Syrian Civil War & American Troops: Arab Tribes Are the Key to Understanding Conflict
America’s options for working with them to defeat jihadists once and for all are difficult.
Tel Tamer, Syria — An uneasy calm prevails over northeastern Syria, as a coronavirus spike and fears of renewed fighting hang over people’s heads. Tensions between the Syrian government and Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), backed by the U.S. government, have added to the troubles. Most people I spoke with here in November and December asked me what I thought would happen, as if being an American gave me special insight into how the next few months in Washington would affect the situation here. Most people here are tired of war — that much is obvious wherever you go.
Northeastern Syria has always been a mosaic, with locals practicing the religions of Islam, Christianity, and Yazidism, while speaking Arabic, Kurdish, Armenian, Turkish, and two dialects of Aramaic, Syriac and Assyrian. The SDF has largely preserved this diversity, though tensions between groups persist under the surface. Turkish-backed opposition forces, in contrast, have continued to push Islamic and Arab chauvinism against minorities that have fallen under their control. The geopolitical ramifications aside, renewed fighting has prompted a humanitarian disaster.
The Syrian Democratic Forces are led by the YPG (People’s Protection Units), a Kurdish militia tied to the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party). The PKK has long struggled against the Turkish government. Initially, many Kurds and non-Kurds alike were skeptical of the YPG’s agenda, but the group’s fight against ISIS, and its insistence on a multiethnic system of rights for each group, reassured some Arabs and Christians that its project was not merely a cover for a Kurdish nationalist project. Over time, however, old tensions have resurfaced. I heard more skepticism toward the Autonomous Administration, the SDF’s governing project, than I have on previous visits.
Some Arab tribes have soured on the SDF and the Autonomous Administration, its governing project in northeastern Syria. In parts of Deir al-Zour under SDF control (the province is split between the SDF and the Syrian government), the mysterious assassination of tribal officials has led to an exchange of accusations against ISIS, the SDF, Turkish-backed opposition groups, and the Syrian government. Tribal politics have complicated and compromised local security arrangements. Still, in much of the commentary and research on the tribes, writers fail to ask fundamental questions. What exactly are the tribes? Why do they maintain such power in some places? And why are their internal politics so difficult to understand from the outside?
Historically, the territory that now encompasses Syria and Iraq has always known a sharp dichotomy between urban dwellers — the cities of Baghdad, Mosul, Aleppo, and Damascus being among the most prominent — and the nomadic tribes roaming the vast desert that makes up much of eastern Syria and western Iraq. Ever since Ibn Khaldun, the 14th-century scholar, Arab academics have distinguished between the region’s settled population (civilized, as they call it) and the Bedouins, desert-dwelling nomadic tribes. For Ibn Khaldun, history was an account of the conflict between nomads and settled (civilized) peoples. Nomads created kingdoms and empires because they had the power of the sword. The settled populations of the cities lived under constant threat of attack from the nomads.
That formula had begun to shift by the end of the Ottoman Empire. In its attempt to bring its Islamic realm into the modern world, the government in Istanbul sought to impose modernity on its rural populations. The nomads now posed a threat not so much to the government as to the empire’s economy, as tribes of the vast desert attacked and stole from caravans carrying goods throughout territory that now forms Syria, Iraq, and southern Turkey. The Ottomans tried various methods to control the tribes and met with varying results. The clash between the tribes’ way of life and the world around them was major, and remains ongoing.
Six centuries after Ibn Khaldun developed his analysis of the nomadic tribes of the Middle East, another Arab scholar, the Iraqi sociologist Ali al-Wardi, advanced the theme, explaining the clash between modernity and the tribal values developed in the desert. Al-Wardi is probably the best-known academic in Iraq even today, decades after his death in 1995. His precise understanding of his own society has led to a renewal of his work in light of the past decade of chaos in the region, especially as it becomes obvious to many that the source of the region’s main problems is internal. Many in the Arab world no longer buy the campaign to blame its problems on foreign intervention, and in that regard al-Wardi was ahead of his time. “Values” (al-Akhlaq), a scholarly article he wrote in 1958 (it was republished, as a book, in 2018), is particularly useful when trying to understand the tribes who have so confused, and frustrated, the American military and its partners in Syria, Iraq, and throughout the region.
Like Ibn Khaldun in the Middle Ages, al-Wardi in the 20th century notes the economic gap between nomads and settled peoples, who rely on occupations through which they produce things. When humans first settled down, they shifted from hunting and gathering to planting and harvesting. Such settlement may have occurred in the Middle East before anywhere else, but nomadic populations as well continued to exist there long after they disappeared elsewhere. The nomadic economic model is based on the exploitation of existing resources, whether provided by nature or by the efforts of other humans. The advent of modernity, with the inability of the tribes to adapt their economic practices to it, has resulted in the social crisis of the tribes in the 20th and 21st centuries.
According to al-Wardi, the different lives led by nomads and by settled populations led to different values systems. Nomads respected those who carried the sword and looked down on those who made their living by the sweat of their brow. Nomads also looked down on saving money, seeing in that practice a lack of confidence in a man’s ability to secure what he needed tomorrow, from nature or by force. Tribes fought each other constantly, and tribal raids were key to proving one’s manhood. The values developed by the tribes may seem harsh to an outsider. It’s important to remember that many Arabs themselves find them strange — they are not the values of the settled populations of Damascus and Baghdad, past or present.
Even so, tribal values include noble virtues. The desert tribes of Syria and Iraq lived in a difficult environment and stressed the importance of providing sanctuary to those in need. Arab tribal hospitality was renowned. It was not acceptable even to ask who guests were when granting them hospitality, lest they understand the welcome to be contingent on their answer. Anyone in need of help in the desert was given it, and it was understood that the generosity would be reciprocated without question. Tribesmen were noted for their honesty as well — it made no sense to raid another tribe’s sheep or camels and not brag about it. The mark of a strong man in the desert was his ability to raid his neighboring tribes with impunity. He had no incentive to lie.
By the late nineteenth century, however, as modernity began to pervade the Middle East, the balance of power shifted from nomads to those living a settled life. The power of the sword no longer resided with the nomad: He could not acquire the advanced weapons of the settled civilization. The nomad became more a nuisance than a threat. In its efforts to stop the tribes from raiding caravans, the Ottoman government used both carrots and sticks. It forcibly moved tribes, to keep them away from popular trade routes. It taxed the tribes’ livestock and registered land in the name of individuals. These administrative changes, followed by the introduction of cars, cell phones, and other technology, upended the nomadic way of life.
The tribal social structure is loosely defined, based largely on self-interest and self-protection. Someone in the lower ranks of the tribe offers loyalty to the sheikh and in return receives protection and some economic support. Historically, tribal leadership was not necessarily hereditary, though it can be. Any pretender to the tribal leadership, however, had to prove himself worthy and earn popular support. Tribal affiliation is defined more by loyalty than by bloodlines, though family ties obviously remain important.
The Ottoman registration of land ownership, continued later by the Syrian and Iraqi governments, fossilized tribal position, both within tribes and among them. Tribal lands were registered in the name of the most powerful local sheikh, leading to a sort of feudal relationship between the sheikh and his fellow tribesmen. Whereas a lower-ranking tribesman had been largely responsible for his own crop or livestock, he now owed a share of that to the sheikh, with no obligation from the sheikh to reciprocate. The sheikh had become a feudal landlord, backed by the power of the rule of law. Moreover, after the Ottomans imposed taxes on livestock, the tribesmen, previously known for their honesty, had a clear incentive to lie to government officials about how many sheep or camels they owned. Later, the Iraqi government enforced conscription, leading tribes to lie about how many people were in the tribe. They saw no value in giving up their young men to fight for a newly created country whose government was trying to impose foreign values on them, tear apart their way of life, and draw boundaries between tribal lands, such as was the case in the desert of Syria and Iraq. Tribesmen began to show their true face only within a smaller and smaller trusted network, al-Wardi writes. To a stranger, lying was the safest option to protect oneself.
In the old world, tribes were known for their hospitality, honesty, and trustworthiness but also for theft, revenge, and tribalism, or favoritism. Al-Wardi argued that the modern world defeated the noble traits of the tribes but not the sinister ones. Although the tribes’ economic model was no longer viable, the system of social protection they offered remained intact, and so did tribal loyalty.
Even in al-Wardi’s time, other drastic changes were only beginning to show their effect. Technological advances allowed tribal sheikhs to maintain control over larger and larger areas of land. Previously, a sheikh was limited by means of transport. He could not reasonably control an area larger than what he could cover on camel within a day or two. The advent of the pickup truck, as Dawn Chatty astutely documented and explained in her book From Camel to Truck: The Bedouin in the Modern World, enabled a sheikh to expand the territory over which he could assert authority. Cell phones have enabled him further.
Analysis of Arab tribes may hold little interest outside the disciplines of sociology and anthropology, but tribal politics have affected, and sometimes confounded, some of the most high-profile and consequential U.S. foreign-policy actions of the past few decades. Tribal politics continue to mystify outsiders. We are still behind the curve in understanding what the tribes are and how they work. The Syrian conflict provides an apt case study: Many of the same tribes backed the Syrian government, then the opposition, then ISIS, and then the Kurdish-led SDF. They repeat the slogans of incoming power at a flashy conference and then hardly bat an eye as they shift to the rhetoric of the next group, though we should not dismiss the principled stands that some tribes have taken throughout the conflict, particularly against ISIS. In any case, tribal politics largely reward the strong, not the principled.
As in Anbar province in Iraq over a decade ago, the U.S. in Syria today faces a complicated tribal dynamic. The tribal structure offers a particular temptation for those attempting to achieve political or military aims efficiently: If you can get the right couple of sheikhs on board, you can shift a situation in your favor quickly. That is what the U.S. did by supporting tribal leaders against al-Qaeda and other insurgents in Anbar.
The problem with that tactic is that the tribal structure has probably never been weaker. Though tribes still carry significant clout within Syrian and Iraqi society, radical jihadist groups and revolutionary protests have offered young people in particular a way to challenge the hierarchy of the tribe and find alternative guarantors of protection and support. And the options for weak tribes to change their position have diminished; there have always been weaker and stronger tribes, and within tribes there have always been weaker and stronger pretenders to leadership. In the past, one could rise within the system by making a direct challenge, within or between tribes — gather a few other weaker tribes, for example, and overthrow the powerful tribe. In the modern world, such options no longer exist. The introduction of land registration, the rule of law, and other fundamental political changes noted by al-Wardi have limited the ability of tribes to shift their position.
Radical Islam has offered the most powerful opportunity for lower-ranking tribes or members of tribes to rise. For example, during the Iraq War, the U.S. gave the Albu Mahal tribe control to the border crossing at al-Qaim, between Syria and Iraq, and so two smaller tribes in the area, Albu Karbali and Albu Salman, backed al-Qaeda in Iraq, seeing it as a way to improve their standing relative to the stronger Albu Mahal.
Carter Malkasian, an adviser to the U.S. military, explains the challenges faced by the U.S. in Anbar province in his book Illusions of Victory: The Anbar Awakening and the Rise of the Islamic States. As the title suggests, the U.S. thought it had achieved stability in Anbar because it temporarily won over the right tribal leaders. But then ISIS took control of most of the Sunni tribal areas of Iraq. Only a few years after the U.S. withdrew, it was clear that victory had indeed been an illusion.
U.S. policymakers face an almost impossible situation, one that has also stumped the governments of Iraq and Syria for the past century. Tribal affiliation and structure remain key to society in the desert. Blind loyalty is the order of the day. But that tribal structure is failing to meet the economic needs of its members, because the modern state system does not permit widespread nomadism or constant raids between tribes and against settled populations. Meanwhile, tribal leaders continue to favor the strongest party. In Iraq in 2008, that was the United States. In 2014, it was ISIS.
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In 1965, Abdul Salam al-Ojeili, Raqqa’s most famous writer of the 20th century, wrote an article about the arrival of the Shammar tribe in northeastern Syria and northern Iraq. The story, more tribal legend than documented history, is set in the early 19th century. As the story goes, a member of the Shammar fell on the outs with his tribe, so he left the Arabian Peninsula and found himself in the Jazira region of northeast Syria and northern Iraq, bringing with him only a tent, his wife, and a slave. There he lived under the hospitality of the emir of the Tayy tribe nearby. When asked about his slave, he said it was his cousin, whose mother was black. He did not want anyone to suspect that he was an important tribesman who owned slaves. The humble newcomer invited the emir of the Tayy to his tent one day for a meal. The emir was surprised at the tray the food was served on — it indicated a higher social status than the newcomer had so far let on. After the meal, the emir’s advisers told him that something was off about their new neighbor and that it would be best to kill him, lest he bring unexpected troubles to the area.
The emir decided to kill the stranger, but his wife intervened, threatening to poison her husband if the stranger came to harm. Meanwhile, the stranger, formerly an important figure in the Shammar tribe, saw the green paradise that the Tayy were living in and pitied his fellow tribesmen, despite their treatment of him. He sent his slave to give word to the Shammar that there was room there for both tribes and that they could live under the protection of the Tayy. Members of the Shammar tribe saw the wisdom of migrating to greener pastures and accepted the invitation. As they approached, they sent a message to the emir of the Tayy, asking for permission to live under his protection and alongside his tribe. They wanted to assure him that they were not invaders and that they would return to the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula if the land proved unable to provide for all of them.
The messenger from the incoming Shammar approached the camp of the Tayy emir and saw that it was in distress, everyone crying and wailing. The messenger approached a tribesman sitting alone and asked what happened: “I am a stranger, o brother of the Arabs, and I don’t know what tragedy has befallen the emir, but I see that it must be a terrible tragedy, so could you tell me what has made all these people cry so?” The man replied that the emir’s wife had given birth to a newborn girl who died a day later. The Tayy tribe was in mourning.
The messenger tucked his message back into his pocket and returned to the Shammar tribe. He told them that the Tayy tribe was weak — that they were hysterical over the death of a newborn girl — and that the Shammar did not need permission from the Tayy to live in the area. They could take it by force instead. And so they did, no longer obliged in their mind to seek the good graces of the emir. Instead, they changed the power dynamic in their favor, and pushed the Tayy out from their prized land.
While the specific dynamics of the tribes may have changed since that event, the story is probably a more useful summary of tribal politics and values than many scholarly articles and think-tank reports. Arab tribes in eastern Syria have lived and breathed a constant power struggle. It continues to this day. Technology and law have altered the form that the struggle takes, but it hasn’t changed the underlying character. The challenge for the United States, as it navigates the social and political environment of the region, trying to determine how best to work with the tribes of Syria and Iraq to bring about ISIS’s full defeat and prevent its return, is that there may be no solution at all.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views and editorial stance of the SOHR.