSK deployment. Moreover, the ethnic divide between SNA troops and the local population, along with the religious fundamentalism of many SNA groups, make abuses more likely—while the SNA’s fragmented chain of command and factionalized structure make policing or prevention of abuses much harder.

Thus, Turkey’s SNA proxies will face the same capacity problems that U.S.-backed insurgents experienced from 2011-2014: they are not unified, and they lack the persuasive and administrative capacity to reshape the social and political landscape of northeastern Syria without significant effort from Turkish forces. Turkey’s proxies can capture territory, but cannot hold that territory for an extended period of time. These forces struggled to hold territory in Arab parts of Syria throughout the war; they will face even steeper challenges in asserting control over predominantly Kurdish areas, particularly if Syrian Kurds challenge their rule with an active guerrilla force, as many predict.⁷³

Managing the Relationship

The problems facing Turkey’s proxy warfare efforts are not only due to the limited capabilities of Ankara’s chosen proxies, but also its difficulty managing them. As noted, a sponsor needs to mitigate information deficiencies, principal-agent problems, and international coordination challenges. Turkey is well placed to address the first and third challenges. However, the principal-agent challenge—in which many of the Syrian proxies Turkey supports seek victory over Assad while Turkey seeks rapprochement—may undermine the entire campaign.

On the positive side, Turkish forces are based inside northern Syria, which mitigates information deficiencies. Artillery and air observers and OKK advisers accompany the SNA, while regular TSK combat forces follow close behind. Relative to other proxy environments, TSK has a clear reading of the battlespace. TSK forces deployed in Syria include two armored brigades, two mechanized infantry brigades, one commando brigade, two gendarmerie special operations battalions, and assorted special forces teams of as many as 6,000 fighters.⁷⁴

On the international coordination effort, President Erdogan is betting on his relationship with his U.S. counterpart and support from Russia to carry out his plan. In the first weeks of Turkey’s incursion, President Erdogan met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. Vice President Mike Pence. He met with President Trump on November 13 at the White House, and although bilateral issues remain unresolved, Erdogan received minimal public pushback from Trump despite credible reports of SNA atrocities and targeting of U.S. forces by TSK artillery. Erdogan has also threatened the European community with a new wave of Syrian refugees, which has led to silence from the European Union, hardly full-throated support for the campaign but sufficient for Turkey’s purposes.⁷⁵ Although the international community’s interests are not fully aligned with Turkey’s, it is safe to assume that, for the moment, there are no major international or regional partners attempting to undermine Turkey’s efforts.

However, the principal-agent challenge is poised to harm Turkey in the long run. In the short term, Turkey’s proxies lack discipline and are prone to undermining Turkey’s reputation through brutal acts. In the longer term, divergence between Turkey’s goals for its safe zone and the goals of its proxies in partnering with Turkey may undermine Turkey’s effort to secure its border with Syria, replacing a Syrian Kurdish insurgency with a fundamentalist one.

In the immediate term, Turkish proxies pose a major reputational hazard inside Syria and abroad. “The SNA does not consist of well-disciplined forces,” explained one assessment, “They record and share all that they are doing on social media, which is not beneficial to the legitimacy of the operation.”⁷⁶ This assessment proved correct, unfortunately, after Turkish-backed proxies murdered Hevrin Khalaf, a prominent Syrian Kurdish politician, and eight other civilians at a checkpoint.⁷⁷

That proxy forces were in the lead and conducted risky operations left Turkey open to the reputational risks that come with these militias carrying out reprisals.⁷⁸ Inside Syria, such seemingly random attacks terrify a population that perceives no logic to the violence, leading to chaos that quickly becomes costly for an occupying force.⁷⁹ Abroad, Turkey is sensitive to reputational hazards, and to the related risk to the Turkish economy, which Trump has said he could “swiftly destroy” if “Turkish leaders continue down this dangerous and destructive path.”⁸⁰ In the long term, Turkey’s goals are at odds with those of its proxies. This could lead to a breakdown of the relationship, so that even if they successfully expel Kurds from parts of northeastern Syria, the TSK and SNA may end up providing a safe-haven for fundamentalist insurgents that could threaten Turkey and the wider region.

On the one hand, Turkey sees the formation of the safe zone as an end in itself: the expulsion of Kurds from northeastern Syria, and their replacement by Syrian Arabs, would undermine the growing power of Syrian Kurdish militants and prevent the emergence of a safe haven for Turkish Kurdish insurgents. Once Turkey has repopulated this region with returning Syrian Arab refugees, it plans to turn the entire territory over to the Syrian government. Already as part of that agreement, brokered in Sochi on October 22, Turkish and Russian militaries are conducting joint patrols along parts of the Syrian and Turkish border.⁸¹

On the other hand, Turkey’s proxies believe they will capture territory from Syrian Kurds in order to create an enclave from which they can oppose the Syrian government. “As long as we have the civilians and a free army, with a small piece or a small town of Syria, we will liberate all of Syria again,” said Abdul Naser Jalel, a division commander in a Turkish-backed proxy.”⁸² Meanwhile, the SNA’s stated objectives reflect the insurgents’ ongoing revolutionary aims to “liberate the country from tyrants.”⁸³ These objectives, along with the very name of the organization—the Syrian National Army—indicate that SNA leadership hopes to take over northeastern Syria as a means to continue to oppose the Syrian government.

Although these goals are not in opposition at the moment, they will be once the Turkish government begins to follow through on its promises to Russia to hand over the territory it captures to the Syrian government. If that happens, Turkey may find its proxies unwilling to be disarmed or integrated into the Syrian government’s forces. There are from 80,000 to 110,000 fighters in the SNA, according to various estimates.⁸⁴ Their revolutionary goals either need to be accommodated, or, barring that, fighters in the SNA might become a guerrilla army. If refugees are returned to this area from Turkey, these SNA guerillas would find ready recruits among the one to two million returnees. In a worst-case scenario, this chaotic conflict zone might attract fundamentalist insurgents, posing a serious threat not just to Turkey, but to the wider region.

Syria’s fundamentalist insurgency used lessons learned by militants who fought in Syria’s uprising in the 1970s and 1980s to develop a more coherent strategy than the rest of the militant groups that emerged in the early years of the current Syrian civil war. Fundamentalist insurgents did receive foreign funding, but also developed independent sources of funding early on in the Syrian civil war by requiring new joiners to pay a fee to join the group and by focusing on governance, which helped them develop local sources of revenue (e.g. taxation). In addition, the fundamentalists’ foreign funders tended to share the fundamentalists’ ideological orientation and often treated their funds more as donations than part of a proxy relationship.⁸⁵ These diverse revenue streams, and the acceptance of local control by many fundamentalist donors, reduced the complexity of fundamentalist insurgents’ operations: because they did not rely on foreign funding, leaders in the fundamentalist insurgents could focus on the rapidly shifting internal dynamics of the war and not on traveling abroad to secure resources. In effect, fundamentalist insurgents put forward a relatively clear strategy of expanding control and influence, and limited the management problems that plagued other groups who embraced proxy relationships by limiting the control sponsors could exercise over them through diverse revenue streams.

Despite limited foreign funding, the fundamentalist insurgency had capabilities that aligned with their strategy. Fundamentalist insurgents were the only anti-Assad militants who combined coercive with persuasive and administrative capabilities in the early years of the war.⁸⁶ This helped them govern and generate local support of the kind that is crucial in a drawn-out insurgency. Fundamentalist factions had several key advantages at the outset of Syria’s civil war, such as better training, equipment, experience, the possibility that they were not priority targets for the Assad government, and the ideological commitment of their members.

The focus on governance gave fundamentalists a massive early advantage. It helped them control territory with persuasive and coercive force, administer populations (albeit often in a rudimentary and oppressive manner) and gave them a more sustainable base from which to draw resources like money, recruits, and material. In turn, the success of fundamentalist governance efforts meant fundamentalists did not have to rely as heavily on foreign funding to raise money as other factions in the Syrian opposition, illustrating the alignment of fundamentalist strategy and capabilities.

One key reason why fundamentalist groups were able to govern from the outset is that the money they raised was not restricted to war-making. By contrast, no one would pay nationalist Syrian militants to carry out governance projects—not via the Operations Room, not via expatriate donor networks, and not through charities set up in the wealthy Arab states to fund militias.⁸⁷ Fundamentalist groups were able to raise foreign start-up money for military campaigns and support their governance projects because their foreign donor networks believed in the religious mission as well as the military confrontation. Early support for fundamentalists included Da’wa efforts—proselytization—that involved providing persuasive and administrative services like education, taxation and charity, and carrying out essential governance functions such as the creation of a legal system under Shari’a law.

Leaders of the official Syrian opposition were not fully aware that the fundamentalist focus on state-building would come at their expense. People generally believed that the fundamentalists and the rest of the opposition had the same proximate goal of overthrowing Assad, and could disagree on what came after Assad once he was gone. As we have shown in our previous report in this ASU/New America Future of Proxy Warfare series, this misconception lasted until at least the summer of 2013.⁸⁸ Martin Chulov, the Guardian journalist who has been reporting on Syria since the outbreak of the conflict, reported earlier in 2013 that a “schism [was] developing between the jihadists and residents,” quoting a rebel commander in Aleppo who said, plainly, “they [the Islamists] don’t want what we want.”⁸⁹

Even if the rebels knew in advance that fundamentalists might eventually compete with them for control of parts of Syria, many thought they could at least use them to overthrow Assad first. “We want to topple the regime,” explained Ahmed Zeidan in 2012. Zeidan was a member of the Idlib Military Council, a coalition of militants based in northwest Syria. “Whoever offers us help,” he explained, “we will call our units whatever they want as long as they support us. We just want to finish [off Assad].”⁹⁰ The jihadists were capable fighters, and armed groups cooperated with them despite ideological differences.⁹¹ Local militias needed them on the front lines, and couldn’t oppose them in rear areas.⁹² This gave jihadists like Jabhat al-Nusra, and big tent fundamentalist groups like Ahrar al-Sham and Jaish al-Islam, years to develop inroads into local communities.

A Vision for Local Jihad

Fundamentalists had long prized Syria as uniquely suitable for their purpose of developing an Islamic state. In The Master Plan, terrorism analyst and former New America International Security program fellow Brian Fishman describes how several members of Al Qaeda developed a seven-stage plan that would eventually lead to the announcement of a Caliphate. As Fishman puts it, the plan noted that Syria was a “geopolitical loophole” that was “uniquely vulnerable to jihadi pressure because the United States would not support the Assad regime.”⁹³ Syria’s demographics also tilted in the jihadists’ favor, since the country was roughly 65 percent Sunni Muslim, whereas the Assad family represented an offshoot of Shi’a Islam that constituted 10 percent of the country’s population.⁹⁴ That meant an uprising against Assad would garner popular support—even if that support partially broke down along confessional lines.

As the war against Assad began in earnest in 2012, two fundamentalist groups started to implement a thirty-year-old Salafi Jihadist plan of state-building in Syria. This plan was different than the one that had described how a fundamentalist Caliphate might emerge. It was based on the lessons of Abu Musab al-Suri, one of the combatants in Syria’s uprising in the 1970s and 1980s.⁹⁵ Suri’s work, “Lessons Learned from the Jihad Ordeal in Syria,” included two key findings that were adopted by the fundamentalist insurgency in Syria’s war.

The first finding was that militants were far too dependent on foreign countries for support. Foreign support “restricted and crippled” the group, and, “once this support came to a screeching halt, hopes were dashed and the end was tragic.”⁹⁶ To address this, al-Suri recommended the group become self-sufficient: “jihad revolutionary movements waging gang warfare cannot rely on outside sources for financing, weaponry, training and support,” he wrote, “they have to depend on themselves…unless they have a detailed and comprehensive plan for self-sufficiency in all areas they will end up at the mercy and whim of their financers and providers.”⁹⁷

Suri’s second finding was that future uprisings should invest more heavily on indoctrinating new recruits in communities where they would be based. “The movement of the jihad cadres [abroad],” he wrote about the anti-Assad forces who fled abroad in the 1970s and 80s, “ended up being a permanent settlement. The revolution lost contact with the masses; its main natural source of financing, personnel, morale, and motivation.”⁹⁸

Putting this in terms of competitive control theory, Suri (and those who applied his plan to Syria) recognized that, in order to establish a resilient system of territorial and population control, they needed to develop independent, coercive, persuasive, and administrative capabilities across a wide spectrum of military, governance, and essential-services tasks, and must retain the autonomy to control and allocate funds, personnel, and other resources in order to do so.

Seeking Local Contacts

While foreign funds were channeled to other militants, groups like Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham implemented al-Suri’s recommendations and built highly trained, selective, and self-sufficient units with the long-term strategy of building an Islamic state in Syria. “While others were seeking foreign funding,” explained Kader Sheikhmous, a Syria analyst, “al-Nusra was doing the opposite, seeking local contacts. They took advantage of this situation and this was the smarter bet.”⁹⁹

Fundamentalist groups established a system in which new recruits donated $1,500 to join the group.¹⁰⁰ New recruits also needed to provide a reference from someone who could vouch for their bona fides. The donation provided by the fighter, along with the ideological and military training he underwent as part of the process of joining the group, meant that al-Nusra, and, to a lesser extent, Ahrar al-Sham, were exclusive groups. “Fighters who joined in 2011-2013 weren’t poor people looking for a salary,” explained Idlbi, “they were ideologically motivated fighters…That structure of training attracted people who were more middle-class fighters and from cities.”¹⁰¹ Unlike other militias, which largely depended upon foreign money, the system of fighter donations provided al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham with the start-up money to buy their first weapons without becoming dependent upon external sponsors and subject to their potential lack of strategic clarity and management troubles.

Although they had different political philosophies, both tried to persuade communities to give them their support.¹⁰² Starting in early 2012, they worked with local armed groups, invested in building relationships with community leaders, tackled corruption and lawlessness, and developed local proselytization (Da’wa) efforts to convince others to follow their thinking.¹⁰³ Their approach to building community support has been described at great length: analysts have described al-Nusra’s approach as “persuasive,”¹⁰⁴ “local,”¹⁰⁵ “gradualist,”¹⁰⁶ “in symbiosis with the broader opposition,”¹⁰⁷ and, militarily, “a key source of resolve and command presence.”¹⁰⁸ Meanwhile, research on Ahrar al-Sham has described it as incorporating all the major strains of political Islam,¹⁰⁹ as a “populist revolutionary force”¹¹⁰ or an “Islamist alternative”¹¹¹ to Al Qaeda or IS that rejects “purist” hardline Salafi-jihadism,¹¹² and has promoted itself as “revisionist jihadism.”¹¹³

The two groups publicly disagreed in 2014,¹¹⁴ 2015,¹¹⁵ 2016,¹¹⁶ and their forces confronted each other in 2017,¹¹⁷ yet they shared similar approaches that focused on cultivating local ties, developing the ability to fundraise locally, and using foreign assistance to bolster their efforts rather than drive them.

Meanwhile, militants with predominantly foreign funding faded away over the course of the conflict. Chasing foreign funding, rather than seeking sustainable sources of local support, harmed these militants’ long-term survivability, resiliency, and internal cohesion. As early as 2013, a coalition of armed groups, including Ahrar al-Sham, Jabhat al-Nusra and three groups formerly within the Free Syrian Army, formally criticized the National Coalition for Syria’s opposition (the “Etilaf”) for spending its time outside the country and not respecting the sacrifices of those fighting in Syria.¹¹⁸ Coincidentally, illustrating just how out-of-touch the Etilaf was, its response criticized these armed groups for their timing, as Etilaf representatives were in New York at the United Nations General Assembly lobbying for international action to support the Syrian opposition.¹¹⁹

In conclusion, fundamentalists established resilient control, which they maintain to this day in Idlib province—and which, as of this writing, is one of the last remaining areas within Syria to survive outside regime control—because they were less concerned with foreign donors and more focused on developing not just a military strategy, but a fundamentally political one as well.

Fundamentalist groups beyond Ahrar al-Sham and Jabhat al Nusra, such as Jaish al-Islam, similarly spurned foreign money in order to build local ties. Even the Islamic State for many years embraced a similar strategy of focusing on local ties. However, IS grew exploitative in part due to its high proportion of foreign fighters, its technical inability to govern large territory or resolve complex management problems, and the intensity of the military campaign it faced.¹²⁰

Fundamentalist insurgents proved to be the most effective non-proxy forces in the Syrian war, as they were far more reliant on raising money locally by controlling territory than on raising funds from foreign backers. This mentality helped them survive Syria’s drawn-out civil war because it reduced their reliance on foreign assistance, it reduced the need to respond to a foreign sponsor’s strategy in the event that it differed from their own, and it reduced the complexity of sponsor-proxy management. This independence and autonomy ensured that those fighters who did participate were more likely to be committed, since they would have more agency on the battlefield. The wide spectrum of persuasive, administrative, and coercive tools on which these groups could draw also gave them much more resilient control over territory and populations than other groups were able to achieve.

Despite the seeming defeat of its caliphate, IS may be the most well-resourced insurgency of the four main fundamentalist groups.¹²¹ A 2019 RAND study estimates that IS retains approximately $400 million,¹²² while a 2019 UN study put its estimated funds at $300 million.¹²³ Other fundamentalist insurgents control territory around Damascus, Idlib, and the Aleppo countryside. As the Syrian war shifts from a phase emphasizing territorial control to one that focuses more on a simmering insurgency, the remaining pockets of anti-Assad resistance will overwhelmingly be run by fundamentalist insurgents.