notes on the Syrian Army

[Sgt Joch]

With the ongoing rebellion in Syria and the possibility (though still remote) of intervention (strange how the fictional CMSF 2008 invasion may become reality in 2011), more attention is being paid to Syria's military. I came across an interesting article this morning:

ALAWI CONTROL OF THE SYRIAN MILITARY KEY TO REGIME’S SURVIVAL

With its central doctrines carefully guarded as religious secrets, the true essence of Alawism has proved elusive to many who have tried to define it. Alawism is primarily a syncretistic belief system that incorporates large doses of Middle Eastern Christianity with significant influence from Isma’ili Islam, Shi’a “Twelver” Islam and traditional pre-Islamic beliefs. French colonial administrators attempted to classify Syrian Alawism as a separate religion despite resistance from Alawi leaders who were more interested in identifying with Islam, a trend that has been resisted by many orthodox Sunni Muslims.

The takeover of predominantly Sunni Syria by a group of Alawi military officers in 1966 and their ability to preserve Alawite rule for over four decades is truly one of the oddest political developments in the modern Middle East. Alawis represent, at best, only ten per cent of the Syrian population, yet their control of the levers of power in Damascus is almost total, including the military, internal security forces and intelligence units. Sunnis and other religious minorities participate in Syrian government institutions in large numbers, but there is no question as to which group holds ultimate power.

The political ascendency of the Syrian Alawis has not resulted in efforts to establish Alawi religious supremacy – on the contrary, it has spurred an effort to bring Alawism into the mainstream of Shi’a Islam (at least superficially) in order to minimize sectarian grievances over the rule of a distinct religious minority. Nonetheless, such efforts have had little impact on the views of the Sunni orthodox Muslim Brotherhood, who appear to have emerged in recent days from years of political repression to lead the armed resistance against the Alawi-dominated military.

The Brotherhood is reported to be smuggling arms from Turkey to northwestern Syrian province of Idlib (NOW Lebanon, June 7). Fighting between insurgents and army loyalists appears to be concentrated on the town of Jisr al-Shughur, where government reports describe “a real massacre” of over 120 members of the security forces (al-Watan [Damascus], June 5; NOW Lebanon, June 6). There are also reports of a mutiny by local members of the security forces that began after some policemen were executed for refusing to shoot on demonstrators.

The repeated failure of conventional Syrian forces in clashes with Israeli forces led to a change in strategic direction in Damascus and a greater emphasis on unconventional warfare, including the development of ballistic missile capability, Special Forces units, chemical weapons and apparently unsuccessful forays into the development of a nuclear capability, the latter being largely deterred by direct military intervention by the Israeli Air Force. Much like Libya, the bulk of the Syrian Army consists of poorly trained and equipped conscripts, with most of the military budget being devoted to training and equipping the few divisions and other units believed most loyal to the regime and under the firm control of Alawi officers.

Much of the state violence seen so far in Syria has been carried out by Interior Ministry forces and units of the heavily-Alawite secret police. There may have been some hesitance so far in deploying the most loyal divisions of the army against protestors, as these divisions are largely Alawi in composition and their deployment might turn a political confrontation into a sectarian struggle that the Alawi minority might be able to win in the short term, but would be hard pressed in sustaining their dominance in the long-term.

Though there has been some speculation that the Alawi officer corps might abandon the Assad regime, this would be more in the style of the Egyptian military jettisoning an inconvenient ruler rather than running the risk of a comprehensive political transition that would definitely not conclude with the Alawi officer corps maintaining their ranks and privileges. Potentially, even their lives could be in danger in such circumstances. At the moment, there is no international encouragement – as in Libya – for commanders to defect, and no tribal incentive, as in Yemen.

The regular Syrian Army consists of 11 divisions, of which only two can be firmly said to be reliable supporters of the regime. The Republican Guard (an armored division) and the Fourth Armored Division are under the direct command of Maher Assad, brother of Syrian president Bashar Assad. Special Forces units of roughly 15,000 men are also considered reliable and are based close to Damascus. Unlike the bulk of the army, the rank-and-file of these units is largely Alawi. Most of the Syrian officer corps is Alawi; though some Sunni officers have succeeded in rising to senior positions, their appointments rarely place significant numbers of troops under their direct command (Reuters, April 6). The Republican Guards are the only Syrian military unit allowed to deploy within Damascus, reducing the risk of mutiny by non-Alawi troops in the most politically sensitive areas.

To reduce the risk of instability within the military, the regime is making intense efforts to portray the ongoing protests as armed insurrections by Salafist extremists or as attacks by externally inspired and funded terrorist groups (Reuters, April 18; see also Terrorism Monitor Brief, April 22). Even if demonstrators were to succeed in winning over the Sunni rank-and-file in the military, there is every chance that we would see, as in Libya, the same reluctance of such defectors to apply their arms against loyal units they know to be superior in almost every way.

the interesting parts are bolded.

http://www.jamestown.org/programs/gta/single/?tx_ttnews%5btt_news%5d=38034&tx_ttnews%5bbackPid%5d=26&cHash=7a09cb47523c8a5c26560b00f445ae79

[Frankster65]

A most interesting read indeed. 2011 will see them in the headlines more often I suspect. I've been working on a mission in the editor for some time now, actually just the map right now. The idea was to create a mission where the Syrians were attacking an area where the PKK is held up. Syria has better relations now with Turkey due to their cracking down on PKK groups in northern Syria. With the new headlines, I may have to change the focus of my mission yet again.

[Erik Springelkamp]

NATO is not going to attack Syria now or in the near future (barring totally new circumstances).

There are about as many demographic threats in Syria as there were in Iraq, and the current president is the formal head of a power coalition, he is not an absolute dictator.

There are major Christian, Shia (including Alawi, who hold the power), Sunni, Druse, Kurd and Palestinian populations in Syria, and an unbalancing revolution would spell disaster for the country.

After the lessons of Iraq, no NATO country would like to take responsibility for that mess.

[LJFHutch]

I seriously doubt NATO will commit any more ground troops to any more places in the world.

[LongLeftFlank]

And there's no oil either. Syria's wealth has been historically rooted in it being a crossroads for trade and secondarily derived from agriculture in the coastal areas.

[Erik Springelkamp]

The Christian and Druse - and also the Shia - populations don't support revolution, as they are afraid to get crunched in Sunni fundamentalism.

And none of the Syrian opposition supports US intervention: they want reform from the inside, on their own.

[Sgt Joch]

Agreed that the chances of military intervention in RL are slim to none, but I am more interested in the wargaming possibilities. Certainly a military intervention or civil war in CMSF 2011 is more plausible than in CMSF 2008.

What I found interesting about the text was the extent of Alawi involvement in the military. I knew that since the mid-70s, the Syrians had been concentrating resources in a few key units so that they would have at least some competent units, a strategy which worked well in the 82 war, just like it was known that the Assads were Alawi. I had not realized how deeply the Alawis were involved in the military to the point of staffing entire key units.

This would have a direct impact on how the key units (Republican Guards, Special Forces) and the regular army and reserves could be expected to fight in a hypothetical NATO invasion or civil war.

[Erik Springelkamp]

REVIEWED BY JOSHUA LANDIS, Department of Near East Studies, Princeton University

International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Aug., 1998), pp. 447-449

Published by: Cambridge University Press

Only a handful of important books have been written on modern Syria; and Nikolaos Van Dam's The Struggle for Power in Syria is one of them. When it first appeared in 1979 with the subtitle, Sectarianism, Regionalism and Tribalism in Politics, 1961-1978, it rapidly set the terms for future debate on Syrian politics. With the recent publication of a revised edition, Van Dam, who has served as the Dutch ambassador to Syria, Egypt, and Turkey, has conscientiously updated his book. He has re-worked the original six chapters and the footnotes, and added three new chapters covering the last twenty years of Assad's rule. The bibliography is the best of its kind and should be the starting point for any student wishing to research Syrian politics. Although the book is twice the length of the original, it contains only a merciful 140 pages of text, making it ideal for serious undergraduate classes and indispensable to any Middle East collection.

The passage of eighteen years has only confirmed the intelligence of Van Dam's original thesis. He has demonstrated elegantly and simply that the coups and factionalism in Syrian politics of the 1960s must be understood in terms of identity politics rather than of class. At that time, Bacthist regimes were trumpeting their elimination of sectarianism and tribalism as meaningful social referents in Syria.

Arab nationalists, inclined to accept such claims, theorized about Arab unity and socialism as if an age of liberation were at hand. Ac-ademics, too, were swept up by the post-revolutionary optimism. Many deployed such Marxist categories as the "rural middle class," "Bonapartist state," and "bureaucratic authoritarianism" as if to suggest that the military dictatorships that had become so commonplace in the Middle Eastern landscape were not as bad as they seemed. Some even argued that they were a pre-requisite to economic development and offered a way out of the destructive embrace of inter-national capitalism. Van Dam took a more sober view.

For Van Dam, dictatorship in Syria was not as much a product of economic necessity as of social fragmentation. Culturally, Syria was too divided to support a pluralistic state. "A clear relationship existed," Van Dam writes, "between political stability and the degree of sectarian, regional and tribal factionalism in the political elite" (p. 139). When the power centers of the state, such as the upper ranks of the security forces and the military, have been divided among diverse sectarian and regional factions, as they were in the 1960s, Syria has been unstable. When "one all-powerful political faction" dominates, as has been the case since Hafez al-Assad took power in 1970, Syria has experienced stability (p. 137). Almost all of Assad's closest lieutenants are not only 'Alawis, they are also members of his family or tribe, or they come from his hometown of Qardahah. Relying on primordial ties for political loyalty has been a simple necessity of power politics in Syria-and the root of Assad's success. That is to say, it takes a village to rule Syria.

The original chapters in The Struggle for Power in Syria remain the most compelling, for they explain how a complete re-shuffling of Syria's social and political hierarchy followed the cAlawi-led Bathist coup of March 1963. 'Alawi officers, with the assistance of other minority officers from the Syrian countryside, broke the political monopoly held by the Sunnis in a series of purges that led up to the second Bathist coup of 1966. The minority factions could not preserve their alliance following the downfall of the Sunnis. Neither their shared Bathist ideology nor their common background of rural poverty was enough to stem the tide of sectarian distrust sweeping through Syrian politics.

In 1966, the `Alawis purged Druze officers following a dramatic standoff, which was re-solved only after Assad surrounded the Jabal Druze with artillery and threatened to level the region. Next, the Ismailis were swept from senior military positions. By 1970, most senior non-'Alawi officers had been dismissed or arrested for having supported abortive coup at-tempts. As Van Dam points out, "this did not mean that hardly any" non-`Alawi officers were left in the army; rather, "it meant the end of their role as significant power groups" that could threaten the 'Alawi domination of the state (p. 61). The last episode in this decade of upheaval was a battle between two cAlawi factions, one led by Assad and one by Salah Jadid. Assad's superior ability to cultivate regional and tribal loyalties within the military secured his victory. In these chapters, Van Dam demonstrates to the satisfaction of this reviewer that sectarian politics and primordial loyalties are the keys to understanding the major stages in the devel-opment of the contemporary Syrian state.

That said, it should be noted that a number of fine academics remain unconvinced, most notably Raymond Hinnebusch. He insists that "class provides the crucial key that drives change" in Syria, and that sectarian politics are secondary, surfacing only "when class conflict recedes" (p. 141).

The three new chapters continue the story of Syria's sectarian struggles up to the present. Two of the chapters deal with the rise of Syria's Sunni Islamic opposition, and its demise following the fateful Hama massacre of 1982. The final chapter, titled "The Power Elite under Hafiz al-Asad," touches on a number of topics, not the least of which is the question of what will happen when Assad dies.

Little of this material will be new to those who have read Patrick Seale's biography of Assad. Many episodes of Syrian history under Assad are not discussed in any detail, in particular those relating to public and foreign policy such as the 1973 war and Syria's involvement in Lebanon. The reason for these omissions, Van Dam explains, is that "Syrian policies as such had nothing to do with the sectarian composition of the power elite" (p. 137). What is included is prescribed by Van Dam's original thesis.

In his analysis of the Hama massacre, for example, Van Dam explains that the troops who destroyed the Sunni city were largely cAlawi in composition and that their commanding of-ficers were CAlawi almost to the man. He notes that the choice of Hama for the regime's bloody showdown with its opponents was not coincidental, for Hamawis had been responsible for much of the past mistreatment of 'Alawis. Revenge provided the motive for some of the ex-cesses of Hama. If Hama is the yardstick by which scholars and statesmen continue to measure the brutality of Assad's regime, it seems that Van Dam is critical but understanding. He does not try to clear up the controversy over the number killed, but repeats that somewhere be-tween 5,000 and 25,000 perished. If the Muslim Brotherhood had toppled the regime, or if Syria had slipped into civil war as Lebanon did, Van Dam suggests, matters might have been much worse. He points out that the majority of Syrians may well have supported Assad, even if grudgingly, in light of these bleak alternatives. Assad succeeded in breaking the back of the opposition at Hama, we are told, even if he may have "sown the seeds of future strife and revenge." It is clear that like many Western and Israeli statesmen, Van Dam respects Assad for his ability to survive and for his mastery of Syrian politics.

All the same, Van Dam is not optimistic about the prospects for meaningful economic re-form in Syria, or about the possibility of a Velvet Revolution in the future. He points out that Assad's anti-corruption campaigns have been ineffectual because the president refuses to dis-cipline his security chiefs, many of whom are the worst offenders. He doubts that the country can make a peaceful transition to a post-Assad government, because Assad has allowed his re-gime to become ossified. No purges have been carried out, and few top personnel have been changed in the last twenty-five years. Consequently, no new generation has been groomed for power or schooled in the art of government.

Only the president's son, Bashar, seems to be in line to inherit authority from his father. Other members of Assad's inner circle have likewise been grooming their sons to succeed them. He notes that the Sunni majority has not given up its "negative attitude towards 'Alawi religion and 'Alawis in general," and adds that he finds it "very difficult to imagine a scenario in which the present narrowly based, totalitarian regime .. . can be peacefully transformed into a more widely based democracy." The key to Assad's success has been his ability to rule through his metaphorical village. Whether the dynastic principle that Assad and his men have been pushing will catch on in Syria is an open question. Van Dam gives us little reason to believe that Syria is developing the political institutions or broader national identity that may someday replace the parochial loyalties and narrow prejudices that now define politics in Syria.

[Erik Springelkamp]

A recent analysis by Nikolaos van Dam:

http://www.nikolaosvandam.com/pdf/article/20110414nvdamarticle01us.pdf

[Sgt Joch]

In "Arabs at War: military effectiveness, 1948-91", Kenneth Pollack discussed various factors which could explain the relatively poor performance of Arab Armies, one was the criteria for choosing officers.

Arab Regimes are generally more worried about the internal threat (i.e. military coups) rather than the external threat. Arab rulers tend to select military officers on the basis of their political loyalty rather than military competence. This is generally viewed as one of the reasons for the poor performance of Arab Armies in 1967. When Arab Armies have made an effort to select and promote competent officers, their performance has markedly improved, for example, Egypt in 1973 or Iraq in 1987-88 vs Iran.

In Syria, this was an endemic problem. In the 25 years before Hafez al-Assad took power in 1970, there was a coup every 2-3 years. After he took over, it appears he attempted to promote officers on the basis of competence to improve the capability of the Syrian Army vs the IDF, although political loyalty was still the main criteria.

After the generally mediocre performance of the Syrian Army in 1973 and in the Lebanon invasion of 1976, a new strategy was adopted. The best men, equipment and training were concentrated in a few key units, notably the Special Forces/Commando units to provide the Regime with at least some units which could compete with the IDF. This worked well in the 1982 war where the Special Forces turned in a generally competent performance vs the IDF.

Since 1982, there have been indications that the capabilities of the Syrian Army has degraded. If Syria has gone back to staffing its key units (Republican Guards, Special Forces) on the basis of political loyalty rather than military competence, this would probably be the case. It would be interesting to know at what point Syria started staffing these units largely with Alawis, I don't know if Van Dam discusses this in his book.