Understanding the New Proxy Wars [1 ed.] 9781787387157

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UNDERSTANDING THE NEW PROXY WARS

PETER BERGEN, CANDACE RONDEAUX, DANIEL ROTHENBERG and DAVID STERMAN (Editors)

Understanding the New Proxy Wars Battlegrounds and Strategies Reshaping the Greater Middle East

HURST & COMPANY, LONDON

First published in the United Kingdom in 2022 by C. Hurst & Co. (Publishers) Ltd., New Wing, Somerset House, Strand, London, WC2R 1LA Copyright © Peter Bergen, Candace Rondeaux, Daniel Rothenberg, David Sterman and the Contributors, 2022 All rights reserved. Printed in the United Kingdom The right of Peter Bergen, Candace Rondeaux, Daniel Rothenberg, David Sterman and the Contributors to be identified as the authors of this publication is asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. A Cataloguing-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 9781787387157 www.hurstpublishers.com

CONTENTS

List of Figures and Tables About the Editors and Contributors Introduction PART I PROXY WARFARE IN THE EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY 1.

Twenty-First-Century Proxy Warfare Candace Rondeaux and David Sterman

2

Syria 2011–19: Lessons for US Proxy Warfare Nate Rosenblatt and David Kilcullen PART II BATTLEGROUNDS

3

Social Networks, Class, and the Syrian Proxy War Anand Gopal and Jeremy Hodge

4

How Raqqa Became the Capital of ISIS Nate Rosenblatt and David Kilcullen

5

‘This War is Out of Our Hands’: Libya’s Internationalized Conflict Since 2011 Frederic Wehrey

6

The Proxy Air Wars Over Libya Melissa Salyk-Virk

7

The View from the City of Taiz: Limitations of the Proxy War Lens for Understanding Conflict in Yemen Adam Baron and Raiman Al-Hamdani PART III

STRATEGIES 8

Decoding the Wagner Group Candace Rondeaux

9

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of the 2020s: Evaluating Iran’s Proxy Warfare Strategy Alex Vatanka

10 The Monarchs’ Pawns? Gulf State Proxy Warfare 2011–Today Alexandra Stark Acknowledgments Notes Index

LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES

Figures 2.1.

A Framework for Assessing Sponsor-Proxy 50 Operational Success

4.1.

Map of Control in Syria, January 2013 119

4.2.

Map of Control in Syria, End of March 2013 120

4.3.

Map of Control in Syria, February 2014 137

4.4.

Number of People Killed in Each District in Syria, 139 2011–15 (per capita)

4.5.

Cumulative Deaths by District in Syria, 2011–15 140

4.6.

Living Conditions in Syria: Raqqa Compared to Other 143 Regions (December 2013– November 2014)

6.1.

Strikes in Libya Each Month, by Belligerent 191

6.2.

Strikes by the United Arab Emirates, 2016–20 193

6.3.

Strikes by Turkey, 2019–20 195

6.4.

Air/Drone/Artillery Strikes Resulting in Deaths by GNA 199 or LNA Compared to all Belligerent Deaths, 2014–20

6.5.

Strikes by the United States, 2012–19 203

6.6.

Deaths from US Drone and Air Strikes in Libya by 204 Combatant Status, 2012–19

Tables 2.1.

Checklist of Lessons to Assess the Counter-IS Coalition 64

3.1.

Breakdown of the Revolutionary Council and Jund 105 al-Haramein by Tribe and Class Background

ABOUT THE EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Adam Baron is a former International Security Program fellow at New America and a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. He worked as a journalist based in Sanaa, Yemen, from 2011 to 2014, and continues to work as a writer and political analyst. His focus includes Yemen, the Arabian Peninsula, and terrorism/counterterrorism. Baron’s reporting has been featured in major media outlets such as The Economist, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, and The Atlantic. Peter Bergen is a journalist, documentary producer, CNN national security analyst, and professor of practice at Arizona State University, where he codirects the Center on the Future of War. At New America, he is vice president for global studies and fellows. He is also the author or editor of ten books, three of which were New York Times bestsellers and four of which were named among the best nonfiction books of the year by The Washington Post. The books have been translated into twenty-four languages. Documentaries based on his books have been nominated for two Emmys and have also won the Emmy for best documentary. Bergen has hosted, produced, or executive-produced documentaries for HBO, CNN, National Geographic, and Discovery. He has held teaching positions at Harvard and Johns Hopkins, and has testified before US congressional committees eighteen times about national security issues. He has a degree in Modern History from New College, Oxford. Anand Gopal is an assistant research professor at the Center on the Future of War and the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University, and a fellow with the International Security Program at New America. Gopal is a contributing writer for The New Yorker and is the author of No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes. He received his PhD from Columbia University. Raiman Al-Hamdani is a Yemeni researcher. His research and work are oriented around issues of fragility and conflict, security, stabilization, and development in the MENA region in general and Yemen in particular. Previously, he was a Visiting Fellow at the European Council for Foreign Relations and a consultant for the World Bank. He has been active in the development field, volunteering at schools for disabled children, working in internally displaced camps, and representing Yemen at the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations. He holds an MA in International Security and Conflict Management from the

American University in Cairo and an MSc in Development from SOAS, University of London. Jeremy Hodge is an investigative journalist covering Syria and Iraq along with Middle East petroleum, defense, and finance sectors. His articles have appeared in Foreign Affairs, The Nation, Le Monde Diplomatique, Al Jazeera, and other outlets. He is a senior researcher at the Zomia Center. David Kilcullen is Professor of International and Political Studies at the University of New South Wales, Canberra, and professor of practice in the School of Politics and Global Studies at Arizona State University. He is President and CEO of the global research firm Cordillera Applications Group. He was a professional soldier, diplomat, intelligence officer, and policy advisor for the Australian and United States governments for twenty-five years, serving as Chief Strategist in the State Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau. His books include The Accidental Guerrilla; Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla; and The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West. He holds a PhD from the University of New South Wales and is a graduate of the Australian Defence College and the Royal Military College, Duntroon. Candace Rondeaux directs Future Frontlines, a public intelligence service for nextgeneration security and democratic resilience. A journalist and public-policy analyst, she is a professor of practice and fellow at the Melikian Center for Russian, Eurasian, and East European Studies and at the Center on the Future of War at Arizona State University. She is a columnist for World Politics Review and a contributing writer for The Daily Beast. Catalyzing the global human pursuit of dignity, justice, equity, transparency, and accountability is a through line in all her work. Before joining New America, Rondeaux served as a senior program officer at the US Institute of Peace, where she launched the RESOLVE Network, a global research consortium on conflict and violent extremism, and as a strategic advisor to the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. She has documented and analyzed political violence in South Asia and around the world for The Washington Post and the International Crisis Group. Before going abroad for the Post in 2009, Rondeaux covered criminal justice and capital punishment in Maryland and Virginia, where she was part of the Pulitzer Prize–winning team of Post reporters who covered the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre. In 2004, while on a reporting sabbatical from covering criminal justice in Florida for the St. Petersburg Times, she reported on energy security issues in the Caucasus as an international reporting fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She holds a BA in Russian area studies from Sarah Lawrence College, an MA in journalism from New York University, and an MPP in public policy from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Nate Rosenblatt is a former International Security Program fellow at New America who has lived, worked, and conducted field research in Tunisia, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Morocco, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. Rosenblatt studies local conflict and

development dynamics in the Middle East and North Africa region. He has a DPhil in Sociology from the University of Oxford, an MA from Johns Hopkins University (JHU) School of Advanced International Studies, and a BA from JHU. He currently serves in government as counterterrorism advisor at the State Department; his contribution to this volume took place before his public service. Daniel Rothenberg is codirector of the Center on the Future of War at Arizona State University, a professor of practice at the School of Politics and Global Studies at ASU, and a senior fellow at New America. Previously, he was the founding executive director of the Center for Law and Global Affairs at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, managing director of international projects at the International Human Rights Law Institute at DePaul University College of Law, senior fellow at the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School, assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, and a fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows. His books include With These Hands, Memory of Silence: The Guatemalan Truth Commission Report, and Drone Wars: Transforming Conflict, Law, and Policy. Rothenberg has a PhD from the University of Chicago. Melissa Salyk-Virk is fellow with New America’s International Security program. She currently works as vice president for transnational projects at Trust Stamp | AiiD (Artificial Intelligence for IDentity) in Malta, focused on Africa and Europe-based initiatives. Previously, she worked with the International Security Program as a senior policy analyst. Her research has focused on armed drone proliferation and the US counterterrorism ground/air/drone strikes abroad, as well as their corresponding militant and civilian casualties; monitoring and evaluation techniques for countering terrorist narratives; preventing violent extremism (PVE) and peacebuilding in South Asia and the Middle East; as well as the countering violent extremism (CVE) pilot program in the United States, specifically in Minnesota. She has presented her research at conferences hosted by the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights and the Society for Terrorism Research, and has been published in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Defense One, and CNN, among others. She has also interviewed former violent extremists for New America public events. Salyk-Virk completed her MSc in global affairs from New York University, concentrating on peacebuilding and transnational security, and her BA in political science from the University of Richmond. Alexandra Stark is a senior researcher for the Political Reform program at New America. She has a PhD from the government department at Georgetown University. She was previously a research fellow at the Middle East Initiative of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and Minerva/Jennings Randolph Peace Scholar at the United States Institute of Peace. David Sterman is a senior policy analyst at New America, with a focus on terrorism and violent extremism in America, immigration and terrorist threats, foreign fighter recruitment,

and the effectiveness and consequences of American counterterrorism efforts. His writing on terrorism has been featured in various media outlets, including CNN, Foreign Policy, and Time. Prior to working at New America, Sterman was a contributing editor at Southern Pulse and edited Foreign Policy’s South Asia channel. He graduated cum laude from Dartmouth College and holds a master’s degree from Georgetown University’s Center for security studies. Alex Vatanka is the founding Director of the Iran Program at the Middle East Institute. He specializes in Middle Eastern regional security affairs with a particular focus on Iran. He was formerly a Senior Analyst at Jane’s Information Group in London. He is also a Senior Fellow in Middle East Studies at the US Air Force Special Operations School (USAFSOS) at Hurlburt Field and teaches as an adjunct professor at DISAM at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Born in Tehran, he holds a BA in Political Science (Sheffield University, UK), and an MA in International Relations (Essex University, UK), and is fluent in Farsi and Danish. He is the author of two books: The Battle of the Ayatollahs in Iran: The United States, Foreign Policy and Political Rivalry Since 1979 (2021) and Iran and Pakistan: Security, Diplomacy, and American Influence (2015). He has also written chapters for a number of books, including Authoritarianism Goes Global (2016); Handbook on Contemporary Pakistan (2017); Russia in the Middle East (2018), Winning the Battle, Losing the War: Addressing the Drivers Fueling Armed Non-state Actors and Extremist Groups (2020); Global, Regional and Local Dynamics in the Yemen Crisis (2020) and Routledge Handbook of Counterterrorism and Irregular Warfare Operations (2021). He is presently working on his third book, Iran’s Arab Strategy: Defending the Homeland or Exporting Khomeinism? Frederic Wehrey is a senior fellow in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He researches armed conflict, security sectors, and identity politics, with a focus on Libya, North Africa, and the Gulf. He has served as a consultant to the United Nations and has testified before the US Senate and the House of Representatives. Prior to becoming a fellow at Carnegie, Wehrey served as a 21-year veteran of the active and reserve components of the US Air Force. He is the author of several acclaimed books, including The Burning Shores: Inside the Battle for the New Libya. He has an MA in Near Eastern studies from Princeton University and a PhD in international relations from the University of Oxford.

INTRODUCTION

Peter Bergen, Candace Rondeaux, Daniel Rothenberg, and David Sterman

Proxy warfare is shaping early twenty-first-century conflicts. Nevertheless, US policy on proxy war remains largely bound to Cold War ideas, such as viewing interstate conflict as the only form of legitimate war, analyzing proxy relations from the perspective of state patrons, and failing to pay adequate attention to local issues and contexts. Understanding today’s proxy wars requires a new approach that reflects the demands and challenges of a highly networked, multipolar world. Today’s proxy wars are bound to transnational social movements; new and emerging communication and military technologies; and interconnected global economic, social, and political relations. They are generally most complex and lethal in ungoverned spaces that call into question the solidity of a state-centric world order. In addition, understanding much of what drives proxy wars and how they operate requires contextually grounded, fieldwork-based research, which is often lacking in US policymaking. Understanding the New Proxy Wars: Battlegrounds and Strategies Reshaping the Greater Middle East engages these issues through a series of essays by thought leaders in international security and conflict studies. This book argues that understanding these conflicts requires rethinking the character of war and directly engaging local social reality, history, and politics, with a focus on the Middle East. While there are signs that proxy warfare is increasing in importance in much of the world, this book focuses on the Middle East, the Arab World, and its periphery. This particular region—bounded by strategically important littoral zones, centered in the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula, and stretching to North Africa—has seen proxy warfare emerge as a prominent dynamic in the twenty-first century. With conflicts involving proxy dynamics in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen compounded by similar conflicts on the region’s periphery in Ukraine and Afghanistan, the region deserves special attention. It has certainly received such attention from a variety of powers, including the United States, Russia, and Iran. The research in this book will hold lessons for the analysis and the study of proxy warfare in other regions. However, one of the key arguments of Understanding the New Proxy Wars is that political, economic, and social realities at the local level—both current and historical —are essential to understanding proxy warfare. The region examined here and the proxy wars that are raging within it are shaped and tied together by cross-cutting economic

interests, including in the energy- and arms-sales sectors, on the part of outside powers like Russia and the United States; political fragmentation and weak governance in states like Yemen, Libya, and Syria; and the growing power-projection capabilities of other regional powers. All of this occurs in a context shaped by the legacies of Cold War alliance systems, the Middle East’s experience of decolonization, and the rise of transnational movements, including the jihadist mobilization as a result of Afghanistan’s war in the 1980s. Understanding today’s proxy wars requires examining how such dynamics shape a complex system that cannot be reduced to the territorial bounds of any specific country or fully abstracted to a universal theory of proxy warfare applicable in all locations. The book fills a significant gap in literature on contemporary proxy warfare by deepening critical thinking on the subject and presenting a series of illustrative case studies focusing on Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. It also puts forth a new approach to understanding proxy war in a rapidly shifting global environment characterized by significant power realignments and emerging intellectual and policy challenges regarding governance, armed conflict, and the proliferation of competing actors and interests. Understanding the New Proxy Wars is based on a 2-year project funded by the Carnegie Foundation and managed by New America’s International Security program and Arizona State University’s Center on the Future of War. The project supported a number of researchers, some of whose work appears in this book, as they explored the current role of proxy warfare and conducted detailed fieldwork in multiple sites. In cooperation with the Syrian-run Omran Center for Strategic Studies, New America and ASU convened more than thirty-five researchers from around the world—including Syrians and Iraqis—in Istanbul, Turkey, and Washington, DC. Researchers from the Omran Center for Strategic Studies also aided with the work collected in this volume; most notably, Navvar Saban helped organize research into the activities of Russian private military companies in Syria. The project also supported training in oral history and other methods of field research for Syrian colleagues working in Syria and Turkey. These efforts were part of the project’s goal of building local research capacity and deepening collaborative networks between researchers in the United States and those in the Middle East. The trainings were managed by the Center on the Future of War at ASU and the Zomia Center for the Study of Non-State Spaces, led by Anand Gopal, Tom Peter, and Daniel Rothenberg. These efforts helped produce fieldwork-based research on the impact of proxy and civil conflict, including an oral history project on Syrian members of ISIS whose lead researchers were Ahmad al-Faraj, Huzeyfa al-Osman, and Muhammad Osman, who worked with six other Syrian researchers who remain anonymous for security reasons. These efforts also resulted in a chapter in this book on proxy war in Syria, whose researchers on the ground were Hussein al-Nasser and Ahmed al-Faraj. Such trainings were connected to the research efforts of a range of analysts and researchers with deep experience regarding the conduct and study of proxy conflict in the region. Conducting research on ongoing proxy conflicts can be dangerous for local analysts and researchers who live with the unpredictable shifts and constraints of ongoing conflicts. The case studies herein are primarily presented from the position of individuals living outside of

the regions studied, hich by necessity incurs limitations. It is the hope of the editors that this book and the larger project out of which it emerged will enable deeper engagement and interaction with local researchers and residents. Some of the research that will further such engagement, including the work on the oral histories of Syrian ISIS members, is being prepared for publication in other venues. The case studies presented in Understanding the New Proxy Wars are another step in that process, bringing together the findings of experienced researchers, practitioners, and analysts with an eye to exploring the limits of the current understanding of proxy warfare and surfacing a range of new and important sources that shed light on its character in the twentyfirst century. Rethinking Proxy Warfare Since 2001, proxy war has emerged as one of the central issues of armed conflicts around the world. This is seen in cases where states are openly, formally engaged in conflict—as the United States and its allies were in Afghanistan prior to their withdrawal and as they are in Iraq, as the Gulf states are in Yemen, and as Russian Federation forces are in Syria—as well as in situations where states and others project their force solely through proxies in a manner that allows for plausible deniability of their roles. While interstate conflict has decreased markedly around the world over the last seventy years, there has been an increase in civil wars and internationalized internal conflicts. This has led to the proliferation of ungoverned, or contested, spaces—territory under the control of militias, rebel groups, or other autonomous and semi-autonomous local actors—many of which operate as proxies in various ways. At times, state sponsorship of proxies is a formal, planned element of security policy. And, at other times, these efforts emerge informally in response to shifting local conditions, often in an ad hoc manner. In some ways, support for proxies is as old as war itself, yet the strategy, character, and reality of proxy war today merits fresh thinking and detailed, context-specific data and analysis. Much of the debate around proxy warfare within international studies emerged in the post-World War II nuclear era, in which global superpowers avoided direct confrontation as they supported multiple competing forces around the world. From this perspective, many in the United States and elsewhere understood certain conflicts largely as extensions of Cold War divisions to be analyzed in terms of state power and the relative success of state sponsorship and control over proxy forces. Yet, today’s proxy conflicts are distinct. They often involve various competing sponsors and multiple proxies, all of which operate in a highly networked global context defined by shifting power dynamics and core contestations over basic issues of governance and control. These conflicts often take place in areas where old forms of governance have fragmented or collapsed altogether. For example, in Libya the collapse of the Gaddafi regime as a result of local rebellion and the 2011 NATO intervention saw the emergence of a multisided, internationalized civil war (discussed in Chapters 5 and 6). Similar situations exist to varying extents in Syria and Yemen (see Chapters 4 and 7). In Syria, the country’s social

fragmentation dating to economic trends from before the outbreak of protest and civil war deeply shaped how networks mobilized during the war (see Chapter 3). Often treated as an issue applicable only to the battlefields of the so-called ‘failed states’ where proxy wars take place, state collapse and sociopolitical fragmentation have also shaped the identity and strategies of outside powers who sponsor proxies in the region (see Chapters 1 and 8 on how the fall of the Soviet Union shaped proxy dynamics and Russia’s strategy). This book applies and builds upon existing research on how participants in proxy warfare—ranging from individuals to armed groups and private security companies to states—use proxy strategies as a way of extending power, maintaining logistical connections, and occasionally reestablishing governance amid fragmented and contested polities.1 Understanding the New Proxy Wars engages the rise of proxy warfare and the complex interplay between global, regional, and local actors and interests, with a focus on the Middle East and Arab World. It questions dominant state-centric approaches that view proxy warfare as a less strategically costly form of armed conflict than interstate wars, a position that informs many political and legal understandings of war as well as foreign policy planning. This approach defines proxy war as cheap, even as the majority of actual current conflicts involve insurgents and rebel movements that are at least partially externally funded and supported. In other words, proxy warfare is one of the primary, if not the primary, modes of armed conflict in the early twenty-first century. Understanding the New Proxy Wars argues that understanding contemporary armed conflict requires three key elements. First, sponsor/proxy relations need to be critically analyzed within the context of a highly networked, multipolar world defined by global networks, transnational social movements, emerging great power competition, and new information and military technologies. Second, making sense of the dynamics of specific proxy conflicts requires detailed, highly granular data that can only be obtained through field research and deep knowledge of social, political, and historical context. Third, effective policymaking regarding international affairs and conflict requires special sensitivity to ungoverned spaces and the basic challenges of governance and state control in many of the most dangerous parts of the world. In this way, Understanding the New Proxy Wars builds on and expands upon recent work by scholars on the changing character of war2 and the rise of proxy conflict.3 Beyond the question of state centrism and the identity of principal and agent, there is substantial debate over what kind of relationship between principals and agents constitutes a proxy relationship. The most prevalent formulations of what constitutes proxy war conceptualize proxies as rebel non-state armed forces under formal or informal contract as agents to a principal state as a unitary and often singular actor. But, as some have noted, multipolarity has given way to a ‘polyarchic’ world order in which the monopoly on the use of force by nation-states is highly atomized and under sway to bureaucracies that tend to do their own thing. Indeed, recent scholarship has emphasized an expanding spectrum of nonstate agents from entrepreneurial individuals to networks to classical organizations capable of being part of a proxy strategy, requiring a move beyond analyses that focus solely on organization-to-organization cooperative arrangements. These efforts are enormously

valuable, yet much more needs to be done, particularly as regards connecting broad thinking on proxy warfare with focused studies of how multifaceted, networked sponsor/proxy relations operate on the ground. Understanding the New Proxy Wars argues that the specific quality of contemporary proxy wars reveals a key element of the ways in which armed conflict is changing in terms of strategy, impact, and quality. By linking a theoretical critique of state-centric thinking about war with detailed case studies of specific instances of proxy conflict, the book seeks to open up debate on the need for a new language and new regulatory and policy frameworks. The book is of special importance now, since today’s proxy wars often escalate into brutal conflicts that spill across borders. As states seek to influence local actors, with varying levels of understanding and engagement regarding the social and political context on the ground, the overall situation often escalates into increasingly severe acts of violence, greater obfuscation of interests and actions, predatory corruption, a lack of transparency, and severe harm to the civilian population. This book contributes to understanding contemporary proxy war as an essential element of international affairs and an indication of the complex ways in which the character and practice of war is changing. By grounding the analysis of proxy war in a series of varied and detailed case studies based on original field research, Understanding the New Proxy Wars provides a much-needed resources for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers. Understanding the New Proxy Wars is divided into three sections and ten chapters. The first section engages the relevance of the concept of proxy warfare and its central role as an increasingly significant mode of conflict in a complex, contested, and multipolar world, with a focus on US foreign policy. In Chapter 1, Candace Rondeaux and David Sterman examine the most common definitions of proxy warfare, how they have been reshaped by current conflicts, and the historical trends behind today’s era of proxy warfare. In Chapter 2, Nate Rosenblatt and David Kilcullen present a framework for analyzing the prospects for US proxy warfare as well as the interventions of other countries, based on an analysis of the Syrian conflict and including a set of basic rules to guide policymakers. The second section examines proxy war battlegrounds in the Middle East to show the use of proxy warfare in specific places and how local dynamics shape and sometimes overwhelm the strategies sponsors adopt. In Chapter 3, Anand Gopal and Jeremy Hodge examine how social class and transnational solidarity networks shaped which groups in Syria connected with external sponsors and which served as effective proxies, with a focus on the city of Manbij. In Chapter 4, Nate Rosenblatt and David Kilcullen examine how ISIS, a non-state actor with little or no external state support, used Syria’s proxy and civil war to take over Raqqa and declare it the capital of its ‘Caliphate,’ revealing the ways in which local dynamics impact proxy conflicts. In Chapter 5, Frederic Wehrey traces the internationalization of the proxy war in Libya and how—even as Russia, Turkey, the United States, and various Gulf states intervened—locals maintained an important role in shaping and guiding the conflict. In Chapter 6, Melissa Salyk-Virk details the proxy war in Libya’s skies, providing a look at how the development and proliferation of drone technology has reshaped potential locations where proxy warfare occurs. In Chapter 7, Adam Baron and Raiman Al-Hamdani focus on a single city in Yemen—Taiz—to document how complex

local forms of governance and competition complicate the dominant lens of viewing the conflict as a proxy war. The third section analyzes proxy warfare as a strategy, examining how different sponsors or principals use proxy warfare. In Chapter 8, Candace Rondeaux examines the complex motives and methods behind Russia’s use of private military security contractors in conflicts with a focus on Syria, revealing how traditional notions of state sponsors as entirely separate from their proxies or as unitary actors are increasingly at odds with today’s strategies of proxy warfare. In Chapter 9, Alex Vatanka explores Iran’s proxy warfare strategy, considering how Iran’s use of proxy warfare can be understood in traditional terms of deterrence but also how the strategy holds the potential to reshape the very identity of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps tasked with carrying it out. And, in Chapter 10, Alexandra Stark examines how the Gulf state monarchies’ proxy warfare strategies were shaped by the states’ identities and how they interacted with the transnational protest movements of the Arab Spring. Understanding the New Proxy Wars reframes the policy debate on proxy war by presenting a new analytic frame supported by detailed case studies based on original field research in multiple sites in the Middle East. The book demonstrates that proxy warfare in the early twentieth century needs to be understood within a multipolar, networked world and contexualized by a granular look at local social reality, including an engagement with complex challenges of basic governance as essential to security. Proxy warfare will continue to define international politics, define key conflicts, and lead to profound harm and social transformation. Crafting more responsible and effective foreign policy, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere, will require a complete reconceptualization of proxy war.

PART I PROXY WARFARE IN THE EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

1

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY PROXY WARFARE

Candace Rondeaux and David Sterman

Proxy warfare will shape twenty-first-century conflicts for the foreseeable future. Cold War norms, however, no longer apply in a highly networked, multipolar world. The erosion of state power, rise of transnational social movements, and proliferation of advanced military and communications technology are shifting the horizons of strategic surprise. The enhanced military capacity of former Cold War client states to engage either covertly or overtly in conflicts is erasing front lines, transforming alliances, and reshaping battlefield dynamics. Whereas Moscow and Washington, with occasional exceptions, once set the rules of the game, the number of state and non-state sponsors of proxy forces is growing in today’s globalized market. Today, a complex mesh of partnerships among states, corporations, mercenaries, and militias is changing the way wars are fought and won. In the wake of the Arab Spring, conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen stand out as ground zero in multi-sided proxy wars that are testing international norms. Wars have also raged on the periphery of the Middle East: for example, in Ukraine and Afghanistan. US policy—in flux since the Arab Spring—struggled to integrate this new reality. Unable and unwilling to commit to direct military intervention after long, costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US national security establishment doubled down on proxy warfare, gambling on a strategy that advances US interests ‘by, with, and through’ local partners. This was a risky wager, and it is still unclear whether it was a winning bet. Civil wars spanning littoral zones of the Mediterranean Middle East, Black Sea, and Persian Gulf regions today remain among the greatest threats to international security. Conflict in those areas has displaced tens of millions of people, killed hundreds of thousands, and devastated large swaths of the regions’ economies and infrastructure. Competition among Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Turkey, and Israel for regional primacy and renewed rivalry with Russia and China have repeatedly forced Washington to reconfigure its grand strategy. Even as the United States doubled down on proxy warfare, its conceptions of proxy warfare did not sufficiently account for the paradigm shift underway. Policy analysis on proxy conflicts has generally fixated on outdated Cold War models of sponsorship or focused

on state-sponsored terrorism, the impact of external support in civil wars, and the efficacy of counterinsurgency campaigns. In general, state-centric definitions of proxy warfare do not sufficiently reflect the networked nature of current conflicts and the ability of new types of actors to project power. Globalization has transformed the role of sponsors and proxies, elevating transnational social movements, an array of armed actors enabled by interconnected supply chains, and conflict entrepreneurs. Transnational social movements have redefined front lines and erased the borders of conflicts once geographically bound by territorial limits imposed by a Cold War order. Military modernization and expanded access to remote targeting capabilities have also shifted the regional balance of power. Shifts in communications, electronics, and computing have produced a profound acceleration in technological synthesis that has transformed the ways ideas and goods are distributed. Analysis of proxy warfare has also suffered from politicization and a ‘good for me but not for thee’ problem that fails to question prevailing US policy assumptions. Much of the English-language research on the subject hews closely to the policy views and demands of Western states, rarely drawing on field data and primary-source analysis in other languages. Avoiding the most dangerous risks of the current era of proxy warfare requires moving beyond the Cold War frames and developing a legally focused definition of proxy warfare. Defining proxy warfare as sponsorship of conventional or irregular forces that lie outside the constitutional order of states can mitigate the risks of the current era, while reasserting accountability and clear lines of command responsibility, something that is sorely needed. Rethinking Proxy Warfare A fundamental first step toward a discussion of the character of proxy warfare today, its future, and the costs and risks of embracing proxy strategies is laying down a conceptual framework. This is tougher than it might seem. Proxy warfare is not a new subject of analysis, but it has few well-marked boundaries or definitions. The phrase dates at least to the beginning of the Cold War and has risen in use since.1 While the term may be of midtwentieth-century origin, the basic idea of engaging in war while someone else does the fighting—by proxy—is likely as old as warfare itself. Uniform definitions of the term ‘proxy warfare’ are hard to come by. This is partly because, as Andrew Mumford notes in his 2013 monograph on the topic, proxy wars have been ‘chronically under-analyzed’ and under-theorized.2 Until very recently, the moral and legal conundrums posed by current proxy wars on international norms and the standing of the United States as a strategic partner received little serious introspection in Washington’s interagency policy community, as Anthony Pfaff has noted.3 Still, there are a number of new works on the subject that advance debate considerably.4 The covert nature of most proxy strategies has also limited analysis. Those strategies that are overt tend to be the product of specific dynamics regarding the strength and motive of the sponsor that allow it to embrace a more public strategy, introducing substantial selection effect biases.5

The question of definitions is essential to good policymaking. A lack of clarity as to what is meant by ‘proxy warfare’ and what qualities define a useful proxy strategy for the United States have been on full display since the 9/11 attacks. The prolonged and sometimes heated policy debates in successive White House administrations over sponsorship of paramilitary and militia forces in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan have profoundly impacted US alliances and affected the stability of the Greater Middle East. Tensions arose between those in the responsibility-to-protect (R2P) camp, who called for interventions in Libya and Syria, and those who feared blowback risks and cautioned against widening foreign entanglements during the Obama administration.6 Despite heated debate, there has emerged little in the way of formal congressional authorization for use of military force or clear strategic guidance regarding the benefits, risks, and endgame of proxy engagements. Much of the theorizing around proxy warfare draws on Cold War analysis of the rivalry between the United States, Russia, and China during the conflicts in Cuba, Vietnam, Angola, Afghanistan, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. The analytical focus on the Cold War has many roots, not least of which is the vast investment in strategic thinking on nuclear deterrence, as well as Soviet support for revolutionary movements. Another factor is that the collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in the declassification of thousands of official US documents, and for a brief time opened Soviet archives, which for years had been sealed in hermitic secrecy. Newfound sources also prompted the publication of a slew of political histories, journalistic accounts, and personal memoirs, and many Cold War participants and witnesses have also been more willing to be interviewed.7 Studies on state-sponsored terrorist and insurgent groups such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria also offer a few theoretical clues. Of particular note for its conceptual clarity are Daniel Byman’s Deadly Connections and his other publications on proxy warfare and state sponsorship of terrorism.8 Many significant studies on external support during civil wars and state sponsorship of terrorism have also touched on the subject, yet both these fields capture only a subset of the broader challenges of proxy warfare. For instance, Idean Salehyan, Reed Wood, and David Siroky, among others, have made significant contributions to understanding principal-agent relations and ways in which external sponsorship of rebels leads to atrocities.9 The literature on state sponsorship of terrorism is predominantly rooted in Cold War conceptions that emphasize the power of highly centralized states and their influence over non-state proxies rather than the agency of groups themselves.10 Moreover, much of the discussion and analysis of proxy warfare in the American academy and Washington policy circles is highly politicized and fails to critically examine the ‘good for me but not for thee’ orthodoxy of partnered military operations.11 This critique of the focus upon the power of highly centralized states finds echoes in more recent literature on state co-optation of rebel forces and the integration of irregular paramilitary and militia forces into the strategic playbook of many principal sponsors of proxy warfare. As Ariel Ahram notes in his book Proxy Warriors, ‘few states have ever actually sought a complete monopoly over military force, much less possessed it. States engage continuously in negotiation, collaboration, and domination of external and internal

challengers to assert and maintain a hold on power.’12 In the context of conflicts in the Greater Middle East, Afshon Ostovar suggests in his book Vanguard of the Imam13 that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Basij paramilitary units stand out as examples of the type of phenomenon that Ahram describes as an as-yet unresolved ‘competition and cooperation between state and embedded societal elites for control of coercion’ that has for decades marked the postcolonial state-building project in the region.14 Several international policy analysts and think tanks have, like Ahram, ably tracked the connection between proxy wars and the rise of paramilitaries and militias since 2001.15 The rise of what András Derzsi-Horváth and Erica Gaston call ‘local, hybrid and sub-state security forces’ in Iraq during recent clashes with ISIS is just one example of how competition between principal rivals is increasingly defining and distorting competition between local elites for control over territory and resources.16 Similar dynamics have precipitated sharp tensions between the United States and other erstwhile partners in South Asia. In Afghanistan, American backing for a variety of ‘auxiliary police,’ ‘tribal gendarmerie,’ and militias who operated outside the established law was a subject of friction between Washington and Kabul until the fall of the Afghan government in 2021.17 Just over the Afghan border, as Steve Coll and Stephen Tankel document in their books on Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency and its relations with the Taliban and Laskar-eTaiba, Pakistan’s military elite has long viewed its investment in proxies as critical to creating strategic depth in the face of threats from India.18 Others have documented the proliferation of militias in Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Ukraine, where principal rivalries between the United States and Russia, as well as Iran and Saudi Arabia, are heating up competition between local elites for support of their own proxy forces. But there are few book-length studies that examine and compare in detail the nature and character of proxy wars that are now raging across the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. Much of the journalistic and think-tank coverage on conflicts in the region relies on interviews with participants and key decision-makers, but leaves open, primary-source data virtually untouched. For some countries mired in proxy conflict today—notably Syria, Iraq, and Ukraine—journalists and analysts have begun to exploit digital traces of conflicts by sifting through social media platforms and other online data; the work has been impressive, but it only scratches the surface.19 However, on other conflicts, most notably Yemen and Libya, the use of digital forensics to find fresh analysis is rare, demonstrating both the difficulties of tracking online sources as well as verifying existing digital evidence absent a strong community of locally based correspondents and researchers in those countries.20 Several recent book-length scholarly publications and articles stand out for their conceptual clarity regarding the subject of proxy warfare.21 In addition to recent books on the subject by Geraint Hughes, Mumford, and Michael Innes, other important contributions that touch on related topics such as state sponsorship of terrorism and patron-client relationships during counterinsurgency include recent works by Walter Ladwig and Daniel Byman.22 Yet few works in this category adequately address the cross-cutting dynamics that drove the rash

of intra-state wars and the rise of transnational social movements following the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990–1. Many studies focus primarily on the outcomes of support upon non-state actors while too often treating the state conflicts that underlie many proxy wars as external factors. As Idean Salehyan observed in his 2011 book Rebels Without Borders: A large share of research on civil conflict treats nation-states as hermetically sealed, independent units. Country-level attributes and processes—such as income inequality, ethnic tensions, dependence on primary commodities, and the responsiveness of political institutions—dominate theories of civil war. This is especially true of works that draw heavily on statistical analyses.23 Other commentators have noted a tendency to debate causes of conflict like ancient hatreds or the role of Islam in the Middle East while ignoring the impact of proxy wars and the Cold War.24 The US experience of engagement in proxy warfare in the Middle East is covered extensively by these scholars, but the experiences of rival states such as Iran and Russia are scantly covered in existing literature.25 All of these analytical approaches offer a window onto the variegated nature of proxy strategies, but there is little in the way of a unified theory on what drives proxy wars, as Geraint Hughes explains in his book on the subject.26 Nor is there much convergence around how to assess a principal sponsor’s support for conventional forces versus irregular forces, or how best to measure the strength of a sponsor’s direct or indirect influence over proxies. Defining Proxy Warfare: The Case for a Legally Focused Definition The question of what constitutes proxy warfare remains a highly contested and underanalyzed issue. There are a number of examinations and efforts to define the subject. These efforts provide insight, yet they suffer from flaws. A legally focused definition that defines proxy warfare as sponsorship of conventional or irregular forces that lie outside the constitutional order of states is best placed to avoid these flaws and form a platform to reassert accountability and clear lines of command responsibility, which is essential to avoiding the threats posed by twenty-first-century proxy warfare. The conceptual roots of proxy warfare have antecedents in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. In the classic narrative of the war between Athens and Sparta, expansion and containment are the intertwined strategic impulses that shape the epochal conflict between the two rivals.27 The characteristic strains of conflict described by Thucydides— asymmetric rivalries, rejection of a total war of annihilation in favor of a limited war of attrition, alliance targeting, rhetorical battles over the moral demands of just wars—are all features that are repeatedly described in subsequent historical and analytical narratives of proxy warfare. Historically speaking, proxy warfare is as old as war itself, but the emergence of international strategic studies as a formal analytical field in the post-World War II era marks

a distinctive period in the conceptual genealogy of proxy warfare.28 Notwithstanding debates about the fundamentals of battlefield victories,29 there can be little doubt that the dawn of the nuclear age brought with it a new understanding of the meaning and dynamics of ‘limited war.’ Yet, analytical approaches to twenty-first-century proxy warfare inevitably run into the thorny problem of definitions. Even a cursory review of conflict studies literature reveals that there are deep disagreements over what constitutes sponsorship, what defines a proxy, and how state and non-state actors fit into the strategic paradigm. Mumford, for example, defines proxy warfare as the ‘indirect engagement in a conflict by third parties wishing to influence its strategic outcome.’30 His definition of proxy war accounts for how states and non-state actors can both be and have proxies. Others have proffered more state-centric views of proxy warfare in which the principal must be a state and the proxy agent a non-state actor. Geraint Hughes, for example, adopts a definition of proxy warfare in which only states can be principals and only non-state groups proxies.31 Yet this definition separates Hughes’ work from the strategic literature on proxy relationships involving states as agents. At the same time, it excludes the rising phenomena of transnational non-state groups, private military security providers, and entities that have cooperative arrangements with other such groups that appear to deserve analysis as proxy relationships. Beyond the question of state centrism and the identity of principal and agent, there is substantial debate over what kind of relationship between principals and agents constitutes a proxy relationship. Mumford suggests that ‘the fulfillment of a strategic goal by proxy does not necessarily have to be a conscious or deliberate act.’32 While this is a useful departure point, Pfaff, for his part, rightly points out that proxy war requires intention—even if the strategy fails or the proxy also seeks goals that are in conflict with its sponsors.33 Not simply a definitional nitpick, the disagreement between Pfaff and Mumford reveals the need for better theories on what constitutes proxy warfare, and an evidence base to test those theories. Pfaff describes proxy warfare strategy as ‘the use of surrogates to replace, rather than augment, benefactor assets or capabilities.’34 This definition conceives of a state as a monolithic actor, though there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the erosion of state power in the age of globalization has seen non-state actors grow their interests and influence over military affairs. Problematic formulations of the state aside, Pfaff’s conceptualization lines up well with the analysis of Michael Innes and others, in the aptly titled Making Sense of Proxy Warfare. But Innes goes one step further, suggesting that a ‘symbiosis between state and nonstate actors’ underpins relations between sponsors and proxies, and that sponsorship takes on many different forms in today’s conflicts, with militias and paramilitaries often serving the interests of multiple actors while private military actors take on state roles, among other phenomena.35 The most prevalent formulations of what constitutes proxy war conceptualize proxies as rebel non-state armed forces under formal or informal contract as agents to a principal state as a unitary and often singular actor. But as some, among them Pfaff, have noted,

multipolarity has given way to a ‘polyarchic’ world order36 in which the monopoly on the use of force by nation-states is highly atomized and under sway to bureaucracies that tend to do their own thing. Indeed, recent scholarship has emphasized an expanding spectrum of nonstate agents—from entrepreneurial individuals to networks to classical organizations— capable of being part of a proxy strategy, requiring a move beyond analyses that focus solely on organization-to-organization cooperative arrangements.37 If there is one major point of agreement, however, in the existing literature, it is that proxy warfare is characterized by a distinctive relationship between a principal-sponsor who delegates some authority over the pursuit of strategic war aims to a proxy-agent.38 There is also near universal agreement that the two major risks in proxy strategy center on proxy motivations and modes of fighting, and the alignment—or more often misalignment—of principal sponsors’ war aims and those of proxy agents. In rethinking proxy warfare, it is important to acknowledge the thin gray line that separates allies and client states.39 Allies, by definition, agree not only on the nature of the perceived threat but to a shared responsibility to respond to that threat in an all-for-one, one-for-all formulation; even where one state holds an upper hand militarily, implicit in the idea of an alliance is the independence of each party. While client states may share the same perception of a threat and may even agree with their sponsors on a response, it is more often the case that clients are materially dependent on a sponsor and could not otherwise respond or pose a credible counter to a threat on their own. It also pays to be clear-eyed about the high price of doing business with a stable allied state versus a fragile client state that has just undergone violent regime change. With very few exceptions, when states have deployed proxy warfare strategies in the clientelist model of state-to-state, military-to-military support, they have relied on formal treaties, military technical agreements, or formal diplomatic notes that define relations and terms and lay out the provisional authorities of external actors who serve as advisors or enablers for conventional forces of allied states. In both instances, the rules of engagement are usually explicitly stated and there is little ambiguity in international law about the obligations of combatants, even when there may be questions about the legitimacy of certain battlefield tactics or specific events. However, in weak states with contested constitutional orders that fail to explicitly or comprehensively articulate the relationship between a state’s security forces, its government, and its citizens, it is ultimately the shortcomings of the client state’s conventional nationalsecurity institutions which often lead sponsors to enter into formal or informal contracts with irregular armed forces. Frequently in these cases, the territorial jurisdiction and legal authorities of externally supported irregular militia or paramilitary forces are murky. Ambiguity can hold a strategic advantage for sponsors and client states in heightening plausible deniability, but it can also undercut local government legitimacy, not to mention— as Pfaff notes—the credibility of the principal sponsor who may have to answer for a proxy’s excesses.40 As seen in Afghanistan and Iraq from 2001 forward, efforts by the United States to advance its foreign policy objectives ‘by, with, and through’ partners have imposed high

economic, political, and strategic costs.41 In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the clientelist model of proxy warfare predominated, despite the fact that decades of internecine conflict arose directly out of systemic abuses of power by the very same Afghan and Iraqi security institutions that the United States inherited as partners. In the heated aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, however, the US national security establishment, the UN, and NATO had little appetite to start from scratch or contravene the orthodoxy of a ‘light-footprint’ approach to intervention and reconstruction.42 Successive White House administrations chose instead to work within the constraints of existing local security institutions while stitching together a patchwork of auxiliary irregular forces to fill in capabilities gaps.43 This wave of post-Cold War US investment in irregular forces at the same time precipitated parallel support from Pakistan, Iran, and later Russia to rival proxies ostensibly allied with the Taliban in Afghanistan.44 In Iraq, meanwhile, Tehran reinforced existing support to Shia militia forces, both during its war with Saddam Hussein and later in its not-so-covert competition with Washington.45 The United States, for its part, backed an array of paramilitary forces after the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks, most notably the Afghan Local Police and Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams and the ‘Sons of Iraq’ following the 2003 invasion.46 The decision to stand up the Sons of Iraq program used the local grievances of tribal leaders in Anbar Province to combat al-Qaeda in Iraq. The decision was made despite concerns that the fighters recruited under the program might not easily integrate into the Iraq government structure.47 Similar logic motivated the US decision to establish the Afghan Local Police (ALP) in 2010. An iteration of the previously disbanded Afghan Auxiliary Police, the ALP was meant to extend the writ of the state by recruiting locally based fighters to challenge the Taliban in remote and contested parts of the country. In theory, ALP fighters would better be able to leverage their expert knowledge of the local terrain and local Taliban to regain control. In practice, the highly centralized nature of the Afghan state, and the Ministry of Interior more specifically, made oversight of ALP forces challenging, while the recruitment of supposed Taliban defectors and locals affiliated with unsanctioned militias raised human rights concerns in more than a few cases.48 Three important factors are often determinative in shaping a decision to adopt a proxy strategy: the length of supply lines, the limitations of conventional forces, and political constraints that make prolonged military confrontation unattractive to many decisionmakers.49 Proxy forces can shorten lines of communication and bring to bear considerable local knowledge of the terrain and stakeholders in a conflict that external sponsors might not otherwise be able to access easily. In addition to flattening the tactical obstacles of range and intelligence, there are significant short-term non-military advantages that both sponsors and proxies derive from their relationship. As one Western military expert suggested, the immediate success of battlefield gains at a fraction of the cost of what it would take to mobilize a conventional force produces a ‘form of military “sugar rush” that can be addictive for policymakers’ looking to demonstrate the efficacy of wars fought on the cheap.50 This may be especially true in situations where the political tenure of elite decision-makers

is shaped by the size of their coalition of support, and foreshortened by either a selection cycle or internal and external threats that spur them to demonstrate a decisive ability to effectively wield coercive power.51 In this respect, the US decision to partner with Northern Alliance fighters in Afghanistan in 2001 and the Russian decision to provide backing to ethnic Russian rebel forces in Ukraine in 2014 are notable examples of the ‘sugar rush’ effect, where swift battlefield victories are followed by a hard crash when local politics do not line up with sponsors’ strategic objectives. The advantage of using irregular forces in each case was in that it allowed sponsors to project power beyond their own existing capacity, while avoiding the same kind of domestic scrutiny that a direct declaration of hostilities might incur. In each instance, external powers relied on national or subnational forces operating outside of their own direct constitutionally defined chain of command. Yet, there were clear distinctions. In the initial years, US relations with local Afghan forces were governed primarily by a military technical agreement, and later by a status of forces agreement.52 In Iraq, US forces initially provided support to Iraqi forces under the imprimatur of an occupying force. Iran appears to rely primarily on less formal agreements with Shia powerbrokers in Iraq. In each case, the role and legal authority of security forces in the constitutional order of a state engaged in active combat, either with an external or internal adversary, thus proves pivotal in demarcating the difference between a proxy strategy that employs ‘allies,’ ‘partners,’ or ‘surrogates.’ The lines may not always be bright, but since one of the main purposes of a constitution is to define the terms of the social contract between a government and its citizens for the provision of internal and external security, examining the legal authorities under which different forces operate becomes critical to understanding parameters of proxy strategies.53 In weighing the costs and benefits of proxy strategies that augment existing forces operating under a clearly articulated constitutional mandate versus forces outside that mandate, a key consideration is how either choice impacts the perceived legitimacy of the state and drives up the cost of doing business for sponsors. The decline in inter-state conflict and prevalence of civil wars since the collapse of the Soviet Union suggests that proxy forces will remain an attractive tool for exerting strategic influence. Since irregular forces are rarely, if ever, mentioned or explicitly described in the constitutions of most states, the strategic usefulness of irregular forces to third parties—be they states or non-state actors—is the very ambiguity of their authorities. It is also in that ambiguity that the classic principal-agent problems of moral hazard and adverse-selection challenges often arise.54 Adverse selection occurs when the expert knowledge that makes proxy forces so attractive to sponsors is used to pursue hidden objectives that may not align with those of sponsors, or alternatively when sponsors use proxies to pursue goals that remain hidden from the proxy (often this is seen in sudden changes in sponsor policy, with sponsors abandoning proxies to achieve broader foreign policy goals). The inability to constrain proxies from abusing power or bending norms around the principals of distinction, proportionality, and military necessity that undergird International Humanitarian Law (IHL) creates a moral hazard for sponsors who champion the political claims of one combatant group over another. Sponsors may pay a high price from the

‘strategic costs of civilian harm’55 arising from murky command and control arrangements that exact tolls on the very population military actions are meant to protect, but which the proxy is not affected by because external sponsorship has shielded the agent from popular backlash.56 The potential for conflict escalation can be high in proxy warfare as a result of the challenges described above. Absent the constraints of well-defined authorities and clear command-and-control structures, agents may be incentivized to take more risks on the battlefield, raising the risk of conflict escalation.57 At the same time, the local expertise that makes proxies so attractive and expedient to external sponsors may also motivate proxies to hide information from sponsors about the actual costs and risks of battlefield tactics.58 High risks and hidden information can make it more difficult to broker an end to conflict, since populations at the mercy of proxies may be less inclined or incentivized to accept a deal that entails power-sharing with former adversaries, or that fails to bring perpetrators of atrocities to account. Despite these drawbacks, reliance on irregular forces offers strategic advantages that some sponsors may calculate outweigh potential downsides, providing three key benefits. First, it insulates sponsors from the high risks and costs associated with direct military action, while allowing them to tap into local coercive power unconstrained by international or local customary law. Second, it obscures the express or implied terms of the contract between sponsoring principals and their proxy agents from public scrutiny, which has the added benefit of allowing sponsors to bend, break, or reshape established norms without suffering immediate retribution from adversaries. The less known about the ways and means that irregular forces enable sponsors to remotely target and disrupt the activities of their rivals, the greater the degree of strategic surprise. The same might be said of allied or aligned conventional forces who, by express agreement, advance the strategic interests of another state by conducting expeditionary operations. Third, support for proxies arguably also allows sponsors to challenge rivals for a longer duration, since domestic responses to military intervention through third-party forces is frequently met with public indifference, or even outright support, as long as it does not entail domestic conscription or casualties. Proxy warfare is best defined as the direct or indirect sponsorship of third-party conventional or irregular forces that lie outside of the constitutional order of states engaged in armed conflict. Secrecy, plausible deniability, and ambiguity in the rules of engagement and command structure are characteristic features critical to the success of proxy strategies, making narrative control over the quality of command and control a central tactical concern. Yet, the more obscure the connections between command and control and the more covert the proxy networks, the less visibility sponsors have into whether and when proxies are operating on agreed terms and providing verifiable information about conditions on the ground. Existing definitions of proxy warfare each grasp part of this problem, but some are too broad, like Mumford’s suggestion that proxy warfare includes when the actions of a thirdparty unintentionally serve the strategic interests of a stakeholder with interests in a conflict. Similarly, a vision of proxy warfare that includes traditional coalition warfare or allied support, where command and control and rules of engagement are articulated under

formalized agreements, mistakenly conflates the characteristics of alliance dynamics with the features that make proxy warfare such an alluring, but also dangerous, policy choice. There is a real risk that overly elastic definitions could contribute to an escalatory climate by encouraging military responses to perceived threats from armed groups that are not actually part of a sponsor’s proxy strategy. This question has particular policy relevance when it comes to the Trump administration’s assertion that al-Qaeda is an Iranian proxy. Tehran’s relationship with al-Qaeda is contested at best, and there is substantial evidence suggesting that Iran’s interactions with al-Qaeda were often hostile.59 A legalistic focus avoids such overly broad definitions of proxy warfare that stretch the term beyond useful meaning. It helps clarify disputes over what constitutes proxy sponsorship by linking the definition to the intentional provision of support to combatants that enhances their capabilities. As noted above, there will always be debate over where to draw the line. For example, is Syria’s attempt to formally integrate Iranian-backed militias operating in the country a legitimate legal authorization? Did Yemeni President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s invitation to the Saudi coalition to intervene in Yemen truly authorize the activities of the coalition, and does this continue to hold legal sway given the collapse of governance in the country?60 Similar debates exist regarding the militias active in Iraq, where assessing the various levels of legal integration into the Iraqi system helps clarify the challenges posed by militias.61 Despite sometimes blurry distinctions, a definition that looks to international law provides a basis for resolving or at least assessing claims regarding where particular cases fall, even if debate over proper interpretation persists. A legal definition also enables the examination of private military companies and militias that may be understood by a sponsor as augmenting its forces, rather than replacing them. Rather than getting bogged down in debates over whether a strategy augments or replaces forces—as Pfaff’s definition risks doing—a legal definition shifts the focus to whether a group is a third party operating under an unbroken chain of constitutional authority. This is essential, for example, when it comes to evaluating whether Russia is waging proxy warfare via private security contingents that are deeply tied to the state but outside the country’s formal armed forces. A legal definition also avoids the artificial limits of state-centric definitions, such as that put forward by Hughes which requires proxy warfare to involve a state sponsor supporting a non-state group. It enables scrutiny to be applied to cases where states sponsor other states in wars that exist outside of—or purposefully stretch the meaning of—constitutional authorizations. For example, the United States’ support for the Saudi coalition in Yemen can be analyzed under this framework if the Saudi-led coalition is judged to be acting outside of constitutionally authorized structures in Yemen. Similarly, non-state sponsors, whether powerful individuals or organizations, should not be excluded from an effort to address the dangers of proxy warfare strategies by dint of their not being states. A legal definition focused on constitutional authorization and International Humanitarian Law holds promise for policy development to return accountability to and limit the costs imposed by today’s proxy wars, without being sidetracked by politicized and analytically

unsound accusations, in which only one’s rival’s partners are considered to be proxies. A more stable reference point based in law as to what constitutes proxy warfare helps guide policy debates about the efficacy and wisdom of partner operations, while giving local populations, human rights advocates, and peace activists a tool with which to identify and clarify the lines of command, a prerequisite to any semblance of democratic governance and accountability in warfare. As the experience of the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq illustrates, adverse selection problems have real-world consequences of joint or partnered military operations, detentions, and intelligence sharing. In Afghanistan, several major military operations which resulted in mass casualties have been directly attributed to faulty intelligence provided by Afghan forces to their American military partners.62 In some cases, Afghan forces deliberately fed misinformation to their American and NATO counterparts with the express purpose of eliminating rivals; in others, inaccurate information was provided to deliver a short-term tactical advantage where Afghan forces were unable to overcome their adversaries without coloring outside the lines of International Humanitarian Law. The October 2015 bombing of a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders in the northern province of Kunduz is perhaps one of the more striking cases in which misdirection and misinformation provided by Afghan forces resulted in devastating numbers of civilian casualties and heavy collateral damage.63 Likewise, in Iraq faulty intelligence provided by local partners on the ground has reportedly resulted in a persistent pattern of errant strikes.64 Several high-ranking US military officials have openly admitted to the strategic costs of errant strikes65 and false intelligence provided by local partners, resulting in substantial changes to the ways partnered operations are handled.66 If Russian operations in Syria and Ukraine are any guide, Moscow appears even less concerned about the adverse selection problems and the strategic tradeoffs of backing the Assad regime and other proxies on the ground. As seen with skirmishes in Deir ez-Zour between US forces and proxies in the Wagner Group, a Russian private military security company (PMSC) with alleged Kremlin connections, reliance on proxies raises the real risk of escalation.67 In Ukraine, the downing of the commercial jet MH17 in July 2014 is another instance in which faulty targeting by proxies on the ground had real strategic impact.68 Moscow, for its part, appears to have developed a systematic strategy of disinformation about operations in which its forces may have been involved, suggesting that one of the best routes for measuring the extent of its control over proxies in Syria and Ukraine may be in examining patterns of denial. Often the covert nature of connections between sponsors and their proxies, and the lack of transparency about the rules of engagement in partnered operations, may provide tactical advantages. But, as seen in the cases of US operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as Russian operations in Syria and Ukraine, persistent monitoring of proxy activity may be the only way to measure the effectiveness of proxy strategies. Four factors warrant examination when defining terms of reference for proxies: authorities, territoriality, alignment with stated sponsor goals and objectives, and information discipline. But once a proxy strategy is defined, what exactly constitutes a sponsor’s control or influence over a proxy, and how can

control be measured so that it can be applied more effectively? As Ladwig explains, aid dependence, power asymmetry, selectorate theory,69 and the strategic utility of a client state make up the main competing theories of control in the academic literature.70 None of these account for the often-divergent interests between patrons and client state powerbrokers, who frequently are poorly incentivized to comply with externally imposed policies lest they look weak to their neighbors and vulnerable to their domestic rivals and constituents. The fractious relationship between successive White House administrations and the government of Hamid Karzai, the former president of Afghanistan, is one more recent example of this phenomenon.71 But in strategy, as in other realms, past is precedent. In this regard, the history of the Cold War and the two decades that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in the lead-up to 9/11 are even more instructive. Proxy War from the Cold War to Today The importance of a legally focused definition is amplified by the ways that proxy warfare has changed since the Cold War. The end of the Cold War saw the emergence of a new age of proxy warfare in which multipolarity supplanted bipolarity, globalization transformed the role of sponsors and proxies, and transnational social movements were further elevated. The principal rivalries that define today’s bloody conflicts in the Greater Middle East and its periphery have a long history. The emergence of the Cold War created a bipolar security system. Even as a bipolar order emerged, other trends of decolonization and nationalism complicated the bipolarity. However, it would take time for these trends to come to fruition in the complex networked character of today’s proxy warfare. It is impossible to give a full review of all the events that have defined these trends, but a few are worth emphasizing as they illustrate the increasing movement away from bipolarity and toward a more complex proxy warfare environment. One key shift came when the 1979 Iranian Revolution overthrew the US-backed Shah in Tehran, reshaping the region’s security architecture in a way largely disconnected from the US-Soviet competition. The revolution sparked an enduring rivalry between the United States and its former client state, fueled by Iranian anger over American support to the Shah’s repressive regime, American anger over the embassy hostage crisis, and Tehran’s increasing alignment with Shia revolutionary fighters in southern Lebanon.72 Iran’s transnational internationalist revolutionary ideology, combined with traditional strategic concerns regarding the Iranian state’s economic and military power relative to Arab states, threatened Saudi Arabia.73 The revolution also quickly put an end to a long history of Israeli-Iranian intelligence cooperation—that included support for Kurdish groups as a proxy against Iraq— though a tense, more limited cooperation would persist through the 1980s, despite growing enmity.74 In September 1980, Iraq invaded Iran, sparking the Iran-Iraq War. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states backed Iraq and provided funding, viewing Iraq as a buffer against Iran, which in turn vastly escalated the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran.75 The Iran-Iraq War, along

with Iran’s transnational revolutionary roots, also led Iran to develop ties with Shia militias in Iraq that would become an important part of its foreign policy in the future.76 The United States provided support to Iraq to aid the remaining Arab pillar of its failing regional security strategy, but found itself increasingly taking on a direct military role in ensuring the flow of oil from the Gulf, notably during the Tanker War of the late 1980s.77 A mix of revolutionary zeal and strategic hedging prompted Iran to jump into the Lebanese fray. It drew upon its cultural cachet as the de facto leader of Shia Muslims in the region, substantial funding, and a contingent of the IRGC to organize a ragtag assembly of Shia militias under the banner of Hezbollah.78 Syria, under Hafez al-Assad’s leadership, provided the main base for the IRGC-Hezbollah partnership, overcoming, in time, initially tense relations with revolutionary elites in Iran as shared interest in pushing back against American hegemony grew and the crucible of the Iran-Iraq War reinforced ties between Damascus and Tehran.79 Hezbollah’s bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 and the subsequent kidnapping of CIA station chief William Buckley deepened the enmity between the United States and Iran, setting up an acrimonious rivalry that continues to this day.80 The Iranian-Israeli rivalry also steadily intensified. Hezbollah’s role in the 1994 bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina Jewish community center in Buenos Aires was a wake-up call for Tel Aviv.81 Iranian investment in ballistic missile development and a nuclear program also bolstered Israel’s perception of its one-time friend as a threat.82 Iran threw a wrench in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process by backing Palestinian groups like Hamas. Tehran’s efforts to regain leverage in the long-simmering conflict also marked the beginning of Hezbollah’s on-again, off-again flirtation with Hamas.83 This would escalate as Israel accused Iran of supporting Palestinian groups during the Second Intifada, setting off yet another wave of investment in proxies in the region that has had far-reaching repercussions to this day. Meanwhile, Gulf countries began to increase the size of their conventional weapons arsenals while attempting to modernize their militaries and expand their ability to deploy weapons of mass destruction. During the Iran-Iraq War, Tehran reportedly launched an estimated 600 ballistic missiles.84 Iraq expanded its military ranks to nearly 1 million and deployed chemical weapons.85 The accelerated acquisition of Soviet-made Scud missiles and Soviet and American conventional weapons such as tanks and armored vehicles was likewise a game changer for the region, while the expansion of US basing rights in the Gulf region set the stage for future confrontations. As tensions escalated between the United States, Israel, and Iran in the Middle East, a new front in the Soviet-US Cold War emerged in Afghanistan, illustrating the continued influence of the bipolar Cold War system in proxy warfare as well as that system’s weakening. The proxy wars in Afghanistan combined with the military modernization in the Middle East helped to sow the seeds of future conflict. The proxy conflict in Afghanistan began with the assassination of Adolph Dubs, America’s ambassador in Kabul, in February 1979 following the Saur Revolution in 1978. Not long before Dubs was kidnapped and sequestered in the Kabul Hotel, US embassy staff

had released a highly critical report on human rights as a response to the crackdown on protestors by Hafizullah Amin, the embattled leader of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA).86 Amin’s failure to secure Dubs’ freedom, combined with suspicions that Soviet advisors were involved in the kidnapping, had goaded Afghan police to move aggressively against the kidnappers and had only increased the growing acrimony between Washington and Amin’s regime.87 The subsequent Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 was ostensibly meant to bring Amin’s government to heel, but the invasion precipitated a violent backlash across Afghanistan. It also drew the United States deeper into the conflict. The incursion and subsequent installation of Babrak Karmal following Amin’s assassination at the hands of Soviet Spetsnaz forces during Operation Storm-333 provoked a harsh reaction from the White House. In 1980, the Carter administration imposed a grain embargo against the Soviet Union in 1980 and led a multinational boycott of the summer Olympic Games. Part policy response to what it viewed as aggressive Soviet expansion, and part opportunistic payback for its losses to the Soviets and Chinese in proxy wars in other parts of the world, American-led sanctions against the Soviet Union were the first step on the road to an extensive covert campaign. Alongside Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other Arab states, the United States leveraged its longstanding support of its client state Pakistan to provide substantial support for the anti-Soviet Afghan mujahideen.88 Under pressure from the UN to withdraw, the Soviets began to internally debate the efficacy of the Afghan campaign as early as 1982.89 Devastating losses in a bloody proxy guerrilla war and a slow-burning economic crisis at home triggered by a precipitous drop in oil and coal production—a key source of much-needed hard currency—sparked a crisis of confidence in the Politburo.90 Struggling to finance a bloated military while maintaining generous pension guarantees to veterans and retirees, the Kremlin found itself looking for the nearest possible exit.91 The United States continued to pump aid and weapons to Afghan factions operating out of Pakistan, subcontracting command and control over the mujahideen to the ISI in Islamabad. Meanwhile, the Politburo was riven between an older generation of hawkish stalwarts committed to avoiding humiliation at the hands of American proxies and a faction led by Mikhail Gorbachev that reluctantly acknowledged that a clean and clear victory was far out of reach.92 By 1987, Gorbachev had more or less won the argument, declaring in a media interview that July that Soviet withdrawal was all but a done deal.93 The decision to withdraw from Afghanistan also appeared to mark, for a time, the end of the Soviet strategy inaugurated by Khrushchev of seeking influence in the developing world via client states and proxies.94 From there forward, UN efforts to pressure the United States, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran into pulling support for their proxies ebbed and flowed, but the resulting Geneva Accords, calling for noninterference in Afghan affairs, failed to end the conflict.95 As internecine battles broke out between the seven main mujahideen factions, the crosslinkages between networks of sponsors and volunteer fighters from the Middle East and

Afghan factions in South Asia propelled the emergence of a violent Salafist-jihadi transnational social movement just as the Soviets began to wind down their involvement in the late 1980s.96 Although the movement’s roots well predate the emergence of al-Qaeda on the rugged edge of Peshawar, its dynamic transformation into a global juggernaut—first briefly under the influence of Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian Sunni Islamic scholar who graduated from al-Azhar in Cairo, and then for a time under the influence of Osama bin Laden, the scion of a wealthy Saudi construction dynasty—illustrated the growing complexity and risks of proxy warfare in a more globalized and interconnected environment. At the time, however, few would have predicted the rise of al-Qaeda and its particularly violent brand of vanguardist jihadism. Many in Washington instead viewed the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 as the end of the Cold War’s bloody proxy conflicts. It appeared to many that the United States was the last superpower standing. This hope was not entirely unfounded; during the 1990s, Iran and Saudi Arabia experienced a short rapprochement even as both sought to gain greater influence and step into the vacuum left by the Soviets in Central and South Asia. However, Saudi support for Salafist groups, including the Taliban in Afghanistan, remained a sore point with Iran.97 Tehran’s anxiety about the rise of these groups in its neighborhood escalated in 1994 when Pakistan backed a Taliban push to gain dominance in the southern province of Kandahar. Iran responded by providing substantial arms and support to the loose confederation of anti-Taliban fighters that would ultimately constitute the Northern Alliance.98 Unsettled by the prospects of a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan, particularly after the Taliban’s involvement in the hijacking in 1999 of an Indian commercial airliner, India also jumped into the Afghan civil war by providing support to the Northern Alliance.99 The few glimmers of hope that the regions tensions might be resolved were not sufficiently nurtured to avoid the continuation and eventual escalation of proxy conflict, even as triumphalism over the United States’ victory in the Cold War predominated. As Washington reveled in post-Cold War triumphalism, pushing a twin agenda of promoting peace through the globalization of prosperity and American predominance through NATO expansion, debates about whether a ‘revolution in military affairs’ justified new approaches to US global military operations.100 In the meantime, the very states the United States sought to isolate throughout the 1990s—particularly Syria, Libya, Iraq, and North Korea—became the subject of great concern because of their proliferating access to nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. In 1997, CIA Director George Tenet detailed the expansion of Syria’s chemical and biological weapons program in official reports and Congressional testimony, warning of potentially catastrophic attacks against Israel.101 In May 1998, Pakistan launched its first nuclear bomb test after cobbling together a secret program that relied on a network of suppliers that ran from Tripoli to Tehran and Pyongyang. Only one year later in Kosovo, NATO and Russian troops clashed at the Pristina International Airport, reigniting Moscow’s anxiety over US hegemony. These dynamics combined to gradually escalate long-simmering rivalries between principal states with a stake in the ongoing conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya,

Afghanistan, and Ukraine, even as interest in the topic of proxy warfare faded. The failure to recognize the continuation of conflict and its escalation in the Greater Middle East and its periphery may be partly ascribed to mistaking driving economic and material forces for ideological issues. For those who viewed the Middle East’s late-Cold War conflicts as driven largely by economic and material factors and increasingly carried out by breakaway regional client states in the Soviet-American contest, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the United States’ decision to step in into the breach provided little solace, and for some even suggested a coming escalation.102 The start of the rebellion in Chechnya in 1994 and the Russian Federation’s brutal campaign of repression ushered in a new era of proxy war marked by gloves-off extrajudicial killings, renditions, and other brutal tactics. With its military hollowed out after Afghanistan and Soviet armed forces cut to roughly 50 percent of what had been dispersed across fifteen of its former republics in the Caucasus, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, Moscow could ill afford another lengthy conflict in its near abroad.103 On the US side, the politically costly Black Hawk Down incident in 1993 and deaths of more than a dozen US Army Rangers in Somalia provoked anxiety in the White House. Consequently, Washington’s national security establishment pressed heavily for more remote missile strikes and use of partners rather than direct US force against groups like al-Qaeda in the Greater Middle East and its periphery.104 Israel, meanwhile, began to expand its use of unmanned aerial vehicles in the region, with attendant expansion of extraterritorial military campaigns and increased reliance on local sources to provide targeting intelligence.105 Hints of reinvestment in proxy warfare strategies emerged in the breakaway former Soviet territories of Chechnya, Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, and Transnistria in Moldova, where Moscow successfully leveraged ethnic divisions and political instability to redraw the boundaries of its imperium. At the periphery of the Black Sea, political and economic transformations obscured the depth of Kremlin anxieties and internal fissures in former Soviet republics. In these conflicts, the Kremlin tested a model that would become central to its gray-zone strategy early in the twenty-first century. Short of conventional war, gray-zone tactics leveraged a combination of support to irregular forces and weaponized narratives predicated on nationalism to advance strategic objectives. After 9/11, the US counterterrorism campaign against al-Qaeda across the Middle East ignited new debates about just war theory, the limits of state-to-state clientelist strategies, and Cold War alliances in the face of a rise in transnational social movements.106 This shift to tactics that bent the norms of international law cast a particularly long shadow over US-led interventions that relied to a great extent on third-party proxy forces that acted outside of or even sought to topple the constitutional order of existing regimes. These norms were further tested after the 2003 US invasion by American actors in Iraq. Sean McFate and other scholars of the post-Cold War privatization of the ‘market for force’ mark this period as the beginning of the reemergence of ‘neo-medievalism.’107 The welldocumented and controversial role of private military security contractors (PMSCs) like Blackwater in major civilian casualty incidents in Iraq raised fresh questions about accountability and command and control in an era of increasing US dependence on forces

outside the constitutional chain of command. The 2006 Lebanon war renewed tension between Israel and Iran. A year later, the surge of US forces in Iraq appeared temporarily to stabilize the United States’ position in the region, but the failure to cement a status of forces agreement for American troops to remain incountry precipitated the start of a drawdown in 2009. Around the same time, Russian anxiety over NATO expansion; the ‘color revolutions’ in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan; and the Euro-Atlantic alliance’s involvement in the conflict in Kosovo emerged as preeminent concerns for the Kremlin.108 After the Rose Revolution in Georgia elevated Mikheil Saakashvili to the presidency in 2004, clashes between the governments in Tbilisi and Moscow over the status of South Ossetia began to reescalate as Georgia deployed extra peacekeeping forces to the region. Across the Black Sea in Ukraine, anger over rigged presidential elections triggered mass protests and a recount that ultimately handed Viktor Yuschenko a victory over Viktor Yanukovych, a Kremlin favorite. The dramatic changing of the guard in two of the most strategically important territories along Russia’s border only reinforced suspicions in Vladimir Putin’s government that the United States was determined to expand its influence over the Kremlin’s traditional power base in the Black Sea region. For Kremlinologists, as Andrew Monaghan notes, Putin’s 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference marked Russia’s important but unexpected pivot away from the cooperative attitude it had adopted in the immediate aftermath of Gorbachev’s resignation. It also provided the most decisive evidence that, in Putin’s own words, ‘the unipolar model is not only unacceptable but also impossible’ to maintain without capitulating wholesale to the peculiar brand of American exceptionalism that emerged out of the ‘Global War on Terror.’109 Putin’s pushback against US hegemony was as much a genuine reaction to perceived Western backing for popular democratic uprisings against the Kremlin’s handpicked post-Soviet successors in Georgia and Ukraine as it was a reflection of internal fears that Moscow could not contain security threats from Islamist separatists within its own borders. The deadly 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis and the 2004 massacre of more than 300 people following the siege of a local school in the North Ossetian town of Beslan raised serious concerns about the effectiveness of state security forces and the Kremlin’s ability to suppress internal threats.110 The successive democratic revolutions during the 2004–6 period that removed Kremlinfriendly regimes in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi and Ukrainian capital of Kyiv were equally decisive in shifting Putin’s government onto a more aggressive footing. Both countries border the Black Sea, home to a key contingent of Moscow’s naval force in the Middle East which was, at the peak of the Cold War, a maritime rival of the US Sixth Fleet. The position of Ukraine and Georgia at the main access to Russia’s only contiguous warm-water port have made both states central to the Kremlin’s grand strategy since the time of Catherine the Great. Indeed, Moscow’s ambitions to maintain access to its main path to the Mediterranean, as well as southeasterly routes through the Suez and to the Indian Ocean, meant that when tensions that had been simmering since 1992 over the breakaway region of South Ossetia finally boiled over into full-scale war between Russia and Georgia in the summer of 2008,

few close watchers of the region were particularly surprised. What was surprising, and has since become one of the key case studies in the advent of cyberwarfare, was Moscow’s attack on news and government websites that ultimately choked off Tbilisi’s ability to communicate clearly what was happening on the ground.111 While state-sponsored cyberattacks between battlefield adversaries began cropping up just as the World Wide Web was beginning to mature, the series of distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) in July 2008 on Georgian state websites and on Georgian hackers skilled at counterattacks was one of the first known instances of coordinated state military action on both the ground and in cyberspace.112 The Georgian campaign not only signaled Moscow’s renewed confidence in its place in the great power pantheon, it redefined Russia’s strategic playbook and presaged coming clashes in other critically important theaters more central to US strategic interests. When protests over the self-immolation of a Tunisian fruit seller erupted in December 2010, few could have predicted the chain of events that would follow. Though the Arab Spring began as popular protests that quickly spread from Tunisia to Egypt in early January 2011, the discontent quickly shifted into the register of proxy warfare.113 Disruption in states within the Saudi sphere of influence led Saudi Arabia to escalate its rivalry with Iran, notably in Bahrain, where it directly intervened by sending troops across the border in March 2011, and in Yemen, where it ran an air campaign and provided support to forces on the ground with the backing of the United States and a variety of other partners against Iran-backed Houthi rebels.114 At the same time, the Arab Spring led to protests and an escalating civil war in Syria where Iran, fearing the loss of a partner uniformly viewed as essential by its foreign policy elite, mobilized a range of proxies—including Afghan and Iraqi Shia militias, as well as Hezbollah—to defend it against rebels who quickly received support from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, and later the United States and Israel.115 In Libya, the United States backed a proxy warfare strategy against the Gaddafi regime, providing air cover to rebels. After the rebels defeated and killed Gaddafi, the country fell into a civil war between the various factions, fueled in part by support for competing militias by Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, as well as counterterrorism missions—often by proxy—by other powers, including the United States.116 The fallout from the Libyan conflict precipitated a decisive break between Russia and the United States. While Russia abstained from a UN Security Council vote to establish a no-fly zone in Libya in 2011, the subsequent breakdown of order in Moscow’s longtime client state and key node in Russia’s energy trading chain prompted a sharp rebuke from Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, which accused Washington and NATO of stretching the UN mandate.117 To complicate matters further, Libya, Yemen, and Syria saw the rise of powerful transnational non-state movements—most notably ISIS—fueled by the adept stitching together of local and global grievances, with openings for organization of jihadists in countries already under stress from revolution and proxy warfare, the challenges of ongoing economic and political globalization, and the powerful impact of the rise of social media.118

Some analysts have gone as far as to argue that this phenomenon requires a reconceptualization of proxy warfare itself.119 A simple review of news headlines reveals the extent to which inter-state conflict expressed through proxy war reemerged in the wake of the Arab Spring. Headlines referred to an increasingly heated ‘Israeli-Iran cold war,’ discuss how an ‘Iranian-Saudi proxy struggle tore apart the Middle East,’ and express concern about a ‘Growing U.S.-Iran proxy fight,’ and the fact that ‘Russia is roaring back’ in the Middle East.120 One examination of the number of battle deaths in the Middle East found that the number of such deaths in the period following 2011 rivaled the peak during the late Cold War and surpassed the toll during other periods of the Cold War in the region.121 According to the United Nations, there are more refugees today than at any point since the end of World War II, driven in large part by the proxy conflicts in Syria, Libya, and Yemen that followed the Arab Spring.122 Far from leaving the dark days of Cold War proxy warfare behind, the Greater Middle East continues to struggle with new and complex forms of the problem. Iran has long provided support to Hamas and Hezbollah to act as proxies against Israel. In Iraq, it supports numerous militias to expand its influence,123 and in Yemen, it provides ballistic missiles and drones to the Houthis.124 Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states arm Syrian rebel groups, often with the support of the United States.125 Meanwhile, Syria relies upon non-state backers like Hezbollah and militias to bolster its shrinking military, while these groups simultaneously receive aid from Iran.126 Russia seeks to protect its interests in Syria, while keeping its own troops out of a direct role in the conflict, by bolstering its support with private military contractors from the Wagner Group and other Russian PMSCs that have been pivotal in joint operations with Hezbollah and Afghan militia fighters.127 The United States has backed Kurdish groups to fight ISIS and Syrian rebels against Assad.128 Egypt, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates battle it out for influence in Libya through their support for competing militias in the country.129 In Syria, the United States and Russia carefully deconflict operations, and America has avoided striking Russian targets even when conducting direct strikes on the Syrian regime.130 Yet, American and Russian proxies have clashed there. For example, the United States bombed Russian private military forces, themselves a form of proxy, that had attacked USbacked forces in Syria, killing hundreds, according to some reports.131 In responding to the bombing, Russia emphasized that ‘no Russian servicemen were involved,’ demonstrating the role proxies play in restraining direct and open clashes between the two powers.132 The move toward proxies as a way of avoiding the costs of direct confrontation is not restricted to rivalries of great powers. According to a 2016 RAND report, Iran has adopted strategies and methods of war that intentionally fall below the United States’ threshold for direct warfare, similar to the tactics adopted by Russia and China.133 Moscow’s strategic innovations are most manifest in the Black Sea region in its annexation of Crimea and in the eastern territories of Donetsk and Luhansk in Ukraine, where hundreds of Russian operatives or so-called ‘little green men’ have helped buttress an armed rebellion against the

government in Kyiv.134 The RAND report also points, among other examples, to Iran’s backing for numerous militias in Iraq. In addition, proxies are often used as a way of avoiding retaliation because their use conceals responsibility, a common reasoning behind the use of terrorists as proxies.135 Fear of retaliation is not the only trend driving a resurgence of proxy warfare. It is also influenced by a desire to avoid the steep costs of occupying territory. Proxies offer a means of extending supply lines, creating strategic depth where it might not otherwise exist, and projecting power at a discount. The United States has shown itself increasingly unwilling to respond to conflict in the Middle East with its own forces, and its appetite for military operations in South Asia is on the wane. Andrew Mumford argues in his book Proxy Warfare that the inevitable consequence of the War on Terror on the American purse (with the Iraq war alone estimated to eventually cost $3 trillion in the midst of a global financial downturn) and on American national pride (with over 4,000 combat deaths even after President Bush proclaimed ‘mission accomplished’ in May 2003) is that the U.S. will revert to engagement in proxy warfare.136 Moreover, the United States is not the only actor seeking to avoid the costs and risks of occupation and direct governance through the use of proxies. Russia has rushed to shore up one-time client state regimes in Syria and Libya, deploying Chechen task forces and private military security contractors in line with long-held strategic visions of using private forces to extend power where it would otherwise be difficult to do so.137 Understanding Proxy War in the Aftermath of the Arab Spring Russian involvement in Syria and Ukraine, and suspected interference in US elections, has prompted a spate of commentary on the emergence of a ‘New Cold War,’ or ‘Cold War 2.0,’ but little in the way of serious analysis that breaks beyond the confines of past paradigms.138 The few policymakers in Washington’s interagency national security apparatus familiar with these trends frame much of their analysis in terms of the United States’ experience of proxy warfare during the Cold War. As Michael Innes suggests in the edited volume Making Sense of Proxy Wars, ‘the use and role of armed proxies have featured only sporadically as a serious subject of either academic or public inquiry’ since the end of the Cold War. Innes adds, ‘In that Cold War formulation, proxies were little more than third-party tools of statecraft without any agency, intent, or indeed interest visibly separable from those a well-resourced state sponsor.’139 Little consideration has been given to the anti-colonialist drives for independence and self-determination or to the political and military modernization processes integral to so many of the conflicts that have shaped the Greater Middle East and its periphery. An understanding of proxy war based on Cold War models also fails to capture the strategic innovations since the collapse of the Soviet Union that have dramatically altered the

character of proxy warfare. Proxies today operate with much greater flexibility and autonomy and benefit from more integrated supply chains supported by a wide range of networks in the private and public sector. Perhaps the most obvious change is the shift in the international system away from bipolarity. During the Cold War, the superpowers often intervened to restrain their client states from escalating conflicts. For example, the superpowers sought, often successfully, to restrain the reach of the Arab-Israeli conflict.140 Today, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has struggled to establish a stable security system in the Middle East, as multiple states, empowered by globalization and technological advancements—whether Iran, the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, or Turkey—compete with each other, often via proxy warfare. Compounding this dynamic is that during the Cold War, warfare—including proxy warfare —was primarily state-centric. Where states with highly centralized militaries once predominated as the principal sponsors of proxies and were able to exert tighter (though admittedly less than complete) control over supply chains, the new and emergent political economy of conflict has empowered proxies themselves to develop their own proxies. The spread of advanced weapons and communications systems that enable more effective and cost-efficient long-range targeting and new forms of security operations; the rise of private security companies; innovations in finance and energy production; and the democratization of information technologies have not only seen non-state actors take pride of place in the strategies of rival states, but also become drivers of strategy themselves. There is a major gap in the literature on the role of the globalized and tightly interconnected international financial system. As seen from the release of the Panama Papers, banking secrecy, the rise of offshore banking, and tax havens have had a real impact on the growth of complex networks of proxies.141 In one of the few book-length accounts of this phenomenon, former Harvard scholar Brooke Harrington has documented the rising importance of wealth managers and their connections to the wide network of offshore banks in supporting the easy transfer of licit and illicit funds to today’s many conflict entrepreneurs.142 A case in point is Rami Makhlouf, a close associate and cousin of Bashar al-Assad, who has reportedly used shell companies in the Caribbean to perform an end run around US and European Union sanctions on supporters of Assad’s regime.143 A longtime client of Mossack Fonseca & Co., Makhlouf reportedly tucked away millions in offshore tax havens and used the international financial system to help fund Syria’s pro-government, so-called ‘Shabiha’ militias.144 In contemporary proxy warfare, newly empowered non-state actors are both principals andagents, marketing their comparative advantage over direct intervention to potential sponsors and sponsoring groups themselves. Daniel Byman and Sarah E. Kreps argue that ‘Lebanese Hizballah, for example, has evolved a specialized set of terrorist capabilities, [and] the group has its own training sites in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon where several Palestinian groups have received training, a well-run and widely viewed television channel (Al-Manar), and a proven record of tactical effectiveness’ that it offers to supporters.145 Further complicating the situation is the acceleration of technological development, wider

availability of dual-use technologies, and technical know-how and its diffusion across borders. Escalatory pressures are likely to increase as technological development accelerates, remote targeting capabilities proliferate, and new developments in areas like cyberwarfare and artificial intelligence allow weaker states, armed actors, and other conflict entrepreneurs to advance their strategic aims from further and further away. Long supply chains, poor controls, new forms of financial liquidity such as cryptocurrency, increased human migration flows, and the wide availability of information on the internet all combine to expand the range of conflict stakeholders who can support and sustain proxies. Today, a complex mesh of states, corporations, armed groups, and wealthy individuals increases the likelihood that conflict will only become more entrenched in the Greater Middle East and its periphery. Continuing to rely upon Cold War understandings of proxy warfare to address this increasingly complex environment is likely to produce analytical failure and increase the likelihood of strategic surprise. In contrast, adopting a legally focused definition of proxy warfare as the sponsorship of conventional or irregular forces that lie outside the constitutional order of states can help clarify the challenges of the current proxy warfare environment. Attention to legal status and chains of command responsibility can help reveal where those dynamics have broken down, differentiate proxy war from the more regularized and distinct issues of alliance politics, and drive further attention to the way that today’s proxy warfare is deeply tied to broader socioeconomic trends as well as political choices, particularly over the past two decades, that have undermined the legal structures that can help restrain the most dangerous consequences of proxy warfare.

2

SYRIA 2011–19 LESSONS FOR US PROXY WARFARE

Nate Rosenblatt and David Kilcullen

On 13 October 2019, US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper appeared on the television program Face the Nation to discuss the withdrawal of US troops from northern Syria. ‘It’s a very terrible situation over there,’ he explained, ‘we have American forces likely caught between two opposing advancing armies and it’s a very untenable situation.’1 The problem with Secretary Esper’s remarks were that the two forces he mentioned in the interview were hardly monolithic ‘armies.’ They were, in essence, proxies. And American forces in northeastern Syria were not alone either. Their partners were the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a coalition of predominantly Kurdish non-state armed groups that the United States had armed and trained as part of its strategy to fight the so-called Islamic State (IS). The sudden decision by the United States to withdraw forces and thereby discontinue support for the SDF—the event that precipitated Secretary Esper’s appearance on television —did not ultimately take place. On 6 October Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdog˘an convinced US President Donald Trump over the phone that Turkey could stabilize northeastern Syria instead of the United States.2 Later that day, the White House issued a press release explaining that the US forces ‘will no longer be in the immediate area.’3 Trump further announced the new policy over Twitter, declaring, ‘it is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars.’4 But Trump was outmaneuvered by advisors in what one described as an elaborate ‘shell game.’5 The way the crisis unfolded was characteristic of Trump’s instinctive and often poorly planned approach in foreign policy. But, in this case, Trump’s position on US troops in northeastern Syria reflected deeper challenges at the root of America’s strategy in the Middle East. He correctly assessed that there is little bedrock of political support in the United States to justify these deployments. The threat to abandon the SDF revealed the limits of America’s ability to compete in the ‘gray zone’—long-term competition, below the threshold of outright warfare, that includes but is not limited to proxy warfare—against adversaries like Iran and

Russia.6 While observers of the Syrian civil war commonly acknowledge the proliferation of proxy forces and the mosaic of the conflict’s sponsor-proxy relationships, there is limited research on the implications of this type of conflict for twenty-first-century irregular warfare. This chapter accepts as a baseline the idea that these complex sponsor-proxy relationships will proliferate in a geopolitical environment described by the Biden administration as ‘strategic competition.’7 To address this situation, this chapter reviews US actions in the Syrian conflict through a general framework designed to inform policymakers considering shaping the outcome of proxy wars. This framework relies on three factors to align for success (see Figure 2.1). First, the United States needs a clear political strategy of what it wants to accomplish in the conflict. Second, it needs an accurate assessment of what its proxy can and cannot do. Third, it needs a plan to mitigate each of the three things that can undermine a sponsor-proxy relationship: an information deficiency problem, a principal-agent problem, and an international coordination problem. This framework is like a bar stool: if one of the three components is missing, the approach will fail. Even a sponsor with a clear political strategy that is well aligned with the capabilities of its chosen proxies can still fail if it is unable to effectively manage these issues. To illustrate the value of this framework, this chapter analyzes US sponsorship of proxies in Syria from 2011 through 2014, a period marked by consistent policy failures. It then evaluates the US-led counter-ISIS coalition’s support for the SDF after 2014, with the goal of assisting policymakers in creating more effective partnerships in the future. The larger lesson from this analysis is that, as attractive as proxies are, it is difficult to leverage them to advance US strategic interests. Without the right preexisting capabilities or extensive incountry support, US-backed non-state proxies in the Middle East can do little more than disrupt a state adversary or conduct counterterrorism operations that hurt an insurgent militarily. They generally cannot address the complex social factors that gave rise to a terrorist group or civil conflict in the first place. Finally, America increasingly uses proxies to fight its wars, but these are political wars that cannot be won by military force alone. USbacked proxies in the Middle East might solve short-term dilemmas, but they hardly contribute to the long-term resolution of core issues affecting American interests in the region. Three Lessons from the US Proxy War in Syria before the Islamic State During the first four years of the Syrian civil war, from 2011 through 2014, the United States sought unsuccessfully to develop proxies to achieve its foreign policy objectives. There are three key lessons regarding US policies on proxy war from this period which help explain the failure of these efforts while also providing a foundation for analyzing the character of other US proxy relationships. Lesson One: Governing without a Political Strategy

US efforts to back Syrian proxy groups from 2011–14 were based on a shifting political strategy. This was true for US support to both the militant opposition and the political opposition, particularly the Syrian local councils which the United States viewed as a potential alternative for post-Assad governance. ‘The problem with American policy in Syria was in some ways the same as it always was: all tactics, no strategy,’ explained a diplomat in the Middle East who described the United States’ political strategy for supporting insurgents as ‘a mess.’8 US efforts to support local councils illustrated the critical first lesson of waging proxy warfare: the need for a sponsor to have a clear political strategy. Fig. 2.1: A Framework for Assessing Sponsor-Proxy Operational Success, Showing How These Three Lessons Interact in the Proxy Warfare Environment

Source: https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/reports/tweet-damocles/part-onethree-lessons-from-syrias-proxy-wars-before-the-islamic-state/ In October 2011, a Syrian activist named Omar Aziz published an essay online called ‘A Seminar for Establishing Local Councils.’ The paper was circulated among anti-government activists and began a process of channeling local protest movements into organized municipal governance as a key form of resistance.9 In January 2012, residents of Zabadani, a restive, strongly anti-government region in the mountains northeast of Damascus, were supposedly the first to form a local council. The concept expanded as other towns and city neighborhoods were ‘liberated’ from Syrian government control by newly active rebel forces.10 In 2012, while working at Caerus Associates, the authors studied twenty local councils in twelve out of Syria’s fourteen governorates to understand what local councils had in common despite differing demographics and conflict dynamics across the country.11 We found that, in areas where the Syrian government had disappeared, local councils acted like miniature governments, performing tasks such as cleaning streets, repairing municipal facilities, and keeping schools open. These councils were generally most active in medium-sized towns, as small villages lacked the need for higher-order organization and large cities were too complex for these ad hocinstitutions to manage.12 The most engaged local councils were also far from the frontlines and were not based in strategic locations that would be of interest to armed groups, such as border crossings or highway interchanges.13 In addition, the councils that governed most visibly were based in places that were ethnically homogenous and lacked pre-conflict non-state governance. Ethnic minority areas, such as Kurdish regions in the northeast and Druze regions in the southern governorate of Suweida, had their own form of governance before the Syrian war broke out. These pre-conflict governing structures filled gaps left by a receding state during the war but did not resemble the local council model.14 In part because local councils represented the promise of a democratic ‘post-Assad Syria,’ they began receiving funding from the United States and European governments properly in 2013.15 Frances Brown, who conducted the most extensive evaluation of US government support to local councils in Syria, concluded that US government work with local councils lacked strategic coherence because it failed to adapt to the ‘political-military realities of the war.’16 Brown found that the initial logic of the United States sending support to local councils matched Washington’s policy to plan for a post-Assad Syria. But by 2013, as that possibility became more remote, ‘the objectives and assumptions of local political assistance in Syria diverged further and further from U.S. high-level policy decisions.’17 The United States’ lack of a clear and viable strategy to support local councils, combined with a rapid rise in funds, meant that, in the words of one official, it was ‘like watching fiveyear-olds play soccer. No one played their position.’18 The programs were poorly implemented because, while the plans may have looked coherent in Washington, they were unworkable on the ground in Syria.

Perhaps most significantly, the strategy of developing governing councils for a post-Assad Syria remained attractive in Washington long after it had outlived its relevance in Syria. In this way, an incoherent political strategy on the part of the United States undermined grassroots civilian-led local governance structures in Syria. In theory, local councils offered persuasive and administrative capabilities that could help anti-Assad militants establish resilient control over territory they captured. But these councils faced competition from armed actors who were interested in governing, and they could not adapt on account of US efforts to support them faced capacity problems, myriad principal-agent problems, and an uncoordinated bureaucracy that lacked strategic guidance. After years of assistance, local councils started out promisingly but did not adapt or develop governing capacity. At first glance, it would seem strange to include US sponsorship of civilian governance in a study of proxy warfare. However, local councils were a key element of the American proxy war effort. There was, on the one hand, support to various militants, and in parallel, efforts to create a more inclusive and technocratic government to replace the regime of Bashar alAssad.19 While some local councils were nonpartisan service and aid delivery units,20 their purpose as initially designed in Omar Aziz’s memo was political. Before Aziz died in a Syrian prison in 2013, his memo called for ‘the establishment of a network of … popular committees whose role was to protect the city and fill the vacuum on the day the security and the police would be forced to leave the city.’21 Thus, local councils were conceived of and supported as a revolutionary ‘parallel governance’ project that provided the administrative and persuasive capabilities to complement the coercive military work of anti-Assad forces. Yet, when it became clear the Assad government would not simply fall, the United States failed to adjust its approach and develop coherent policies responsive to local conditions. Lesson Two: The Role of Persuasive and Coercive Capabilities in Aleppo Beyond lacking a clear political strategic objective, US proxies in Syria in 2011–14 often lacked the capabilities to take and hold territory. Instead, other groups—notably fundamentalist militias like then al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra (later Hay’at Tahrir alSham)—successfully outcompeted the rebels backed by the United States. The success these fundamentalist groups saw in holding territory also emphasized the important role of persuasive and administrative capability in a competitive environment, as even their hold often proved brittle in the absence of such capabilities. From September 2013 to January 2014, a small group of researchers working with the authors investigated the conflict in Aleppo.22 Although all were native Aleppans accustomed to the challenges of reporting in their city, they found this period especially challenging. Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, was the center of gravity for the war in Syria’s north. By the end of 2013, fighting was particularly intense: Syrian government forces ended a siege in the western third of the city, while IS fighters entered eastern Aleppo by force. By January 2014, as pro-government districts were refortified, IS fighters were defeated by a coalition of antiAssad forces. As this was happening, our research team carried out a panel survey each month over a 4month period of 561 residents across Aleppo’s 56 neighborhoods. They questioned residents

from all parts of the city about their political attitudes, perceptions of safety, and daily experiences (e.g., the extent to which they traveled outside their neighborhood, the extent to which prices for commodities were affordable). In addition, researchers collected information about the location of military checkpoints (as an indicator for territorial control, enabling them to identify which insurgent or pro-regime group controlled which part of the city), as well as the location and operational status of bakeries (as a signal of humanitarian conditions). The researchers drew two conclusions about the relationship between power and allegiance in achieving territorial control in Aleppo. First, they found that political support for armed groups in the city flowed from military strength. Armed groups did not control territory because people supported them; on the contrary, people began to support them when, and only when, they had established effective territorial control. Second, the researchers concluded that military force alone was not enough to sustain control over territory. In order to achieve resilient—rather than brittle—control, armed groups needed persuasive tools (i.e., methods of ensuring local legitimacy) along with administrative capacity (i.e., the ability to deliver governance and essential services) and not just coercive tools (i.e., the use of force to compel obedience). In our Aleppo study, we found that fundamentalist insurgents received more support than members of the Syrian government or the political opposition. In total, 26 percent of respondents reported that ‘Islamic Brigades’ (in effect, fundamentalist insurgents) were the ‘legitimate representative of the Syrian people.’23 This was the most popular choice after ‘No One’ (39 percent), and a far more popular choice than either the official political Syrian opposition (1 percent) or the Syrian government (12 percent).24 One reason why fundamentalist insurgents may have registered so much support from residents was not because Aleppans supported their ideology, but because they exerted a monopoly of violence in the neighborhoods they controlled. This allowed them to offer safety and predictability to populations in those areas. Before IS entered east Aleppo, neighborhoods such as Bustan al-Basha were protected by local militias. These militias were well-known to local residents, and presumably would have been trusted. But these residents still felt unsafe with them precisely because the militias lacked a monopoly on violence: no single group was clearly in charge. Months later, residents in these same neighborhoods reported feeling safer and more supportive of fundamentalist insurgents than anyone else.25 To a larger degree, this was because these insurgents—in this case IS—were better trained and better equipped than the local militias in Bustan al-Basha, and therefore more capable of providing security. Later, these neighborhood militias cooperated to force IS, a common enemy, to retreat from Aleppo. But this cooperation was short-lived, as an even more powerful adversary in the form of the Syrian Army defeated them 2½ years later. The second conclusion from the Aleppo study is that, while military strength alone can achieve temporary control in the absence of opposition, such control is brittle: that is, it lacks resiliency in the face of an external or internal challenge. Insurgent groups need the full spectrum of coercive, administrative, and persuasive powers to achieve resilient control. IS’s rise to power in Aleppo was rapid but short-lived because it governed brutally and

incompetently, establishing control that was quickly shattered when more militarily capable groups arrived. While the extent of IS’s incompetence as governors would emerge later, this Aleppo study uncovered early evidence of it. IS was the ‘strongest group’ in twelve out of fifty-six neighborhoods in Aleppo by December 2013—more than any other armed actor not affiliated with the Syrian government. And while residents claimed that they supported IS in our surveys, their observable behaviors indicated that they actually feared IS. For example, we took the average time for a vehicle or individual to pass an armed actor’s checkpoint as a remotely observable indicator of local support, on the theory that checkpoints run by groups who had friendly relations with local populations would spend less time searching or interrogating those passing through. The more restrictive an actor’s checkpoints, the less local support that actor could count on, irrespective of subjective statements of political support by (potentially intimidated) respondents. During our Aleppo study, IS was by far the group with the highest proportion of restrictive checkpoints (41 percent).26 By contrast, Liwa al-Tawhid, a popular local rebel group, had roughly the same number of checkpoints as IS but half as many restricted movements. Additionally, one-third of residents told us they avoided IS checkpoints entirely, 1.5 times higher than the average in Aleppo. As a result of the low levels of trust between civilians and militants, IS needed a large military deployment to control the population in its territory, whereas the more locally accepted Liwa al-Tawhid controlled almost as many neighborhoods but needed far fewer restrictive checkpoints (and a smaller number of armed actors) to control them.27 In Aleppo, we also found that IS imposed a logic of violence that residents at first found comforting due to its predictability. But since IS only had coercive force, not persuasive or administrative capacity, its control was ultimately limited and short-lived. Residents supported IS because they feared it, and once a coalition of forces opposed to IS pushed it out, the population had no reason to continue to support the group.28 The lesson for future proxy conflicts is that few non-state armed groups possess all three traits of administrative, coercive, and persuasive capability. Groups that can do all three will be able to not only seize territory but also hold it during a conflict. The United States worked on the local councils’ administrative capabilities but failed to help them grow at a scale large enough to govern large swaths of territory, as well as to connect them with insurgents who could support them by making the local population feel safe. As the conflict shifted, some groups adapted by combining military force with governance. The United States failed to adapt to these new realities, contributing to the marginalization of the Syrian opposition in favor of fundamentalist insurgents. Lesson Three: Problems with Managing Proxies The United States faced significant difficulties managing its proxies in Syria despite costly efforts to improve their capabilities. A key problem was that US assistance was often exploited because of the poor quality of the information on the proxies being supported. In fact, the United States frequently found its proxies pursuing ends or taking actions it opposed. To further complicate things, the United States struggled to coordinate other

international sponsors, whose own efforts often disrupted or challenged American strategy. Qutaiba Idlibi was an advisor to the Syrian opposition and witnessed firsthand the chaos of sponsors trying to identify which Syrian rebel groups to support in the first few years of his country’s revolution. In 2012, he was in Syria with Okab Sakr, a Lebanese Shia member of parliament in charge of distributing Saudi money to Syrian rebels as a representative of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri.29 Idlibi remembers the confusion of meetings between Sakr and rebel commanders. The commanders would constantly inflate the size of their groups because the larger their group, the more funds they could receive. ‘It was, of course, all bullshit,’ Idlibi explained, but he did not have a way to question their figures.30 When he raised the point, Okab Sakr justified the support despite a lack of accountability: ‘We need to fill in the power gap that is happening in Idlib or else it will be filled by Ahrar [al-Sham] and [Jabhat al-] Nusra.’31 The fog of Syria’s early war gave many commanders the opportunity to raise tremendous amounts of money based on the flimsiest evidence that they commanded a rebel group. One of Idlibi’s most vivid memories was of the first meeting between Sakr and Jamal Maarouf, who sought funds for his rebel group, the ‘Syrian Martyrs’ Brigade.’32 While Maarouf ‘had a bunch of fighters from his smuggling network,’ he presented a list of his fighters, which included 15,000 names and national ID numbers that he had lifted from civilian registries taken from government centers near his hometown of Jebel al-Zawiya in northwestern Syria.33 Sakr promised Maarouf millions of dollars—according to one interview he promised $14 million.34 Maarouf used those funds to launch the ‘Syrian Martyrs’ Brigade,’ which later became the ‘Syrian Revolutionaries Front,’ a coalition of self-proclaimed moderates which he asserted had over 20,000 fighters.35 Maarouf’s claims about the size of his force, false at first, became self-justifying once the United States allegedly established the CIA-backed ‘Timber Sycamore’ program, which tried to coordinate donations to Syrian insurgents from countries like Turkey, Qatar, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Kingdom, and France.36 The early money helped Maarouf build an actual force, which would not have been possible had he not first faked the names. But the foreign money was inadequate to protect Maarouf from attack by al-Qaeda-linked militants in November 2014, after which he fled northwestern Syria for Turkey.37 Idlibi’s experience showed that finding proxies to support in Syria was messy and complex. This is the information deficiency challenge that all sponsors face when assessing a complex battlespace. Idlibi saw firsthand in his meetings with Maarouf that sponsors selected proxies in Syria based on extremely limited and often faulty information. This dearth of reliable information was especially true for the United States, which had limited understanding of local actors and conditions on the ground, such that these problems impacted the entire reading of the conflict environment.38 Once a proxy like Maarouf was selected, principal-agent problems immediately emerged.39 Specifically, this involved ‘adverse selection’—in which the United States lacked accurate information about the motives or capabilities of Maarouf, as well as other proxies,

before working with them—and ‘agency slack,’ when the proxy engaged in actions that conflicted with the preferences and interests of the United States. In fact, there were myriad principal-agent problems between the United States (and other sponsors) and their proxies in the early years of the Syrian war. Perhaps the most significant impact of these issues was how funding from sponsors shifted the proxies’ motivations away from their initial goals of supporting efforts to remove Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.40 As Idlibi explained, the United States’ and other sponsors’ actions ‘started to change the morals of the fighter,’ since once they started earning money for joining an armed group, ‘they started thinking “Why do I need to go and be killed if I am receiving a salary?”’ So, while foreign funding was intended to pay fighters to accomplish their goals of regime change, it instead incentivized rebels to avoid military confrontations with state forces. To make proxies fight harder, sponsors would have to pay more and more.41 While few insurgent groups received as much initial funding as Maarouf, most needed to raise startup cash to purchase weapons, often turning to ad hoc Syrian donor networks (local and expatriate).42 In this context, foreign funders paid for specific operations, providing weapons and ammunition to ‘liberate’ towns or cities, attack Syrian Army bases, defend critical supply routes, or break the siege of beleaguered neighborhoods of cities.43 Haid Haid, a Syrian activist and analyst of insurgent groups, describes how funding for these operations was ‘popular and had fewer strings attached—foreign donors wanted people to fight.’ It was easier to raise money for operations, the results of which could clearly be seen on the battlespace, than for salaries that could easily be pocketed by commanders. As Haid explains, sponsors would ‘make a joint fund and give it to battalions who signed up … and is accepted by the leaders of the operation.’44 The opposition’s first offensive on Aleppo in July 2012 was one of the earliest high-profile examples of a foreign-backed operation. Aleppo residents were among the least vocal in their opposition to Assad during the first year of the revolution, so revolutionaries wanted to bring the fight to Syria’s largest city. Reuters’ Erika Solomon documented the spirit of the attack on Aleppo in an interview with one of its commanders: ‘We liberated the rural parts of this province,’ he explained. ‘We waited and waited for Aleppo to rise, and it didn’t. We couldn’t rely on them to do it for themselves, so we had to bring the revolution to them.’45 But a Syrian activist with knowledge of the offensive explained the darker side of the rebels’ motives behind attacking Aleppo: ‘They [rebels] wanted to attack Aleppo,’ he said, because ‘the price was 15 million dollars. It devastated the city … they [rebel commanders] didn’t feel responsibility [to make a careful military plan]. They didn’t care. They just took the money.’46 The third problem, the international coordination problem, was clearly on display in the summer of 2013 when the CIA allegedly established ‘Timber Sycamore.’ This program attempted to coordinate donations to Syrian insurgents from multiple countries, including Turkey, Qatar, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Britain, and France.47 The CIA-backed ‘Operations Room’ (also known by its Turkish acronym, MOM—Müs¸terek Operasyon Merkezi—or ‘Joint Operations Center’), was a clearinghouse for insurgent funding in southern Turkey.48

The Operations Room allegedly tried to fill the gaps in foreign funding to proxies in Syria’s war by helping commanders pay their fighters a salary (US$150 for a fighter, US$300 for a commander) so that they did not have to carry out offensives willy-nilly to sustain their war effort.49 Funding from the Operations Room would usually include a monthly payment of salaries to fighters in approved rebel groups. The Operations Room was dysfunctional. Ironically, it rarely supported operations. Instead, it would purchase weapons for an operation and give them directly to fighters, rather than pay them to buy the weapons themselves. Payments in cash, which were easy to steal, were only provided in hard-to-reach areas (e.g., Ghouta, a besieged neighborhood in the Damascus suburbs). In addition, attacks on minority areas were strictly prohibited, which was one of several guidelines intended to ensure that proxy forces did not commit atrocities and human rights violations. There were various efforts to prevent commanders from stealing from their troops, but that and other forms of agency slack were hard to police because there were so many sponsor countries in the Operations Room. Proposals that were rejected inside the room might just as easily be approved in the back room. As Idlibi explained, ‘people [representing countries in the region] would go outside the room and give them “x” amount of money and say, “see what you can do.’50 In the end, the US effort to develop proxies in the early years of Syria’s war exemplified the three key factors that can undermine a sponsor-proxy relationship. First, American policymakers had an information-deficiency problem which severely impacted efforts to create and maintain effective relations with proxies. It was difficult for US officials to fact check claims by insurgent commanders like Jamal Maarouf or to tell whether partnering with any of these forces would advance US strategic interests in Syria. Second, the United States faced significant principal-agent problems in managing fighters on the ground and was unable to prevent commanders from stealing funds from their troops or selling equipment to the very adversaries they were supposed to be fighting.51 Third, the United States faced international-coordination problems as multiple sponsors pursued divergent policies aligned with their differing interests, despite being on the same ‘side’ of the conflict. This allowed proxies to ‘forum-shop,’ moving from one sponsor to another to maximize access to resources while minimizing loss of their own autonomy, thereby creating overall problems of strategic coherence. Applying the Proxy War Framework to US Counter-IS Efforts 2015–19 Our assessment of the United States’ involvement in Syria’s war distills the complexities of working with proxies into three questions: Does the sponsor have a political strategy for what it wants to accomplish? Do the capabilities of the proxy match what it is expected to do? And has the sponsor mitigated the problems it faces managing its proxies? Sponsors can craft a political strategy for proxies quite simply if the goal is to disrupt an adversary. With minimal sponsor commitment and support, proxy forces can pressure a state actor or disrupt terrorist and insurgent groups. But if the goal of partnering with a local proxy force is to change the political and social dimensions of a war, or to restructure the balance of

power inside a state, then that proxy is not just going to have to fight wars but will also need to control and govern territory in order to achieve the sponsor’s aims. To have the capability to control and govern territory, a proxy needs to have coercive power, the type of authority that leads to a monopoly on the use of force that can impose laws and a logic of violence in a given area. But to control and govern territory over an extended period, a proxy also needs to have administrative capacity, the ability to provide key (albeit often minimal) governance services for a population, and persuasive power, the ability to convince communities that their interests are best served by its continued control. Assessing a sponsor’s level of strategic ambition requires determining whether the conflict represents a high or low priority. A high priority means that the sponsor wants to change the social and political dimensions of a conflict, and a low priority means that they seek only to disrupt an adversary.52 The United States treated Syria from 2011–14 as a high-priority conflict rhetorically, but never resourced proxies on the ground adequately. It is also essential that a sponsor align its strategy with the capabilities of the proxy force. Proxies with narrow-spectrum capabilities only have coercive tools to control populations, while proxies with broad-spectrum capabilities have coercive, administrative, and persuasive tools, allowing for more comprehensive forms of control. If a sponsor’s strategy is to disrupt an adversary, then the proxy does not need to control territory or administer populations over an extended period. In this case, a sponsor can work effectively with a proxy that possesses only coercive capabilities. If a sponsor’s strategy involves shifting the social and political dimensions of a conflict, then the sponsor needs a proxy with broad-spectrum capabilities to control territory and populations over an extended period of time. Finally, a sponsor needs to deploy strategies to mitigate the three key factors that can undermine a sponsor-proxy relationship. A sponsor that views a conflict as high priority needs a proxy with broad-spectrum capabilities and must be able to monitor the battlespace and the forces it is supporting. This often raises many complex principal-agent problems which can only be addressed with significant information and close coordination. As such, this situation implies the need to deploy forces to the front line as partners.53 A sponsor that views a conflict as low priority can work with a proxy with only coercive capabilities, which allows the sponsor to supply support remotely, either covertly or through established channels. If a conflict is internationalized, the sponsor must find common ground with international partners, or risk losing control over proxies who can otherwise ‘shop around’ for sponsors. This is true for conflicts viewed strategically as both high and low priority. Prior to the counter-IS campaign, US strategy in Syria from 2011–14 failed because it did not design the campaign in a way that provided appropriate policy responses and mitigation strategies. The United States never clearly defined its mission, vacillating between high- and low-priority goals while failing to align the capabilities of its chosen proxies with those goals. At one point, the strategy asserted that ‘Assad must go,’ but did not develop or resource a plan to assist any party capable of accomplishing the task.54 At a other points, the strategy was not to get rid of Assad, but to ‘cauterize’ Syria by preventing the conflict from spilling over into other countries.55 And another strategy voiced during this period was to support rebels with resources not to defeat Assad but to pressure him into negotiating a

political transition.56 Yet, the problem with US sponsorship was not only an incoherent policy, but also a lack of proxies capable of accomplishing the tasks of controlling territory and engaging in governance. However, as illustrated in the United States’ counter-IS proxy strategy, when a state takes actions in line with a policy framework based on a clear political strategy, coupled with an appropriate match with proxy capabilities and reasonable efforts to manage proxies, it can substantially improve its chances for success. The framework can also help identify likely points of failure for sponsor-proxy strategies. Although the rise of IS brought new horrors to Syria’s war, it gave the US government greater strategic clarity. By 2014, the United States largely ended its support to opposition groups seeking to oust Assad in favor of supporting groups that would fight IS.57 US efforts to develop proxies in Syria’s war before the rise of IS (2011–14) and after (2015–19) present what can be viewed as two separate conflicts within the same war and two distinct approaches to proxy warfare. Just as the early period was a notable failure, the anti-IS campaign was ultimately successful. Sponsor Strategy When the United States announced on 10 September 2014 that it had formed a multinational coalition to defeat IS, it was not clear how large that coalition would grow or to what degree ground forces would be involved. That coalition would eventually include 80 members, some of whom supplied air strikes, a deployment of 2,000 ground troops in Syria (mostly American Special Operations Forces), and intelligence and logistical support.58 The coalition succeeded beyond most expectations. Nevertheless, in 2017, a new US administration with unpredictable foreign-policy instincts undermined key elements of the proxy war strategy through its shifting conceptions about the purpose of a partnership with the SDF. In the end, the US-SDF partnership succeeded in defeating IS, but questions remain on how to transition that partnership now that IS no longer controls territory (see Table 2.1). Table 2.1: Checklist of Lessons to Assess the Counter-IS Coalition Proxy Warfare Lesson

Assessed Fit of US Effort

1) Sponsor Strategy

Mostly Effective

Counterterrorism strategy of ‘degrade and ultimately destroy’ IS worked until IS was territorially defeated, but then there was no off-ramp for the relationship.

2) Proxy Capabilities

However, a lack of strategic guidance or clear leadership under the Trump administration meant tensions emerged that pressured the counterterrorism partnership toward state-building (i.e., as part of a post-Assad Syria) and at the same time toward disruption (i.e., against Iran). In addition, the campaign, from its initiation, left questions regarding what the political objective or off-ramp should be once IS was territorially destroyed and whether such disruption was sufficient. Mostly Effective

Full spectrum capability (coercive, administrative, persuasive) in Syrian Kurdish territory. Limited to no capability in Syrian Arab territory.

Capabilities matched strategy in Syrian Kurdish areas. A sponsor helped create the SDF in order to capture and govern Syrian Arab territory held by IS.

Proxy Management Plan 3.1) Information Deficiencies Very Effective Forces deployed to battlespace US and other coalition forces were deployed to for intelligence collection. northeast Syria, allowing them to establish persistent presence on the ground, monitor conditions in real time and cue intelligence collection resources to close information gaps. 3.2) Principal-Agent Problems

Mostly Effective

Forces deployed to battlespace US deployed forces to battlespace and occasionally for intelligence collection. embedded with SDF fighters on missions. However, the US anti-IS campaign mostly relied on Kurdish leadership, which led to some tensions in predominantly Arab territory recaptured from IS. 3.3) International Coordination

Very Effective

Multi-national coalition of 81 international partners.

The multi-national ‘Counter-ISIL Coalition’ met multiple times per year to coordinate contributions by member organizations.

Source: https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/reports/tweet-damocles/part-twocase-studies-in-proxy-warfare President Barack Obama’s 10 September announcement of the counter-IS coalition stated the United States’ strategic objective: to ‘degrade, and ultimately destroy [IS] through a comprehensive and sustained counterterrorism strategy.’59 At the time, IS controlled territory that spanned the Iraqi and Syrian borders and included 12 million people in a territory the size of Great Britain.60 To fight IS on the Iraq side of the border, the United States worked with Iraqi government forces and predominantly Shia (and Iranian-backed) Popular Mobilization Forces. To assist in securing towns liberated from IS, the United States established ‘National Guard Units’ composed of Sunni Arab locals.61 In Syria, implementing a ‘clear-hold-build’ counterinsurgency strategy of this kind was more complicated because US forces lacked a partner. Eventually, through connections from

Iraqi Kurds, the United States began to work 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 US forces provided support with air strikes. These efforts led to ‘the first major battlefield defeat inflicted on Islamic State’ and ‘provided the template’ for US cooperation with the Kurdish forces that would eventually form the nucleus of the SDF.62 To ‘degrade, and ultimately destroy’ IS was the strategy that drove coalition efforts for over four years. The mission was not only to attack IS but also to gain control of territory and administer the population living in areas liberated from IS to prevent a resurgence or return of the group. This clear political strategy governed US actions in Syria until President Trump announced via Twitter that IS had been defeated in December 2018.63 At the time, IS still controlled a small redoubt in eastern Syria, but after a brutal six-week offensive in February and March 2019, it was fully recaptured.64 President Trump’s announcement of IS’s defeat raised the long-postponed question: what would US strategy be toward its SDF proxy in Syria? As it turned out, absent clear leadership, US 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 2018.65 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 US-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.66 But by January 2019 McGurk had resigned, and his responsibilities were given to Jeffrey. According to sources in the SDF and at the State Department, Jeffrey supported Bolton’s position, which was to use the SDF to counter Iranian influence in the region.67 With this in mind, Jeffrey convinced the SDF not to negotiate a political settlement with the Syrian regime.68 But, as one Special Forces officer told one of the authors at the time, Donald 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.’69 Jeffrey managed the US-SDF relationship for all of 2019.70 The SDF went to Damascus in May 2019 and failed to secure an agreement with the Syrian government, likely because both parties felt they were in a strong position and did not feel the need to compromise. Despite the SDF’s victories against IS, several US-Turkey agreements forced the group to dismantle key defenses and give up heavy weapons.71 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.72 In a letter circulated to coalition commanders on 7 October, Mazloum’s chief of staff wrote, ‘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.’73 Just two days later, on 9 October 2019, TSK armored columns—led by Turkish-backed proxies—crossed the frontier and began pushing SDF forces back.74 The main blunder was not in the way the United States government used the SDF to advance its goals in Syria, but in its lack of a consistent political strategy for the US-SDF relationship after IS lost all territory under its control. While the shifting strategies among advisors in the Obama and Trump administrations are more easily understood in Washington, they are inscrutable to US allies in the region. Washington’s failure to develop an off-ramp to its relationship with the SDF risks its partnership as well as many Kurdish lives on the Syrian-Turkish border as of this writing in November 2021. Proxy Capabilities The counter-IS coalition relied heavily on the efforts of 50–70,000 in-country proxy force partners under the SDF.75 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 necessities. This made the United States’ political goals of retaking and controlling IS territory possible. The SDF was the most capable US 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—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, group members were closely affiliated with the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê (PKK), a designated terrorist group based in Turkey.76 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.77 This problem highlighted the potential for an eventual misalignment of capabilities and objectives in that, while pursuing a low-priority goal of disrupting IS, the United States was increasing the capabilities of a force in ways that some regional actors feared would shift the conflict fundamentally (in effect, a high-priority result). The United States addressed the YPG/YPJ’s links to the PKK by changing it into a new force with a new name. While this shift helped US forces skirt the legal ramifications of supporting a group whose leaders were closely aligned with the PKK, the implications of the sponsor-proxy relationship were never 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 could 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 address this issue, US 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, US forces would use the SDF to ‘gradually glue more Arab groups onto a Kurdish core force.’78 And, unlike prior sponsor-proxy relations in Syria, the United States would go beyond remote support and actively seek to shape SDF capabilities on the ground and ensure that the group was able 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.’79 Over time, the balance of Kurdish and Arab forces started to equalize: many Arabs were frustrated that decision-making ultimately rested with Syrian Kurds,80 but they still signed up in order to recapture their homelands while being protected by US air power and special operations forces.81 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.82 By 2016, 15–30 percent of the SDF were Syrian Arabs,83 a number that rose to roughly 50 percent in 2017,84 and then to over 50 percent according to a 2019 study.85 These increases in the proportion of Arab fighters were critical in ensuring that, when the 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 US support and its preexisting persuasive and coercive capabilities, the SDF transformed into a proxy that had the full spectrum of capabilities needed to help defeat IS in Syria and control the territory it captured afterward. Managing the Relationship The US-SDF partnership worked well because it matched political strategies with proxy capabilities. It also worked because US in-country deployments and multilateral diplomacy helped resolve information deficits, reduce principal-agent problems, and minimize international coordination issues. US forces in northeastern Syria were a ‘force multiplier’ that enhanced the capability of SDF ground troops through air support, mentoring, and technical training. But US 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: fifty troops who would ‘train, advise, and assist’ SDF forces.86 These troops were designed to provide technical and intelligence support for the SDF, but were also present to ensure that US 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.87 By 2017, US 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.88 Finally, international coordination under the counter-IS coalition was successful insofar as it focused on signing up as many international partners as possible (eighty-one as of this writing) and only asking of them what they could contribute.89 Bringing these partners into the coalition resolved much of the international coordination challenge, reducing the chance that other countries might carry out operations of their own.90 The main criticism of the US-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 clashed with Turkey, who vehemently opposed its partnership with the SDF. The tensions of that relationship finally spilled over in October 2019 when Turkish forces and their Syrian proxies invaded territory captured by the USbacked SDF.91 Nevertheless, the counter-IS coalition matched political strategy with partner capability, and mitigated all three of the challenges associated with sponsor-proxy relations to such an extent that IS was defeated resoundingly over a large and complex battleground in a relatively short amount of time.92 It was only once coalition forces finished recapturing territory from IS that their lack of political leadership for a clear end-state strategy reemerged to undermine the working relationship between the United States and the SDF. American Promises, American Proxies George Kennan traveled from Washington, DC to Moscow in the summer of 1944 to take up the post of Minister-Counselor (now usually called the Deputy Chief of Mission) at the US Embassy. From that position, less than two years later, he would write the so-called ‘Long Telegram,’ the famous cable in which he outlined the nature of the United States’ struggle against the Soviet Union for the next half-century. To travel from Washington to Moscow during World War II, Kennan had to fly by military plane through the Middle East and North Africa, with stops in Libya, Egypt, Iraq, and Iran. Kennan expressed glibly prejudiced views while in the Arab world. Egypt was a ‘triangle of irrigated desert around the delta of a polluted stream.’ Iraq was ‘a country in which man’s selfishness and stupidity have ruined almost all natural productivity.’ Reflecting on this time in his memoirs, Kennan expressed remorse, describing his comments as ‘shallow and misleading’ and admitting the Middle East and North Africa were ‘blind spots’ in his understanding of the world.93 While Kennan’s observations of Middle Eastern society may indeed have been superficial at best, his analysis of the future of the United States in the region was more incisive. The

United States would not be able to carry out a consistent policy in the Middle East, he mused, because its democratic system privileged well-organized, ‘vocal minorities’ who might hold very specific views. America’s democratic system, he argued, ‘is technically incapable of conceiving and promulgating a long-term consistent policy toward areas remote from its own territory.’94 Kennan’s assessment was just as valid in 2019 as it was in 1944. US proxy warfare in the early years of Syria’s civil war was too inconsistent to be successful. To a certain extent, this was even true for the United States’ partnership with the SDF. For a time, the United States aligned its political strategy with the capabilities of its proxy and built a strong working relationship with the SDF and global partners. But, in the absence of IS controlling territory in Syria and Iraq, the counter-IS coalition must confront the same complex geopolitics that brought Secretary Esper to the Sunday talk shows in 2019: Syria’s civil war and the ongoing threat of Turkish incursions mean pressure is put on the SDF and its US advisors on two fronts. The flaws Kennan identified will undermine US power projection, even as it is likely to rely more heavily on proxy forces in the Middle East in coming years as it shifts attention to strategic competition with China. There is little public or political support for the large-scale combat deployment of American troops, let alone for a return to wars of occupation. Yet, there is also no end in sight to the Middle East’s wars. Conflicts continue in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Libya, and the Palestinian territories, and the potential for new wars exists in other regional states, such as Algeria and Lebanon. Conflicts create opportunities for America’s adversaries to shift the balance of power in the Middle East in ways that could, over time, overwhelm American allies and partners. In some cases, regional conflicts also catalyze the emergence of new safe havens for insurgents to plan attacks against Americans. To counter these threats at a reasonable cost to American lives and treasure, the United States must work with allies and partners in the region. Sometimes, in the absence of formalized relationships with a state, those allies can be proxies: in effect, non-state allies. As Brian Katz notes in his study on proxy warfare, there is a gap between the military objective for engaging proxies and the political strategy needed to use them in the first place. ‘Recent CT campaigns conducted via non-state proxies,’ he writes, ‘had a primarily military objective—the defeat of the Islamic State—with no clear or achievable political end-state for which military operations were intended to serve.’95 Katz noted that using violence without a political strategy may be a ‘sub-optimal but necessary option when terrorist threats are exigent and diplomatic solutions are dubious.’ But, he warns, ‘Sustaining those battlefield gains may be tenuous, however, if there is no political outcome to solidify them over the long-term.’96 Our research supports this assessment. The challenges faced by the US-SDF partnership after the demise of IS’s territorial socalled ‘Caliphate’ shows that problems can emerge even when the proxy force is capable and the relationship is structured in such a way as to mitigate the downside risk of information deficiencies, agency problems, and coordination gaps. The partnership does provide a useful model for how the United States government could approach proxy warfare in the future,

insofar as the United States is able to address the shifting strategic reality in Syria’s civil war. Can the United States develop a long-term strategy for dealing with security challenges in the Middle East and carry it out with the strategic clarity necessary to succeed? The complexity of proxy warfare in general, and in the Syrian war in particular, should give policymakers pause when considering future engagements in the region.

PART II BATTLEGROUNDS

3

SOCIAL NETWORKS, CLASS, AND THE SYRIAN PROXY WAR

Anand Gopal and Jeremy Hodge

The Syrian conflict began as a mass uprising, with protesters gathering in one small town after the next to demand the end of the Assad family’s 40-year dictatorship. The demonstrators linked arms, chanting ‘Peaceful! Peaceful!,’ waving placards with slogans championing liberal values and human rights. Within months, however, the movement for democratic reform mutated into an armed struggle to oust President Assad. The hand of regional powers could be seen and felt everywhere. The conflict became many things at once: an inspiring revolution, a devastating civil war, a magnet for Islamist radicals, and ultimately one of the most complicated and wide-ranging proxy wars in modern history. The United States, Jordan, Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia all supported, to varying degrees, the rebel movement, while Russian, Iranian, Hezbollah, Iraqi, and Afghan militias stood behind the Assad regime. With its hundreds of factions and dozens of foreign actors, the Syrian battlefield can seem numbingly complex, but underneath it all lies a logic. To grasp this logic, we must turn the analysis of the war on its head. Most studies of proxy war prioritize the interests of outside sponsors and the degree of control they hold over their proxies. While this is important, it misses the other side of the story: how such outside interests interact with the intimate forms of life on the ground, such as preexisting political currents, economic interests, cultural mores, religious practices, and, above all, the mosaic of friendships and rivalries that help form the fabric of everyday life. In a proxy-client relationship, the aim of the local actor is to leverage outside support to pursue local objectives, and the aim of a patron is to enroll local actors in the pursuit of external interests. The patron’s interest in directing client behavior is distinct from its capacity to do so. Patron capacity depends on levels of financial support, but other factors can play a role as well, including the strength of ties between patron and client; the internal cohesion of the client actors; and the client’s ability to secure alternative or independent means of support.

All three factors depend on the features of social life before the conflict. Individuals form several stable relationship patterns based on marriage, kinship, joint economic activity, shared geographic origins, shared political membership, shared religious activity, and so on. Social networks such as these represent an important way through which individuals engage in collective action such as occupying squares, join armed groups, and track down funding through their friends, relatives, business partners, political allies, and religious community. An often-overlooked factor in network formation is class, because an individual’s economic position not only influences their worldview, it also defines their horizons for obtaining resources. Social networks and class played a key role in determining which segments of the Syrian rebellion were more susceptible to forming transnational linkages, and when those linkages would allow foreign patrons to effectively control their proxies. The rebel movement against the Assad regime broadly fell into two camps: a US-SaudiJordanian axis and a Turkish-Qatari axis. Generally, the US-Saudi alliance backed three types of actors in the uprising: liberals, loyalist Salafis, and tribal figures. In contrast, Qatar and Turkey chose to back Islamist forces that were built upon, or descended from, networks related to the Muslim Brotherhood.1 In addition to the Brotherhood themselves, these Islamists included so-called activist Salafis, who represented a hybrid of Brotherhood-style political beliefs with a Wahhabi-influenced theology. Saudi-backed Free Syrian Army (FSA) groups had few preexisting networks outside of kinship, meaning that as factions expanded beyond kinsmen it proved difficult to control. As aid fluctuated, FSA groups fragmented and relied on banditry to fund themselves.2 Qatarbacked Islamist groups, on the other hand, emerged from cohesive preexisting networks and were well resourced because of their links to the Brotherhood, who were themselves members of the ‘provincial bourgeoisie’ and thus less likely to resort to banditry. Moreover, unlike their liberal counterparts, the groups backed by Qatar maintained longstanding ties to foreign states. This holds an important and counterintuitive lesson about patron capacity: while US-Saudi proxies were generally poorer (prior to infusions of funding) than Qatar’s proxies, that did not mean that Riyadh or Washington could buy greater allegiance or ability to act effectively from their proxies. Rather, the relative wealth and cohesion of Qatar’s proxies helped Qatar exercise influence. In summary, because the nature of prewar social networks differed, the capacities of patron states differed. This chapter is divided into five subsequent sections that explore this phenomenon in depth. The next section examines the nature of the key networks in Syria’s war, detailing the role that class played in their formation. This is followed by a review of patron interests, examining the Gulf states’ motivations for intervention. The next section narrates a history of the Syrian war through the proxy lens, focusing on how patron capacities intersected with local social structure. This is followed by our application of these concepts to a micro-historical case study of the northern city of Manbij. The chapter concludes by placing the issue of social networks and class within the broader context of Syrian history. A Deeper Look at Patron Capacity: Networks of Solidarity in the Syrian Rebellion

There are many factors that may influence a patron’s ability to shape its clients’ behavior, including levels of bureaucratic efficiency, funding, and expertise, as well as political realities within the sponsoring state. What is often overlooked, however, is that key features of the client also influence patron capacity. Perhaps the most important is the nature of client social networks. Social networks come in many forms; we call those which facilitated collective action in the Syrian conflict ‘solidarity networks.’ We can characterize the nature of a solidarity network by describing its ‘internal’ and ‘external’ features. Internally, the more cohesive a solidarity network is, the more easily its leadership can exert command and control over rank-and-file members, and the less likely it is that one will see banditry and other criminal behaviors. Likewise, the more highly capitalized the network is—that is, the wealthier its members—the more easily it can provide start-up revenue and consequently withstand the vicissitudes of patron funding. Externally, the more preexisting ties between the client and the patron, the more effectively the patron will be able to control client leadership. Such ties allow patrons to better coordinate with their clients, grant them greater oversight over client activities, and generally generally ensure that both patron and client’s interests are aligned. In Syria, there were dozens of prewar networks, but only some figured prominently in the conflict. Of these networks, the armed movement was dominated by six: liberals, tribal sheikhs, the Muslim Brotherhood, activist Salafis, loyalist Salafis, and jihadi Salafis. Liberal and tribal networks were generally not cohesive, and this section takes a closer look at the other four networks. The Muslim Brotherhood The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood is one of the most important organizations in modern Syrian history. Historically, the Brotherhood was aligned with the Syrian merchant class and to multiple foreign actors, including (for a time) Saudi Arabia and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.3 The formal organization was destroyed in the 1980s but survived under the guise of informal kinship and merchant networks. By 2011, this network represented the most organized, wellfinanced, and transnational political formation in the country. The group—in particular its informal apparatus, which includes multiple offshoots—enjoyed close links with Turkey, Qatar, and revolutionary Libya. As a result, its characteristics made it well positioned, relative to other Syrian networks, for high patron capacity. When the Baʿath Party seized power in the 1960s and expropriated major landowners, the bourgeoisie and landed aristocracy increasingly threw its support behind the Muslim Brotherhood, whose worldview aligned with that of the urban merchant class. This occurred primarily in regions that had the highest ratios of inequality in landholding—areas such as Hama and Idlib—and therefore where the old elites had the most to lose from redistributive Baʿathist policies.4 These class dynamics would have important consequences for the Syrian revolution. In Syria, a Brotherhood splinter launched an insurgency against the Baʿathist state in the late 1970s.5 However, because the Brotherhood’s social base was limited to a narrow section of the population—the urban merchant class and the landowning elite—the regime was able

to isolate and crush the uprising.6 Afterward, many Brotherhood cadres fled the country, establishing businesses in the Gulf and Europe.7 Over the years, this developed into a network of merchants and traders who commanded significant capital and hailed from former Brotherhood hotbeds like Jebel al-Zawiya, Mareʿ, and ʿAnadan. Most of these merchants were no longer formal members of the organization, but they constituted a network of trust based on their shared former affiliation. In the revolution, this Brotherhood network became one of the earliest funding conduits to penetrate the country. The most prominent rebel faction representing this trend was Liwa al-Tawhid, which was under the command of two merchants from Mareʿ and ʿAnadan.8 Activist Salafism The movement that some scholars call activist Salafism consists of a few disparate lineages, all linked by their merger of Brotherhood-style concern with worldly politics and Wahhabi theology, as well as their independence from the Saudi regime.9 Qatar is the world’s premier backer of activist Salafism, while significant currents that function without state support are found in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. In Syria before the war, activist Salafis constituted a small, tight-knit network that could be found in most major cities and in many small towns, and they tended to come from the same upper-middle-class background as the Muslim Brotherhood; indeed, the activists are in some sense one of the descendants of the Brotherhood.10 Like the Muslim Brotherhood, the activist Salafist network’s cohesiveness and access to capital contributed to the development of high patron capacity to influence it. Moreover, the activists harbored many pre-2011 ties to Qatar, making for a successful proxy relationship when the war started. The activist Salafist trend ultimately traces its origins to Wahhabism, a doctrine which, by the mid-twentieth century, remained clustered in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. The Muslim Brotherhood, on the other hand, had chapters in many countries, and, despite surface similarities, their brand of Islamic modernism differed sharply from the Wahhabi belief system.11 The key distinction is that the Wahhabi movement is oriented primarily toward creed, in particular the question of which forms of personal conduct qualify as legitimate religious beliefs, whereas the Brotherhood emphasized the political nature of religious reform. Because the state and the market had radically transformed social life, it was impossible for the Brotherhood activists to conceive of religion independent of such forces. Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna argued that Islam was not merely a question of theological orientation, but rather a ‘complete system’ that implied a total reordering of society through such reforms as constitutionalism and wealth redistribution.12 Such a notion would be unthinkable in classical Wahhabi doctrine. In fact, the Brotherhood’s very existence as a political party was an abomination to Wahhabi sensibilities, which viewed any form of hizbiyya (factionalism) as a threat to monotheism. In general, Banna paid little attention to creed, instead tailoring Islam to the anti-colonial struggle. It was in 1960s Saudi Arabia that these two disparate traditions merged, a novel synthesis out of which the modern Salafi movement appeared. Activists, primarily university professors and students, grafted a Wahhabi conception of creed onto the Brotherhood’s

political vision. This fusion proved popular among Brotherhood expatriates who, with the regime’s encouragement, had filled the ranks of the university system. This fusion of Brotherhood and Wahhabi doctrines came to be known as the Sahwa (awakening). Over the decades, tens of thousands of young Saudis were influenced by Sahwi ideas, either by attending university or clubs organized by Sahwa luminaries. At first, these activities steered clear of criticizing the regime. But by the late 1980s, in the shadow of declining oil revenues, recent graduates found themselves facing dim career prospects and a religious establishment that remained impenetrable to outsiders.13 In 1991, the Sahwa movement erupted in protest following the regime’s decision to allow American soldiers on Saudi soil. The movement went on to call for wide-ranging reforms, including tentative steps toward democratization; however, by the mid-1990s the regime had managed to crush the uprising and arrest most of its leaders. Still, the Sahwa made a lasting contribution by helping to give rise to the modern Salafi movement. By politicizing Wahhabi doctrines, the Sahwa produced a version of Wahhabiinspired ideology that could engage with modern questions like political reform and social justice.14 One of the key Sahwa networks representing this synthesis sprung from the followers of a Syrian named Muhammad Surur bin Nayef Zayn al-ʿAbadeen. His acolytes, known as Sururis, perhaps most clearly exemplify the ‘brotherization’ of Wahhabi belief; key Sahwi leaders Salman al-ʿAwda and Safar al-Hawwali were Sururis, and were imprisoned for four years for their roles in the protest movement.15 As Sahwi ideas expanded beyond Saudi borders, the Sururis became an important component of a network that we call ‘activist Salafism.’ Activist Salafis typically seek to reform existing Muslim governments, and potentially support the overthrow of non-Muslim ones. Some prominent activist Salafis argue that there is no contradiction between democracy and Islam, while all agree with Qutb’s injunction that a state is only legitimate if it administers religious law.16 On matters of creed, most are similar to Wahhabis and share with them an intense sectarianism against Shias. In Syria, activist Salafism first took root in the 1990s. One of the movement’s founders was a schoolteacher named Abu Anas, from Saraqib. He recalls:17 We had a secret group in Aleppo, we used to meet each other in creative ways to avoid the security grip. We were five in our secret group; this was the core of the Salafi movement, and it started to spread and to expand in other areas. In Raqqa for example, because I was a teacher there, and in Idlib. There was no name for this group; the others were also university students. Our activities were mostly to distribute books, and to call people to Islam, to reawaken them. Usually we would organize against communism, or to support the Muslim cause. For example, during the Bosnia conflict, we started to raise awareness because the people didn’t know anything about what was happening. We were interested in raising awareness about Shariʿa. In 1994, we began to warn people about the Shia. By the mid-1990s, there were nearly two dozen people in Abu Anas’ group.18

Our main interest was in giving a response to communism [which was then popular on university campuses] and liberalism, and then later on to respond to the Iranians and the Sufi orders. We read al-Albani and the Sahwi Sheikhs of Saudi Arabia, such as Salman al ʿAwda, Safar al-Hawwali, Naser al-ʿUmar. The sheikhs of Sahwa were in the middle between the Brotherhood and Wahhabism. So they used to care about Muslims around the world, the jihad in Afghanistan, and Chechnya and Bosnia. In 2011, Abu Anas became a key founder of Ahrar al-Sham, one of the most important rebel organizations and arguably the largest recipient of funds accrued through the worldwide activist Salafist network. Loyalist Salafism Within Saudi Arabia, anti-Sahwa views emanated not only from the regime but from another major religious trend that took root there in the 1960s. Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani, an Albanian scholar who grew up in Damascus, arrived in the kingdom in the sixties and began to arraign both the Brotherhood-influenced Sahwa generation and the official Wahhabi tradition. Against the former, he made familiar Wahhabi-style critiques of the politicization of religious practice, maintaining that Muslims must purify their creed before engaging in political activity. On the other hand, he criticized the Wahhabi ʿulema’s adherence to the Hanbali school of jurisprudence, arguing that the Qur’an and the hadith are the only legitimate sources of religious knowledge. He espoused a renewed science of the hadith, through a process of historical investigation and moral reasoning that was, in theory, open to anyone who committed themselves to the task. This removed the mastery of religious knowledge from the grip of the Wahhabi ʿulema, a closed religious aristocracy limited to a few families from the Najd region of Saudi Arabia. However, like the Wahhabi ʿulema, Albani harbored a hostility toward political activity, so his thinking represented a quietist form of Salafism. Nonetheless, in practice, his followers often adopted de facto political positions: during the 1990s, for example, one current, led by Rabi al-Madkhali, were staunch defenders of the Saudi state against the Sahwa protest movement.19 Other currents even engaged in de jure political activity, such as Kuwaiti Salafis, who participated in parliament. What unites these strands, ultimately, is not quietism but the fact that they do not oppose the Saudi regime. For this reason, we denote this trend as ‘loyalist Salafism.’ With respect to the Syrian conflict, key loyalist Salafis include, in addition to al-Madkhali, Hayef al-Mutairi (Kuwaiti), and ʿAdnan ʿArour (Syrian, but based in Saudi Arabia), both of whom were among the most prominent fundraisers for the Syrian opposition. In Syria, loyalist Salafi networks emerged in the 1990s, like their activist counterpart. An early hotbed of loyalist activity was in the Damascus suburb of Douma, where local religious scholars returned after traveling to Saudi Arabia, where they had been exposed to Salafi ideas.20 One of the leading Salafis in Douma was Sheikh Abdullah Alloush, imam of the Tawhid Mosque, who moved to Saudi Arabia in the 1990s. After 2011, his son Zahran Alloush became the leader of the rebel faction Liwa al-Islam, which ruled the Damascus suburbs like a fiefdom, benefiting primarily from funds drawn from loyalist Salafi networks

backed by Saudi Arabia.21 Loyalist Salafist networks were not as pervasive in Syria as the Brotherhood networks, though they began to grow after the 1990s. One factor in this growth was globalization and migration to the Gulf, particularly in areas along the Euphrates river basin where local clans maintained historic kinship ties to tribes living within Saudi borders. Unlike Brotherhood or activist networks, however, loyalists came from a diverse class background and did not form a cohesive national network. As a result, during the war the patrons backing loyalist networks did not enjoy high capacity to direct client behavior in areas of northern Syria where the revolution was strongest, such as Idlib and the northern Aleppo provinces. Instead, loyalist Salafism was strongest in eastern Syria, particularly along the Euphrates River. Jihadi Salafism Jihadi Salafism reflects a merger of various strands of political Islam. Its roots lie in a faction of the Qutbist wing of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood that turned violent and sought to overthrow the Egyptian state (of which Ayman Zawahiri is a prominent example). This trend merged with two others: one stemming from the Sahwa generation in Saudi Arabia (Osama bin Laden passed through a Sahwa network in the Hejaz) and another originating in a wing of Albani’s followers who radicalized and turned against the Saudi state (for whom the Jordanian Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi played an important role as a theorist reconciling Qutbist ideas with Albani’s theology).22 Jihadi Salafi doctrine further developed through exigencies of the battlefield, which was a crucible of their worldview. In Syria, the first Salafi jihadi network materialized around the firebrand preacher Abu alQaʿqaʿ, whom Syrian intelligence supported as a means to apply pressure on the US occupation of Iraq. Many Syrians were moved by US atrocities to cross the border and join the resistance in Iraq; a minority went through al-Qaʿqaʿ’s network and fell into al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) circles.23 In this way, AQI began to develop networks in Deir ez-Zour and the Damascus countryside, aided by porous borders and the regime’s blind eye. The regime also likely harbored links to Fateh al-Islam, a jihadi Salafi group based in the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon, as a means to help manage its occupation there.24 Eventually, Damascus faced blowback: splinter elements from this group linked up with returnees from Iraq to form Jund al-Sham, which waged a low-level insurgency against the Syrian state during the mid2000s.25 Key leaders of Jabhat al-Nusra and ISIS emerged from these networks.26 In Syria, jihadi Salafi networks were much smaller than the others, but nonetheless quite cohesive due to the time individuals spent together in prison or in underground cells. Compared to the others, these networks harbored few links to foreign actors.27 A Deeper Look at Patron Interests: The Logic of Gulf State Interventions Patron capacity is only one element of the patron-client relationship: the other is the patron’s own objectives. This section describes the logic of the Gulf states’ interventions, which by 2012 became strikingly divergent, leading to the development of two main axes of support: a US-Saudi-Jordanian axis and a Turkish-Qatari axis. This division led to battlefield

incoherence that undermined the opposition’s ability to combat the regime. The logic of intervention was rooted in the intervening power’s geopolitical interests, its domestic concerns, and its prewar ties with Syrian networks. Saudi Arabia In early 2011, Saudi Arabia adopted a counterrevolutionary stance toward the Arab Spring to discourage political change within its own borders. The threat to Riyadh was twofold. In the late 1990s, a group of ex-Sahwi activists in Saudi Arabia merged with a strand of Albani followers and those from bin Laden’s network to form a local al-Qaeda franchise.28 Between 2002 and 2006, this outfit waged an insurgency in the kingdom that left more than 200 dead and 500 wounded, striking vital targets including US interests and petroleum infrastructure. This occurred as al-Qaeda expanded in Iraq, raising the prospect of a multipronged threat to Saudi interests. The second threat came from the possibility of pro-democracy movements spreading to Saudi Arabia and challenging the monarchy’s grip on power. After stamping out the Sahwa in the 1990s, the regime sought to prevent its resurgence by rehabilitating key Sahwi leaders on the condition that they limit their critiques to social issues and remain silent on political questions. The palace also pursued rapprochement with foreign branches of the Muslim Brotherhood, allowing them to return to the kingdom so long as their activities were directed abroad. These policies bore fruit early on, as Sahwa and Muslim Brotherhood figures in the country almost unanimously boycotted calls to hold a ‘Day of Anger’ protest on 11 March 2011 in solidarity with the revolutions elsewhere.29 With the outbreak of revolution in Syria, Riyadh faced a delicate predicament. On the one hand, the regime welcomed any development that weakened an ally of Iran, its regional rival. On the other, the palace recognized that the rise of al-Qaeda was in part blowback from Riyadh’s earlier policy of nurturing the Muslim Brotherhood at home and supporting the jihad in Afghanistan, and viewed the uprising’s pro-democracy sentiments with concern. For these reasons, Saudi Arabia avoided intervening in Syria in 2011 but waded into the foray in 2012, supporting secular groups and some Brotherhood factions to limit the strength of activist Salafists. During 2012, though, the Brotherhood grew closer to Qatar, while the election of the Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi as president of Egypt raised the specter of a reinvigorated Sahwa movement, pushing Riyadh to alter course. By late 2012, Saudi Arabia had completely excluded Brotherhood and activist Salafi networks from its patronage, bringing it into direct competition with Qatar. Qatar Unlike Saudi Arabia, Qatar’s tiny population has never launched a grassroots opposition movement, and the country does not share borders with fragile states, which reduces the threat of jihadist spillover. Rather, Qatar’s foreign policy is driven by rivalries within Doha’s ruling class that have been exacerbated by Saudi rulers. The Saudi royal family is tied by kinship to Qatar’s second most powerful tribe, the al-Attiya clan, links Riyadh has used to influence Khalifa bin Hamad al-Thani, Qatar’s emir from 1972 to 1995, who had married into the al-Attiya family. But Khalifa’s son, Hamad bin Khalifa, opposed Saudi influence and

refused to marry into the al-Attiya. In 1995, he led a coup against his father, signaling Doha’s attempt to steer a course independent of Saudi domination. Riyadh in turn retaliated by sponsoring several failed coups.30 Hamid bin Khalifa also grew closer to the United States, opening the al-Udeid air base in March 2002. In October 2002, reports claimed that domestic disapproval to Doha’s alliance with the United States inspired a botched coup attempt by factions of the Qatari royal family. In 2009, conservatives led by the Chief of Staff of Qatar’s Armed Forces General Hamid bin Ali al-Attiya purportedly launched another failed coup attempt. Some indicators suggest these oppositional factions were linked to Salafist networks.31 Rather than risk confrontation, Hamid bin Khalifa attempted to placate these groups by awarding top government posts to figures with activist sympathies, and by supporting the Brotherhood and activist Salafis abroad.32 This strategy had the additional benefit of diverting Saudi Arabia’s focus overseas rather than exerting pressure on Doha at home. Furthermore, while most Qataris practice Wahhabism, and the ruling al-Thani clan hails from the same Najd region as the Saudi elite, Doha’s embrace of the Brotherhood was in part an attempt to build an alternative form of religious legitimacy that could not be manipulated by Riyadh.33 For these reasons, during the Syrian revolution, Qatar was the principal supporter of Brotherhood and activist networks, and occasionally of Salafist jihadis like Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s official branch in Syria. In early 2012, Qatar and Saudi Arabia attempted to cooperate and channel funds to some of the same groups; however, by summer of that year Doha’s largesse and ties to Islamists enabled it to wrest control of Brotherhood and activist networks. By 2013, the countries were in open competition. While Riyadh sought primarily to manage the uprising, hoping to pressure Assad into a negotiated settlement, Doha carelessly pumped funds to its favored networks. Kuwait Kuwait’s tradition of parliamentary democracy and freedom of assembly, dating to 1962, has created a thriving civil society in a country with robust protections against state surveillance. As a result, post-2011 Kuwait’s ruling al-Sabah monarchy allowed religious charities to channel aid to Syria without interference from law enforcement.34 Loyalist Salafist groups in Kuwait, such as the Revival of Islamic Heritage Society (RIHS), enjoyed the support of the crown and the country’s urban Sunni elite. More recently urbanized Sunni tribesmen from marginalized rural desert regions—some, known as bidun (those without) have yet to be granted citizenship—were generally closer to the Muslim Brotherhood and activist Salafist movements.35 Leading Kuwaiti activist Salafists such as Hakim al-Mutairi, an important Sururi thinker, as well as Shafi al-ʿAjmi and Hajaj al-ʿAjmi, were active domestically in groups such as the Salafist Movement and the al-Umma party, and they supported armed groups like Ahrar alSham during the Syrian revolution. RIHS and other loyalist groups, meanwhile, largely backed Saudi-sponsored groups.36

The Syrian Proxy War: 2011–16 The four solidarity networks—Brotherhood, activist, loyalist, and jihadi—were the raw ‘social’ material out of which revolutionaries on the ground and powers in the region and beyond fashioned networks of patronage. This process passed through four stages, with the nature of these networks playing a key role in how the stages shifted from one to the next. From the start of the protests until late 2011, the uprising witnessed diaspora mobilization, in which funds trickled in through family networks, usually comprised of wealthy individuals acting in an individual capacity. Because of their prior political orientation, class position, and embeddedness in transnational networks, ex-Syrian Muslim Brotherhood members dominated this phase of funding. From late 2011 until late 2012, the uprising went through a period of open competition, when various non-Syrian individuals and entities began to channel funds into the country, and foreign states such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia began to intervene. Funding in this stage was widely distributed, driven by revolutionary actors’ ability to traverse various solidarity networks to attract cash and weapons from all possible sources. By late 2012, the uprising entered a period of structured competition, by which point a sharp distinction had arisen between Qatari- and Saudi-backed funding networks, and most factions were forced to orient to this divide. After 2015, global priorities shifted with the rise of ISIS, while the Russian intervention tilted the balance decisively in the regime’s favor. Gulf funding dried up, leaving Turkey as the main patron, inaugurating an exploitativephase in which the client rebel factions had little room for independent action. April 2011–December 2011: Diaspora Mobilization The first protests to oust Bashar al-Assad erupted in the spring of 2011, and by that summer debates were simmering in activist circles about whether the revolutionary movement should arm itself. Syrian Muslim Brotherhood networks were a major instigator in the pro-arms camp, particularly in expatriate circles in the Gulf and Europe. Most of these individuals were no longer members of the organization, but their experience in the 1980s convinced them that the regime could not be reformed, while their class position put them in command of revenue that could be transferred through business ties into Syria. An activist from Saraqib, Idlib, recalls: Someone from Saudi called me, in the beginning of August [2011], and said ‘We’ll raise money to get you weapons.’ He was a former Muslim Brotherhood member, but he had fled Syria in the 1980s. He said, ‘My friends and I are ready to support you if you want to create an armed group to protect the country … we don’t want you to join our party, we just want to support you because we want to return to our country.’37 In some cases, direct descendants of the 1980s Brotherhood uprising joined the revolution and exploited their family links to collect startup funds for their own brigades. In Saraqib, the ex-Brotherhood member Assad Hilal, who’d served eighteen years in detention, helped form

the town’s first Free Syrian Army battalion. In the Idlib town of Taftanaz, members of the Brotherhood-linked Ghazal family did the same.38 Despite their Brotherhood origins, both FSA groups were liberal in political orientation. In the Jebel al-Zawiya region of southeast Idlib, on the other hand, the Brotherhood heritage influenced the creation of a prominent faction with Salafi ideology. In November 2011, a merchant from the Jebel al-Zawiya town of Sarjeh named Abu ʿIssa al-Sheikh announced the formation of Suqur al-Sham.39 AlSheikh came from a Brotherhood family; his father was involved in the 1980s insurgency, and he himself was imprisoned in Sednaya in 2004. After his release in the summer of 2011, he was able to launch Suqur al-Sham with aid he’d procured through his family’s Brotherhood connections.40 December 2011–December 2012: Open Competition By autumn 2011, the Syrian cause was stirring hearts across the region. For activist Salafis, the revolution represented more than a struggle for democracy: it was a defense of Sunnis facing extermination at the hands of a sectarian Shia regime. In Kuwait, activist Salafis began to organize donation campaigns, bringing together Syrian expatriate communities with local charities. A leading light in this scene was Shafi al-ʿAjmi, a lecturer at the College of Sharia and Islamic Studies at Kuwait University and host of a popular television show.41ʿAjmi took his soapbox demagoguery to Twitter, where his denunciations of Assad’s crimes were laced with vicious sectarianism, and where the screen flashed with bank account information for viewers to donate.42 Before long, RIHS and other loyalist Salafi groups also began raising funds. By December, the first donations trickled into Syria. Researcher Elizabeth Dickinson writes: Each nascent rebel brigade would designate a Syrian representative in Kuwait, who was then responsible for dealing with the individual backers. Sitting for tea at Kuwait’s diwaniyas [home spaces used for public gatherings], the representatives would make their cases for support: ‘The representatives were Syrian, imagine they were from one village or another and creating their armed group. They received monthly payments, which at that time were small, maybe 20,000KD per month [US$70,630], just according to the donations we received. … From RIHS, it was 80,000KD per month [US$282,540]. At that time, in the creation stage, they didn’t need much money.’43 With Salafi patrons now intervening in the Syrian conflict, those rebel groups that could tap these networks—while simultaneously drawing from the Brotherhood diaspora—were able to leapfrog other FSA factions. Abu ʿIssa al-Sheikh, for example, could lean on his family’s Brotherhood ties and his own Salafi links cultivated in Sednaya Prison to maneuver Suqur alSham into becoming a dominant faction in Idlib.44 Even more successful was Ahrar al-Sham. Founded in Saraqib, Ahrar al-Sham merged Brotherhood, activist, and jihadi lineages to become the largest Salafi rebel group in the country. Some Ahrar founders, like the aforementioned Abu Anas, were Sahwa-inspired activist Salafis, whereas others, like Hassan ʿAboud, were descended from a Brotherhood

family. ʿAboud once said that he belonged to ‘a generation that grew up in circumstances of oppression, who sought revenge for what happened [in the 1970s and 1980s], and who became proud of their identity, which many of their fathers had struggled to forge.’45 A later Ahrar leader, Abu ʿAmmar from Taftanaz, descended from a Brotherhood family but then joined AQAP in Yemen, before returning to Syria sometime before 2011.46 By early 2012, Ahrar al-Sham became a favored recipient of aid from Shafi al-ʿAjmi and other Kuwaiti activist Salafis.47 At the same time, the group worked its Brotherhood networks to reach Qatari donors. In this way, the Qatari state itself began contributing to the Syrian cause, and was the first foreign country, aside from Turkey, to do so. On 3 January 2012, a Qatari Emiri Air Force C-130 touched down in Istanbul, the first arms shipment that had not reached the rebels through the black market.48 The growth of Ahrar al-Sham coincided with an even more ominous development. In late December 2011, twin car bombs killed 44 people and wounded more than 160 in Damascus’s Kafr Sousa neighborhood. The following week, a suicide car bomb ripped through a bus carrying the regime’s riot police. This attack was later claimed by a shadowy new Salafi-jihadi group calling itself Jabhat alNusra.49 Riyadh watched these events with concern. Having previously kept its distance, Saudi Arabia began to wade into the conflict to control the flow of weapons and thwart the growth of activist and jihadi Salafi groups. In February 2012, Riyadh began supporting Mustafa alSheikh, a defected officer who was attempting to launch an umbrella rebel formation as a secular alternative to Islamist brigades.50 As private Saudi citizens began to donate to the uprising, loyalist Salafis like the popular satellite television host ʿAdnan ʿArour urged supporters to direct their aid toward al-Sheikh’s group and similar formations.51 However, during this period Riyadh also began to cautiously and indirectly support Brotherhood formations, both by allowing diaspora networks to fundraise on Saudi soil and by exploring joint initiatives with Qatar. In March 2012, for example, the two powers launched the so-called Istanbul Room, headed by Lebanese Shia politician Okab Sakr, a leading figure in Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s Future Movement and a close ally of Saudi Arabia. The goal of the Istanbul Room was to organize rebels across Syria into sixteen military councils, representing the country’s regions, which would channel weapons purchased in Libya to rebels on the ground. The key conduit in this distribution network were the Faruq Brigades, a Free Syrian Army faction from Homs that had earned acclaim for fending off the regime assault on the Baba Amru neighborhood. Under the terms of the Istanbul Room arrangement, the Faruq Brigades were tasked with overseeing distribution and in exchange were allowed to keep one-third of all weapons that passed through the network. While the aim of this arrangement was to streamline distribution, it inadvertently transformed the group into a corrupt powerbroker, marking the beginning of the Saudi-Qatari split. The Faruq Brigades was accused of hoarding weapons meant for other factions.52 In some instances, they even clashed with Brotherhoodlinked militias.53 In response, the Brotherhood leveraged its dominant position within the Syrian National

Council (SNC), the Syrian opposition’s official government in exile. Since the SNC was founded in August 2011, the Brotherhood had steadily taken over the body. In leaked emails from March 2012, SNC Chairman Burhan Ghalioun claimed that, by that point, the Brotherhood had ‘seized control’ of the SNC’s Relief Committee, which was allegedly transferring US$1 million every three days from its Qatari bank account into Turkey.54 Then, the Brotherhood used the SNC to wrest control of the Istanbul Group’s Libya weapons pipeline. Like the SNC, Libya’s interim National Transitional Council (NTC) government contained groupings close to the Libyan Brotherhood. In May 2012, SNC and Brotherhood members led by Haitham al-Rahma and ʿAimad al-Din al-Rashid made several visits to Libya, inking agreements to secure a US$20 million grant for the SNC.55 Before long, activists on the ground began to complain that weapons shipments from Libya were being seized by the Turkish IHH charity and transported to FSA groups exclusively affiliated with the Brotherhood.56ʿAimad al-Din al-Rashid, founder of a Brotherhood splinter organization known as the National Action Group, soon became one of the most prominent arms dealers in Syria, selling weapons to FSA groups in the Damascus suburbs and Aleppo province, as well as to Abu ʿIssa’s Suqur al-Sham.57 The Brotherhood’s marginalization of the Faruq Brigades—Saudi Arabia’s preferred proxy —was the first step in the unraveling of the Saudi-Qatari alliance. The next blow came in late May, when the Assad regime slaughtered 108 civilians in the town of Taldou.58 The killings, which came to be known as the ‘Houla Massacre,’ awakened many of Saudi Arabia’s leading activist Salafis, who launched a fundraising campaign for Syrian rebels.59 Fearing a revitalized Sahwa movement, Saudi authorities swiftly cracked down, arresting most of the campaign’s leaders. One of the targeted clerics, Muhammad al-ʿArifi, tweeted: I have just returned from the building of the Emirate of Riyadh after spending two hours there and signing a pledge not to collect funds for Syria. I ask those who intended to come to the al-Bawardi mosque to donate not to tire themselves.60 Then, in early June 2012, Saudi Arabia’s Senior ʿUlema Council issued a decree outlawing all calls for citizens to ‘perform jihad’ in Syria.61 But the unintended consequence of Riyadh tightening the reins was that activists began to flock to the Qatari sphere of influence, even making regular fundraising trips to Doha. A few weeks later, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi was elected president of Egypt, again potentially stirring Sahwa passions inside Saudi borders. Riyadh saw the region careening out of its control. Morsi soon compounded these fears by visiting Iran, Saudi Arabia’s archrival.62 Saudi proxies like Okab Saqr began to funnel funding to those factions Riyadh perceived as best able to counterbalance Brotherhood and activist networks, such as secular groups (e.g., Jamaal Maarouf’s Syria Martyrs Brigade), loyalist Salafis (e.g., Zahran Alloush’s Liwa al-Islam), and tribal factions with historic ties to the kingdom. Before long, loyalist Salafis in Kuwait helped fund the creation of another Saudi-backed collection of rebel groups, the Authenticity and Development Front.63 Riyadh also worked with the US Treasury Department to secure a license for the Syrian Support Group to fundraise for

factions outside the influence of the SNC, the Brotherhood, and Qatar.64 It was during this period, early summer 2012, that the CIA established a regular presence in southern Turkey to better monitor weapons flows. Qatar responded by redoubling support for Brotherhood and activist Salafist networks. A key point man in this effort was Ahmed Ramadan, the leader of the National Action Group, an organization that had emerged as a split from the Brotherhood’s Aleppo wing.65 In early July, Ramadan marshaled funds from the Kuwaiti activist scene in an attempt to catalyze the merger of various factions, including those close to Ahrar al-Sham.66 His principal success, however, was in bankrolling the unification of Brotherhood-linked groups in the northern Aleppo countryside. On 9 July, ʿAbd al-ʿAziz Salama (‘Hajji ʿAnadan’) and ʿAbd al-Qadr Saleh (‘Hajji Mareʿa’) convened an 8-hour meeting with 15 other rebel leaders that resulted in the formation of Liwa al-Tawhid, which soon became one of the most important rebel factions in northern Syria. Flush with Ramadan’s funds, Hajji Mareʿa transformed his hometown into a critical hub for dispensing Qatari patronage, so much so that, locally, the town of Mareʿ was dubbed the ‘Qurdaha’ of the north, in reference to the way in which Assad’s hometown had been the ultimate source of all power and resources under the regime. A week after its formation, Liwa al-Tawhid led an assault on Aleppo, a city that was only partially with the revolution; some rebels argued that city-dwellers sould see the attack as an invasion by countryside rebels, but Ahmed Ramadan and Turkish intelligence allegedly forced the issue.67 In summary, the events of June and July 2012—Morsi’s election in Egypt, Riyadh’s exclusion of Brotherhood and activist networks, and Qatar’s opening of the floodgates in response—radically transformed the battlefield. Towns and cities across northern Syria fell to rebels, including key border crossings like Jarablus and major urban centers like Manbij. A bomb wiped out Assad confidante Asef Shawkat and three other senior officials, and fighting raged in the Damascus suburbs. The regime seemed on the brink of collapse.68 The Turkish government eased restrictions on materiel-bearing flights, and before long Qatari Air Force cargo jets were touching down three times a week.69 The United States grew increasingly concerned with the Qatari intervention. By autumn, Doha’s networks were even supplying small quantities of shoulder-fire anti-aircraft missiles to the Syrian battlefield.70 In fact, by most estimates, Qatari-sourced weapons made up the bulk of the arms that were pouring into the country, and they were exclusively reinforcing activist Salafist and Brotherhood groups at the expense of secular formations. After Obama’s reelection, the United States finally decided to intervene by throwing its weight behind Saudi Arabia’s efforts. In early December, with American backing, Saudi Arabia organized the Conference for Change in Syria in the coastal Turkish city of Antalya, where 550 Syrian opposition leaders gathered to inaugurate a new mechanism to channel foreign patronage.71 The conference authorized the creation of the Supreme Military Council, under the command of Salim Idris, which would oversee action on five military fronts across the country. At the same time, the United States authorized increased Saudi and Jordanian intervention, assisting both countries in sourcing weapons (usually from Croatia), which would then, in theory, be shipped to the SMC.72 The conference marked the first concerted attempt by the United

States and Saudi Arabia to sideline Qatar, keep weapons out of the hands of Doha-linked Islamists, and cohere the rebel movement around a single source of patronage. Unsurprisingly, Qatar soon retaliated by sponsoring a rival formation around Ahrar alSham that called itself the Syrian Islamic Front.73 Unlike liberal rebel groups, the cadre of Ahrar al-Sham had decades of political experience garnered through its members’ associations in prison or from their families’ Muslim Brotherhood background. Together with Ahrar’s ability to tap into complementary networks—Brotherhood and activist—as well as the sheer scale of materiel support flooding in from Qatari and Kuwaiti donors, SIF quickly became the most important rebel alliance in the country. The Syrian battlefield was now split between a US-Saudi-Jordanian axis on the one hand, and a Qatari-Turkish axis on the other. Nearly every faction was forced to orient itself to this divide, inaugurating a period of structured competition within the rebel movement. December 2012–June 2014: Structured Competition In the opening months of 2013, it was Saudi Arabia that enjoyed the advantage over Qatar in the battlefield. The United States was supplying the SMC with nonlethal aid, including armor and night vision equipment, and they even provided intelligence to select rebel groups. At President Obama’s request, senior Saudi figures like Prince Salman bin Sultan and his brother, intelligence chief Prince Bandar, began to personally oversee the arms network.74 For example, in March, Salman provided SMC rebels with 120 tons of explosives, directing them to ‘light up Damascus’ and ‘flatten’ the airport.75 Then, on 9 April, Jabhat al-Nusra officially split from its parent organization in Iraq. Thousands of fighters, including many foreigners, decided to stay with the parent organization, which was now called ISIS. Overnight, ISIS found itself in control of vast swathes of territory in eastern Syria. Qatar’s reckless policy of flooding Syria with weapons now took on an even more dangerous edge, as some of these weapons may have inadvertently wound up—through rebel realignments, theft, and transfers—first in the arsenal of Nusra and now ISIS. On 23 April, two weeks after the Nusra-ISIS split, Obama met with Qatari Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani and allegedly warned Doha that its weapons were falling into the wrong hands.76 The United States also supported Saudi efforts to purge the Syrian National Council of its Brotherhood influence, especially with respect to the president, Ghassan Hitto, who was close to Doha.77 By July, the Saudis had politicked and cajoled their way to influence within the SNC, resulting in the election of Ahmed al-Jarba, a Shammar tribal leader with close ties to the kingdom, to president of the SNC. This would be Riyadh’s crowning move. Prominent Brotherhood figures who had been critical nodes in the Qatari patronage network, like Nazir al-Hakim and Ahmed Ramadan, began to realign themselves with Saudi Arabia.78 Even Liwa al-Tawhid, the powerful Brotherhood faction from northern Aleppo, would momentarily drift into the Saudi orbit.79 But it was a pyrrhic victory. Although the United States and United Kingdom pledged to provide the SMC with US$500 million as part of the shift toward Saudi networks, only small amounts were actually released, as receiving aid required a long vetting process that had not

been in place for factions under Qatari stewardship. SMC commander Salim Idris regularly complained that he had a hard time integrating the largest factions—such as Liwa al-Tawhid, Ahrar al-Sham, and Suqur al-Sham—into his fighting structure. For the moment, the battlefield hung in the balance between the Saudi and Qatari axes. When the turning point came in May 2013, it was neither Qatar nor Saudi Arabia that seized the advantage; it was the Assad regime. Assad’s forces attacked Qusayr, a strategic rebel-held town linking Damascus and Homs. This was the first significant military engagement overseen and financed almost entirely by Saudi Arabia and the SMC. For weeks, the rebels held off the regime advance, but—also a first—Assad, relying heavily on Hezbollah from Lebanon, managed to seize the town. The Battle of al-Qusayr marked the most significant inflection point on the battlefield since the war began. Now, with Hezbollah’s forces by its side and willing to die in large numbers, the regime had halted the rebels’ momentum. The rebels would never regain it. By late summer 2013, Qatar began to sharply reduce its aid. Meanwhile, ISIS was steadily expanding.80 Despite this, the the remainder of the US-Saudi package to the opposition was not forthcoming, as Saudi officials demanded that Syrian opposition groups provide pledges to fight ISIS before allowing for aid to be dispersed.81 Intimidated by ISIS’ aggressive behavior and unwilling to open a second front that could detract from the fight against the regime, most factions were hesitant to agree. It was not until after the Assad regime’s chemical weapons attack in Douma in the Damascus suburbs, which killed 1,300 people, that the Obama administration released the remainder of its aid package. The attack also allegedly prompted the United States to finally arm rebels directly.82 Under a covert CIA program codenamed ‘Timber Sycamore,’ the first shipments of light arms began arriving in September to select rebel groups in the Saudi-Jordanian axis.83 The CIA provided training, while Riyadh supplied the funds to purchase weapons. But it was not enough. The US-Saudi-backed forces failed to cohere into a potent battlefield force, or to offer a viable alternative to the Qatar-backed Islamists. Unlike the Qatari factions, which were built on longstanding Brotherhood networks, most leaders of the US-Saudi factions lacked preexisting ties. They tended to originate from poorer or more tribal backgrounds than their Qatari-backed counterparts, and they lacked access to merchant networks that could supplement the irregular flow of US-Saudi aid.84 As a result, groups in this axis, like Jamal Maarouf’s Syria Revolutionaries Front, were roundly accused of criminality. These groups were in many cases liberal or secular, which opened the door to criticism from Islamists, who viewed criminal behavior as being inherently linked to secularism’s supposed lack of values. In reality, the criminality was rooted in the fact that these groups did not belong to longstanding cohesive networks like the Brotherhood, so there were few accountability mechanisms to stop rank-and-file members from engaging in predatory behavior. Regardless, by late 2013, these Saudi-backed forces were rapidly losing popular support to more radical factions like ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra. July 2014–Present: Exploitative Phase In the spring of 2014, the United States authorized anti-tank weapons shipments to certain

factions, but it was too little too late.85 The radicals were now dominating the battlefield; ISIS had captured most of the eastern half of Syria. When ISIS seized Mosul and began to threaten Erbil and Baghdad, the United States shifted course and launched an anti-ISIS intervention. The interests of the US-Saudi coalition were never aligned with those of the rebels; Washington preferred a negotiated settlement that would remove Assad but preserve the state, whereas most rebels were fighting and dying for the sake of overthrowing the regime. Nonetheless, the two sides had come together in a marriage of convenience. Now, however, US aims were directly opposed to those of the rebels. The United States began to pressure its proxies to prioritize fighting ISIS over fighting Assad, whereas the rebels insisted on continuing to battle the regime, viewing Assad as the root cause of the phenomenon of Islamic State. In the end, the United States not only lacked the capacity to direct rebel behavior, it also had diverging interests. Though it would not be officially shut down for a few more years, by 2015 Timber Sycamore was a dead letter. And the Saudi intervention was winding down down as well, with key Saudi proxies being cut off and left to be routed by al-Nusra or ISIS. Qatari proxies were also suffering major battlefield losses as well. In late 2013, Liwa alTawhid’s leader Hajji Mareʿa was killed, and the group subsequently dwindled until it became a shell of its former self.86 Half a year later, a bombing wiped out most of the leadership of Ahrar al-Sham.87 In one town after the next, rank-and-file Ahrar al-Sham members were defecting to al-Nusra and ISIS. Meanwhile, Washington was tightening the pressure on Doha to crack down on funding networks. In December 2013, for example, the US Treasury Department accused the Qatari professor ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Nuʿami of supporting terrorist groups (a charge he denies).88 Similar accusations appeared throughout 2014, amplified by right-wing think tanks like the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.89 The combination of external pressure from the United States and internal pressure from al-Nusra and ISIS meant that Qatar-backed groups found it ever harder to secure funding lines. Remaining factions gradually fell under sole Turkish sponsorship. Bereft of grassroots support and severed from other revenue streams, these groups had little scope for independent action. Turkey’s high capacity also stemmed from its control of the border and the fact that it hosted rebel leaders and millions of refugees on its soil. The Turkish-backed rebels (eventually rechristened as the Syrian National Army) were repurposed into an antiSDF force, and the fight against Assad was abandoned. Case Study: The Proxy War in Manbij Background: The Provincial Bourgeoisie of Manbij The city of Manbij was liberated from Assad’s rule in July 2012; for the next eighteen months, Manbij operated as a quasi-independent city-state. By early 2013, the local political scene was split between a Brotherhood-linked faction comprising the city’s economic elite, who were ultimately backed by Qatar, and a poor and working-class movement, of which some elements had no foreign backing while others received Saudi support. These two wings

of the revolutionary movement were rivals, leading to a standoff which the Salafis, a third force, exploited. Ultimately, this divide laid the grounds for the city’s takeover by the Islamic State in early 2014. Manbij thus offers a case study that illustrates how class structure and social networks intersected with the Saudi-Qatari rivalry to produce patterns of mobilization that were repeated, mutatis mutandis, across Syria. Lying about 60 miles northeast of Aleppo, Manbij before the war was home to about 100,000 people, most of them Arab, although the city had sizable Kurdish and Circassian minorities. Historically, Manbij was dominated by a wealthy Sunni merchant class engaged in trade with Aleppo, Turkey, and the interior desert regions of Syria. These trading families, who formed close ties with each other through intermarriage and business partnerships, much like the bazaari of Iran, were cut from a different cloth than the tribal, rural-minded folks who made up the majority of Manbij. Locally, this merchant class is known as Hadhrani, a term meaning ‘civilized,’ denoting their deracinated, elite status. The traditional ruling class also included landowners from certain tribes like the Albu Sultan. Throughout the 1950s, Hadhrani families dominated retail, trade, and construction, while Albu Sultan members monopolized political posts like the mayorship.90 With the rise of leftist parties in the 1950s, some Hadhrani families gravitated to the antisocialist, conservative message of the Muslim Brotherhood. When the Baʿathists seized power the following decade, Brotherhood ideas gained even greater currency among elite circles. The new regime carried out land reform, through which they cultivated a rural constituency and antagonized the wealthy. In Manbij, the party attacked the power of oppressive landowners and recruited from impoverished rural tribal communities such as the Hosh confederation and the Albu Banna.91 The Hadhrani bourgeoisie saw their fortunes fade as the Baʿath imposed price controls and monopolized foreign trade, while government posts were no longer the birthright of Albu Sultan elite. In the early 1970s, for example, the Hafez al-Assad regime replaced the Albu Sultan mayor92 with a Hosh figure, and the position, along with the leadership of the local Baʿath Party chapter, would largely remain with the Hosh for the next forty years.93 By the late 1970s, Hadhrani families such as the Sheikh Weiss and Salal households formed the core of Manbij’s Muslim Brotherhood movement. When the insurrection was smashed in 1982, these families formally left the movement, but retained close ties with the Brotherhood through marriage and trading partnerships.94 When Bashar al-Assad assumed power in 2000, he ushered in a series of neoliberal reforms that reintroduced the market to Syrian life to an extent far beyond what his father had envisioned. But the gains of this economic opening largely accrued to Assad’s relatives and leading Sunni bourgeois families in Damascus and Aleppo. The merchants and traders of small towns like Manbij—the ‘provincial bourgeoisie’—were left in the lurch. Although wealthy by Manbij standards, merchants were second- and third-class citizens next to the Damascus-Aleppo bourgeoisie and the security services. They became leaders of the city’s revolution. Qatar and the Manbij Revolutionary Council Late one night in the winter of 2011, under the cover of darkness, a few dozen activists

gathered in an old farmhouse outside Manbij. The city was roiling with protests nearly every night, and the men gathered there voted to form a body to take power should the local regime fall. Although the protest movement comprised all walks of life, the Revolutionary Council, as the body came to be called, was dominated by ex-Brotherhood Hadhrani and Albu Sultan liberals, the two elite groups marginalized by the dictatorship. The liberals lacked strong ties with their counterparts in other cities, but the Hadhrani were able to tap into national and international Brotherhood networks, thereby transforming the Revolutionary Council into the most important entity on the city’s revolutionary scene. A key Revolutionary Council financier—Ahmed al-Taʿan, a professor in Damascus University’s faculty of Sharia and one of the founding members of a Muslim Brotherhood splinter group called the Syrian National Movement—was its director of external relations.95 The council also forged links with merchants from northern Aleppo that belonged to ex-Brotherhood families, building a network that would become the powerful Qatari-backed faction Liwa al-Tawhid.96 With such support, in early 2012 the Revolutionary Council created an armed wing, the first rebel group in the city.97 In this period of ‘open competition’ (see section IV), activists sought to cultivate ties with anyone willing to furnish aid. So along with procuring weapons from Liwa al-Tawhid headquarters in Mareʿ, for example, Ahmed al-Taʿan regularly traveled to Jordan and Saudi Arabia to solicit donations for the Revolutionary Council’s field hospitals.98 By mid-2012, however, Saudi and Qatari policy began to veer away from each other. In July, the Qatari-Turkish push, as described in Section IV, allowed rebels flush with Libyan weapons to sweep across Idlib and Aleppo provinces. In the face of this onslaught, the regime fled Manbij on 18 July, and the Revolutionary Council assumed power with hardly a shot fired.99 For the next eighteen months, the council presided over a remarkable experiment in participatory democracy. The council established an upper house, which functioned like a parliament, issuing laws for the city. For the first time in sixty years, this corner of Syria experienced freedom of assembly and press: where there had been one state-run newspaper before, now nearly a dozen independent newspapers were in circulation. Ex-Muslim Brothers and liberals made up the majority of the council, but even leftists, like the longtime political dissident Hassan Nefi, played a prominent role.100 Ultimately, though, it was the council’s links to Brotherhood networks—and Liwa al-Tawhid, in particular—that proved kingmaker. The Brotherhood sponsored projects throughout the city: the establishment of a court system, a police force, and—in an effort to unify Manbij’s rebel groups—a Military Council. Meanwhile, the Revolutionary Council used largesse from Liwa al-Tawhid to reorganize its armed wing, which now consisted of three battalions.101 Manbij therefore presents one of the few examples anywhere in Syria where armed factions were subordinate to a civilian body.102 Despite the Brotherhood and Qatari influence, the council’s democratic nature meant that its patrons were unable to exert full authority over the body. In September 2012, for instance, the Brotherhood sent a delegation led by the wealthy businessman Yasser al-Zakiri to assume direct control over the council’s day-to-day operations, but some council members—led by the leftist Nefi—blocked the efforts.103 Still, Brotherhood/Qatari patronage played a pivotal

role in rebel strength and behavior. For example, Thuwwar Manbij, one of the battalions comprising the council’s armed wing, was the city’s most well-equipped faction. This owed in large part to its commander, Anas Sheikh Weiss, a founding council member, who belonged to one of the city’s leading Hadhrani Brotherhood households.104 Thuwwar Manbij was so well-stocked that, at one point, their arsenal included a few coveted Soviet-era 14.5mm anti-aircraft DShK weapons.105 This stood in contrast to Manbij’s other factions. Nearly seventy armed groups had appeared following liberation, most outside the Turkey-Qatar-Brotherhood pipeline and desperately in search of support. Arms dealers and middlemen proliferated, gouging prices and extorting their clients. Looking back, one rebel commander in Manbij recalled, The first thing I would have done was imprison every arms dealer and take their weapons. It was just ridiculous. The revolution was begging the world for weapons, and in Manbij alone, I recall six arms dealers … Once, we drove to al-Atarib to buy weapons. I remember walking into the guy’s shop, which was basically the size of a living room, and it was full of every type of weapon you could imagine. Of course, no anti-aircraft weapons or the types we really needed, but definitely small arms. He had Uzis, and even a bathtub full of diesel to remove the lubricant they came in. There were a lot of weapons, but they were inaccessible to us. A Kalashnikov, a real one, was $2,500. [We used to buy the fake ones] made in Saudi Arabia. It was horrible. It literally turned red when you fired it. If you fired it long enough then set it down by the wall, it would actually bend. This happened to me.106 Factions without Qatari patronage had to find other means of financing. Moreover, the Qatar factions were built on networks of businessmen—the provincial bourgeoisie—whereas the leadership of other factions tended to be of working class or rural origin. To fund their efforts, these other factions were forced to turn to banditry. The Rise of the ‘Bread Factions’ From the beginning, the Revolutionary Council had found it difficult to control its armed wing. Before liberation, some fighters were conducting freelance raids on police stations and refusing to share the spoils with the group.107 By the July 2012 liberation, the council’s armed wing effectively split: one group remained under the council’s authority, while the other became an independent faction called Jund al-Haramein (‘The army of the two holy mosques,’ in a bid to attract Saudi funding).108 Unlike the Revolutionary Council factions, Jund al-Haramein did not belong to Hadhrani Brotherhood networks and recruited primarily from the poor and working class.109 While 60 percent of the council were businessmen, 64 percent of Jund al-Haramein leaders were of poor and working-class backgrounds (see Table 3.1). They lacked preexisting ties with key council members, which made them difficult to control and encouraged an independent streak. This also placed them outside the Liwa alTawhid funding stream. Other factions soon appeared with similar sociological compositions. Bereft of external

support or links to the merchant class, they turned to other means to sustain themselves. Within weeks of liberation, Jund al-Haramein and allied factions unleashed a massive crime wave on Manbij.110 Reports of looting and kidnapping became commonplace.111Al-Masar alHorr, one of the revolutionary weeklies, denounced the chaos:112 Are we really living in a wild forest where the strong can rule and do whatever he wants? … Where is the freedom that the young and old cheered for with their hearts and their throats? We’ve lost safety and now live in the dark, where houses have been looted and the rich are kidnapped off the streets. Table 3.1: Breakdown of the Revolutionary Council and Jund al-Haramein by Tribe and Class Background Class Background

Revolutionary Council

Jund al-Haramein

Business

60.0%

16.0%

Professional

26.7%

20.0%

Working

13.3%

64.0%

Hadhrani/Albu Sultan

40.0%

8.0%

Hosh/Albu Banna

0.0%

28.0%

Other

60.0%

64.0%

Tribe

These factions refused to subordinate themselves to the city’s ruling authority, the Revolutionary Council. While the council controlled the city’s central furnace, producing 60,000 loaves of bread daily at full capacity, Jund al-Haramein seized control of Manbij’s reserve furnace and refused to surrender it.113 At times, the group would hoard supplies, or sell bread directly to private bakeries at lower prices to undercut the Revolutionary Council. The faction then used these revenues to expand its footprint to Raqqa and the Aleppo countryside, where it took part in battles against the regime.114 Members of the Revolutionary Council would derisively term Jund al-Haramein and allies as the ‘bread factions,’ and repeatedly attempt to clamp down. They critiqued the bread factions on moral terms, calling them corrupt or of poor character, but in truth Jund alHaramein’s behavior can be explained by class position and lack of access to external support. Paradoxically, the bread factions even developed a popular following, especially in poor neighborhoods, where they were seen as an authentic—if flawed—representation of class grievances. Over the course of late 2012, as prices of basic living necessities climbed, popular anger toward the Revolutionary Council mounted.115 One figure who rode this wave was an enigmatic commander named The Prince, who headed the local chapter of the Faruq Brigades, which recruited almost exclusively from the Hosh tribal confederation. The Prince

would kidnap the rich and pro-regime figures—while undertaking extraordinary exploits of bravery on the frontlines—and became something of a folk hero, as well as a sworn enemy of the Revolutionary Council.116 Ultimately, though, banditry and working-class sympathy were not enough. To fend off the regime—and to position themselves against the Revolutionary Council—the bread factions would need to find a patron of their own. The Bread Factions Turn to Saudi Arabia In September 2012, a bread faction belonging to a rebel leader named Abu Khalid al-Baggari kidnapped nine employees of Lafarge, a French company that owned a cement factory not far from Manbij. Al-Baggari ransomed the employees for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and with the windfall he acquired new weapons stockpiles and merged a number of factions into Fursan al-Furat (The Knights of the Euphrates).117 The previous month, the powerful Idlib faction Suqur al-Sham (see Section IV) had broken with the Muslim Brotherhood, after its commander Abu ʿIssa al-Sheikh accused his former patrons of ‘politicizing’ aid and demanding excessive control over clients.118 The sudden appearance on the rebel scene of a well-financed rebel outfit free of Brotherhood control had immediate appeal to the bread factions of Manbij, who were looking to insulate themselves from Liwa al-Tawhid and the Revolutionary Council’s oversight. Flush with funds and fresh from a major military success, Baggari reached out to Suqur al-Sham, and an alliance was born. As one of Fursan al-Furat’s founders explained: When choosing a patron, we wanted to make sure to go with someone with whom we could secure material support while still maintaining our own internal independence. Liwa al-Tawhid’s Sufi ideology, along with that of the Muslim Brotherhood, which Liwa al-Tawhid was tied to, is known for its emphasis on rigid hierarchies and obedience … Lower ranking members aren’t allowed to question their sheikhs … Furthermore, Abu ʿIssa al-Sheikh was known for having a calm personality, and being a leader who would encourage debate amongst his deputies and allow sub-factions a certain level of autonomy. Plus, by that point, he had rejected the Brotherhood.119 Suqur al-Sham’s prowess was due to its ability to tap multiple funding sources, including ʿAimad al-Din Rashid’s Brotherhood splinter, but it was their access to loyalist Salafist networks that proved most lucrative, and that linked them indirectly to Saudi Arabia. In the resulting proxy cascade, Saudi Arabia supported Kuwaiti loyalist Salafis, who aided Suqur al-Sham in Idlib, who in turn funded Fursan al-Furat in Manbij.120 As a result, Fursan alFurat became a major player locally, and other bread factions looked to follow suit. By early 2013, Jund al-Haramein was heavily involved in battles against the regime in rural Raqqa, which enabled them to forge ties with the al-Nasser, an important clan in the area.121 For generations, sheikhs of this clan, which belongs to the Weldeh tribe, had presided over massive plantations—where they kept slaves and indentured servants—until the Baʿth land reforms of the 1960s stripped them of property.122 After 2011, eager to reclaim their

land, Nasser sheikhs were quick to support the revolution, launching a string of influential FSA factions.123 The rough-and-tumble Jund al-Haramein and the elite sheikhs of the Nasser clan might seem like odd bedfellows, but Jund al-Haramein were capable fighters, while the sheikhs had something Jund craved: access to outside donors. Beginning in the 1970s, many Weldeh tribespeople had moved to Saudi Arabia for work, and a wealthy minority forged business and political ties with Saudi elites.124 These alliances paid off after the revolution; the Weldeh tribesman ʿAbd al-Jalil al-Saʿidi, for example, became a top advisor to Okab Saqr, the Lebanese Shia politician who was the Saudi point man for weapons distribution through the ‘Istanbul Room.’125 Al-Saʿidi would become instrumental in helping Jund alHaramein access Istanbul Room weapons.126 Finally, through al-Nasser links, Jund al-Haramein also managed to ally with Hamud alFaraj,127 a close associate of Saqr’s brother who regularly visited Saudi Arabia to coordinate the transfer of funds to al-Nasser-run FSA groups.128 In December 2012, when the United States and Saudi Arabia created the Supreme Military Council, in an effort to create a unified, Saudi-friendly rebel command, Faraj was one of thirty opposition leaders appointed to coordinate aid on five separate fronts, and was himself tasked with overseeing Raqqa. As a result, Jund al-Haramein became one of Saudi’s top aid recipients in the greater ManbijRaqqa corridor.129 Qatar versus Saudi Arabia in Manbij: Structured Competition By late 2012, a tenuous balance hung over the revolutionary scene in Manbij. The Revolutionary Council, with its patrons in the Doha-backed Liwa al-Tawhid, remained the main authority in the city. However, against them stood a rival grouping, led by the Saudibacked bread factions Jund al-Haramein, Fursan al-Furat, The Prince, and smaller formations. This grouping even supported its own rival council, called the Local Council, headed by an engineer named Muhammad al-Bishir.130 The same class divide marking the factions also manifested with regard to the rival councils: while many upper- and middleclass activists supported the Revolutionary Council, the Bishir Council had a greater following among poorer segments of society. (Despite the fact that, for the time being, it was the Revolutionary Council that successfully carried out state-like activities, such as social services.) However, the Saudi-led creation of the Supreme Military Council in December 2012 upset this balance. Seeing this move by Saudi Arabia, correctly, as an attempt to sideline its clients, Doha retaliated by opening the spigot, primarily to Ahrar al-Sham. The group formally announced its presence in Manbij in early 2013, launching a populist program that won them admirers across the city’s political divide.131 On the one hand, they targeted the Revolutionary Council’s economic policies—especially the handling of bread, the prices of which continued to rise—by attending protests outside the city’s main bakery.132 On the other, they pledged to clean the streets of the criminal bread factions. At the top of this list was The Prince and his Faruq Brigades.

The Faruq Brigades were a powerful anti-Brotherhood faction in Homs that was responsible for distributing Saudi-donated weapons ationwide. However, this fostered corruption, as commanders began skimming weapons to sell on the black market, as well as entering into lucrative partnerships with Turkish smuggling networks.133 As a result, they eventually fell out of Saudi Arabia’s favor, and in this weakened state, Ahrar al-Sham moved in for the kill. In April 2013, the group attacked The Prince. The Revolutionary Council, sensing an opportunity to rid the city of a hated rival, requested backup from Liwa al-Tawhid, which sent a contingent from Aleppo. The battle lasted a few intense hours and then, in a stunning dénouement, the Ahrar al-Sham-led forces captured The Prince.134 The rout changed the city’s power balance almost overnight. To the masses, Ahrar al-Sham proved that it was serious about cleaning up crime. The bread factions, meanwhile, felt they could not compete with Ahrar’s lavish Qatari funds or its ironclad organizational discipline, and they began disintegrating or switching sides. Jund al-Haramein gravitated toward its erstwhile enemy, the Revolutionary Council, and the Faruq Brigades dissolved. Fursan alFurat, the Saudi-backed group, whose commanders had chafed at what they viewed as the rigid organizational and ideological control of the Brotherhood, eventually allied themselves with a small group of men who had recently appeared in the city. Occupying the cultural center downtown, this group was made up of foreigners, and it called itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.135 Network Structure in Manbij’s Proxy War By the summer of 2013, the Saudi-Qatari competition in Manbij was effectively over, with Qatar the clear winner. Although the United States and Saudi Arabia organized their proxies into the Supreme Military Council, they were unable to mold this entity into a cohesive force. By magnifying the case of Manbij, it becomes clear why this was the case. First, the Saudibacked groups—the bread factions—simply lacked the firepower to defeat Ahrar al-Sham and its allies militarily, even though they outnumbered them in personnel. This was due, in part, to the fact that Ahrar al-Sham was a direct beneficiary of Qatari funding, whereas the bread factions received aid through a cascade of intermediaries, such as Suqur al-Sham or tribal sheikhs. It was also because Ahrar al-Sham was able to access multiple networks for revenue: Brotherhood, activist Salafist, and jihadi Salafist. Second, the bread factions lacked cohesive preexistingties and organizational structure. Even in the face of Ahrar al-Sham’s superior firepower, The Prince may have stood a chance had the other bread factions rallied to his support and presented a united front. But the bread factions did not constitute a cohesive network; in fact, there was little to unify them except their having gone through the experience of revolution, in contrast to the Qatari clients, who benefited from years or even decades of close interaction through business ties and political activity. Finally, aside from a shared albeit vague opposition to dictatorship, the bread factions expressed little in the way of ideology. The Qatari-backed factions, on the other hand, benefited from expansive, elaborate ideological frameworks that could respond to changing circumstances and help dictate strategic action. Without strong social ties and ideological norms, there was little to prevent the bread

factions from engaging in corruption and war profiteering, and patrons had few means to exert command and control. An example of how this worked in practice is the case of alShaʿr Gas Field near Palmyra. In early 2013, a coalition of Idlib factions and Fursan al-Furat, the Manbij-based bread faction, planned to launch a campaign to capture the field from the regime. Fearing that flat desert terrain would provide little cover, Suqur al-Sham leader Abu ʿIssa al-Sheikh ordered his client Fursan al-Furat to abstain from participation.136 There was little connecting Fursan al-Furat and Suqur al-Sham apart from the alliance they’d forged during the revolution; they did not share preexisting social networks, nor did Fursan have a well-thought-out ideological framework, beyond a hazy, individualistic liberalism, to match Suqur’s Islamism. So Fursan’s leaders ignored the order, waited for a sandstorm to provide cover, and managed to seize the field. The ensuing revenue windfall afforded Fursan even greater independence from its patrons. A year later, as ISIS was advancing upon Manbij, Suqur al-Sham ordered Fursan to defend the city, an order which they also ignored. Fursan had previously undertaken several joint ventures with the Islamic State, including a smuggling ring that trafficked organs harvested from prisoners’ bodies.137 The rich social ties among Qatar and its proxies, on the other hand, gave Doha the capacity to influence client behavior. So long as interests aligned, Doha’s support could make the difference between success and failure on the battlefield. But when interests diverged, clients found themselves constrained by Doha or its subsidiary patrons. In the summer of 2013, for example, two different Qatari proxies were the dominant forces in Manbij: Ahrar al-Sham and the Liwa al-Tawhid-linked Revolutionary Council. Ahrar al-Sham began attacking the latter’s laissez-faire economic policies, especially around the question of bread prices.138 As Ahrar gained popular support, seizing buildings around the city, Liwa al-Tawhid warned the Revolutionary Council not to escalate the situation by resisting. It was in the interests of Liwa al-Tawhid to preserve the peace between their clients in Manbij and Ahrar al-Sham, even if, locally, that was not in the council’s interests.139 The council was forced to follow Liwa al-Tawhid’s orders, though the consequences would be tragic. In July, Ahrar al-Sham and ISIS, who were controlling key granaries in Maskana and Raqqa respectively, halted all grain shipments to Manbij.140 This siege temporarily forced the price of bread in the city to skyrocket, and ISIS seized the advantage by organizing protests that nearly brought down the Revolutionary Council, allowing them to assume control of the main bakery.141 By the time Liwa al-Tawhid recognized the calamity unfolding in Manbij, it was too late. Crucially, ISIS did not have the support of the other Qatar proxy, Ahrar alSham, who insisted on remaining neutral in the growing tensions between revolutionaries and ISIS. Still, they faced no sanction for seizing the main bakery, because Qatar appeared uninterested in halting ISIS or even treating the group differently from any other faction.142 By January 2014, in the face of mounting economic crisis, the Revolutionary Council had lost the street. That month, the city’s beleaguered factions banded together in a final push to expel ISIS, but without Ahrar al-Sham or popular support, they proved no match for the Islamic State. Within days, ISIS seized complete control of the city, expelled all factions, and Manbij’s revolution was finished.

Manbij Today: Exploitative Phase The ISIS takeover of Manbij and other parts of eastern Syria in 2014 marked a turning point in proxy relations countrywide. The United States shifted to anti-ISIS efforts, while Qatar gradually tempered its patronage and ultimately ceased it altogether. Liwa al-Tawhid soon began to splinter and was no longer a patron in northern Syria.143 The former members of Manbij’s Revolutionary Council migrated to the patronage of Turkey. Due to the historic Brotherhood ties, as well as the council’s embeddedness in cohesive networks, Turkey wields significant capacity as patron. However, Turkey’s primary interest is in defeating the PKK, whereas the council’s core interest is in overthrowing Assad, meaning the two sides do not share a common goal. This combination of high patron capacity and divergent interests means that the remnants of the council are forced to do Ankara’s bidding. Today, these former council figures comprise the core component of the forces that Turkey hopes to employ to capture Manbij from the PKK-linked Syrian Democratic Forces. The SDF liberated Manbij from ISIS rule in 2016, and the city is now under the control of the SDF-aligned Manbij Military Council. Remarkably, the MMC-Turkish divide is actually the latest iteration of the same divide that has plagued the city since the 1960s: a division built on class and networks of patronage. To recap, recall that before the 1960s, urban-based Albu Sultan and Hadhrani elites controlled the city’s wealth and politics until the Baʿathist coups and land reforms usurped their privileges. During the Assad years, power shifted to rural tribal sheikhs, particularly those from the Albu Banna and the Hosh tribal confederations. In response, some Hadhrani families gravitated toward the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2011, Hadhrani and Albu Sultan figures became the revolutionary leadership in Manbij, which took the shape of the Revolutionary Council, and allied themselves with a faction descendant from the Brotherhood, Liwa al-Tawhid. Meanwhile, though Albu Banna and Hosh sheikhs supported the regime, poorer members of these tribes also joined the revolution—but were not allied with the council. Instead, many joined the so-called bread factions, Free Syrian Army groups known for criminality. By 2013, the Revolutionary Council-bread faction split was the key divide in Manbij. When Salafis like Ahrar al-Sham entered the scene, they represented a third force. In April 2013, they routed the bread factions, who dissolved or joined other, stronger groups. A pivotal moment then came in August, when many Hosh tribesmen, who had previously belonged to bread factions like The Prince’s Faruq Brigades, banded together with a Kurdish FSA group called Jabhat al-Akrad.144 This group, which had formed a year prior and had chapters in Manbij, Raqqa, and elsewhere, was secretly a PKK proxy.145 The new Jabhat alAkrad-bread faction alliance joined a rebel group called Ahrar al-Suriya, an anti-Liwa alTawhid faction headquartered in ʿAnadan. In other words, both the PKK and the Hosh tribespeople formed an alliance in the face of a common enemy, the Muslim Brotherhoodlinked Liwa al-Tawhid. In 2016, the Jabhat al-Akrad-Hosh alliance became the core of the newly formed Manbij Military Council.146 Before long, Jund al-Haramein also joined SDF, and the reiteration of Manbij’s classic divide was complete. Almost all of today’s key Arab figures in the Manbij SDF and local administration were once linked to the bread factions, or to tribal communities

that had opposed the Hadhrani- and Albu Sultan-dominated Revolutionary Council.147 In this way, issues of class and patronage continue to run through the heart of the Syrian conflict today. Syria’s Proxy War and Social Networks The Syrian conflict can appear dizzyingly complicated, but grasping its underlying logic can help make sense of it all. The uprising was concentrated in rural towns that were marginalized by the regime’s neoliberal economic opening after 2000; in contrast, wealthy metropoles like western Aleppo and Damascus never wavered in their support for the regime. Within the marginalized rural towns, the Syrian opposition broadly fell into two camps: a relatively wealthy merchant and landowning elite who had historic links to the Muslim Brotherhood, and poor Syrians primarily engaged in informal labor. The merchant elite formed a cohesive network with transnational ties to foreign states, and after 2011 they became the primary clients of the Qatar-Turkey axis. Because this network was cohesive, built on longstanding ties of trust, and displayed relative ideological coherence, they were easier for outside powers to control. Thus, Qatar enjoyed significant influence in determining battlefield dynamics. This proved most evident in the pivotal summer months of 2012, when a Turkish-Qatari push helped expel the regime from swathes of northern Syria, and pushed countryside rebels to invade and capture portions of Aleppo city. The poorer segment of the opposition, on the other hand, lacked strong pre-2011 ties beyond those of immediate kinship and neighborhood. There were few longstanding ties of trust between poor FSA rebels in, say, Idlib than between those in Manbij. Moreover, they lacked pre-2011 ties to foreign powers. Finally, this milieu had little by way of ideological coherence. These factors together made it more difficult for outside powers to direct their behavior. Yet to highlight the role of Syrian social structure in shaping patron capacity is not to reduce battlefield developments solely to patron-client dynamics. As the case of Manbij shows, the wealth and network divides among the opposition was central to shaping the trajectory of the revolution. Across eastern Syria, ISIS was able to exploit these divides, ultimately overthrowing both tendencies and destroying the opposition altogether. In the end, the question of class and network cohesion is pivotal to understanding both what happened internally in the uprising, and how these internal dynamics linked to the designs of foreign powers. While many commentators have pointed to the lack of cohesion of the FSA, they usually treat this as a purely strategic deficiency. In fact, the lack of cohesion stemmed from the nature of pre-2011 social structure in Syria. Rebels could not be expected to cohere under the trying conditions of the conflict when the social prerequisites for doing so simply did not exist. Ultimately, it was the policies of the Assad dictatorship itself that, over decades, ensured that the type of networks that could have grown into a cohesive insurgency never came into being.148

4

HOW RAQQA BECAME THE CAPITAL OF ISIS

Nate Rosenblatt and David Kilcullen

On 6 March 2013, Syria’s armed opposition, supported by multiple foreign sponsors, captured the city of Raqqa from Syrian government control. In a matter of days, the Syrian opposition seized what had been, before the war, Syria’s sixth-largest city. Raqqa was the first provincial capital to be captured by the insurgency, and many observers who supported the opposition initially saw its fall as a good omen for their victory against the government. But that optimism soured by November of that year when Raqqa fell to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). In January 2014, ISIS consolidated control over Raqqa, and for the next three and a half years Raqqa would become the capital of their so-called ‘Caliphate.’ This distinction marked Raqqa as the center of one of the most bloody and complex proxy wars thus far in the twenty-first century. Raqqa’s violent entry into global geopolitics began in 2013, when control of Raqqa changed hands three times during Syria’s civil war. First, it was controlled by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Second, it became the first provincial capital captured by the Syrian opposition. Third, it was seized by ISIS, which made this city on the edge of Syria’s eastern desert the capital of their short-lived Caliphate. The story of Raqqa during this dramatic year remains largely untold. Yet, what occurred in the city illustrates key elements of the complexity of Syria’s proxy conflict, revealing how a unified insurgency focused on controlling the local population wields a significant advantage over a coalition of militants distracted by internal disputes and their somewhat fickle and disunited foreign patrons. Although Raqqa was far less nationally significant than larger cities like Aleppo or Damascus, Syria’s opposition leaders wanted to make it a model for their vision of the future of the state. But the Syrian opposition, as they tried to build a coalition on the fly, was too divided internally, and their unexpected revolution quickly metastasized into a civil war. With no one clearly in charge, different groups and multiple external patrons tried to turn Raqqa into a template for varied models of a post-Assad Syria. In this way, competition between sponsors and poor coordination among local forces prevented these groups from consolidating their gains. As a result of these rivalries, proxy forces were unable to defeat

ISIS, which was a smaller group but better equipped, more experienced, and more unified. The Syrian opposition’s control over Raqqa was brittle and short-lived. ISIS captured Raqqa with a pre-planned strategy predicated on dividing and conquering its opponents. ISIS carefully mapped local social networks, using individualized targeted violence. By isolating its opponents, ISIS could defeat them one-by-one. Initially ISIS’ takeover of Raqqa coincided with a decline in the overall level of violence in the city. This may be associated with ISIS’ reliance on focused acts of violence that were no longer necessary after their victory, but may also have resulted from a decline in deadly Syrian government air strikes. Regardless of the cause, ISIS used the relative calm after it took control of Raqqa to bolster claims of its ability to provide security in contrast to the chaos of Syria’s civil war that existed elsewhere. In hindsight, ISIS was better at seizing territory where its opponents were weak than governing that territory after it was captured. While in control of Raqqa, ISIS failed to govern the city effectively. Based on surveys that the authors conducted in Raqqa in 2013– 15, we found that several key aspects of life worsened significantly under ISIS rule. First, perceptions of security among residents of Raqqa consistently declined under ISIS relative to other parts of Syria over the same time period. Second, ISIS was unable to provide continued access to essential services, such as electricity, despite the fact that Raqqa is next to Syria’s largest hydroelectric dam. Third, while Raqqa is Syria’s traditional breadbasket, its residents progressively lost access to bread under ISIS rule. As a result of ISIS’ inhumane governing practices and its incompetence as governors, violence and instability in Raqqa drove hundreds of thousands out of the urban center, shrinking the city’s estimated peak population of 500,000 inhabitants by 25 percent only a few years after ISIS took control.1 In this way, ISIS’ control of Raqqa was based more on its ability to exploit the security vacuum created by the competing elements of the country’s proxy war and the broader civil conflict than by its capacity to govern effectively and address local needs. Our analysis of ISIS control of Raqqa reveals flaws in the classic approach to understanding proxy warfare, which often takes as its starting point an analysis of how great powers create and support proxies in multiple locations on a global chess board. This Cold War-era realist model insufficiently addresses the role played by transnational movements and the social networks that support them. Some analysts have argued that the Syrian war stretches the bounds of traditional views of proxy warfare because of the range and complexity of principal sponsors and proxy agents involved.2 These dynamics are far from restricted to Syria, although the country’s conflict is a central example of what early twentyfirst-century proxy warfare looks like. Despite the importance of Raqqa, few have studied the city in depth, most likely because reporting and research from the city went from difficult to near impossible once ISIS named it as their capital. ISIS used brutal violence and extensive surveillance to restrict the flow of information, intimidating the population and abducting or murdering journalists. Nevertheless, some braved these threats and reported on what happened to their city. This chapter is possible because of their work.

The analysis presented here draws on data on economic conditions, population attitudes, and local atmospherics collected in Syria from 2012 to 2015, as well as information gathered through interviews and social media archives, to tell the story of what happened in Raqqa in 2013 and during the first years of ISIS control of the city.3 It begins chronologically, by tracing the evolution of the conflict in the city in four phases, and concludes with analytic reflections on larger lessons relevant to understanding the dynamics of proxy war drawn from the Raqqa case study. The chapter describes conditions in Raqqa at the start of the revolution, exploring how and why Syria’s armed opposition captured the city from Syrian Arab Republic Government (SARG) forces in March 2013. It then reviews how the rebels struggled and eventually failed to coalesce into something powerful enough to resist the ISIS takeover of November 2013. The chapter then examines ISIS governance, arguing that—far from some claims that the group was administering a complex state—ISIS was quite incompetent at governing. It then examines conditions in Raqqa after its recapture by the SDF in 2017, finding that acute insecurity in the city continued, making it ripe for ISIS resurgence. The 2013 battle for Raqqa represents how proxy competition shaped the war in Syria. It also illustrates the potential risks entailed in proxy strategies that fail to recognize the centrality of local governance to success. The case of Raqqa demonstrates that proxy warfare may be effective in seizing and holding territory in the short-term. But, without local forces or an emphasis on controlling and governing, proxies face substantial long-term challenges in stabilizing governance and security. Raqqa’s Reluctant Revolution: March 2011–March 2013 For nearly the entire first year of Syria’s uprising, Raqqa was thought of as too loyal to the regime to be a locus of opposition support (see Figure 4.1). But it would turn out that the regime had invested only in the political quiescence of Raqqawis (residents of Raqqa), not in their active military or political support. The tribes of Raqqa could tamp down dissent in peacetime but were not ready to fight for the regime when Syrian opposition forces bore down on the city in early 2013. The Assad government took its control of Raqqa for granted because the city was peripheral to the regime’s core interests; at the time, SARG forces were busy fighting on far more important fronts in Damascus and Aleppo. The Syrian regime had neither the attention nor the resources to bolster its defenses in March 2013. The same tribes that had pledged allegiance to President Bashar al-Assad in person eight months after the revolution began in March 2011 did little to stop opposition militias4 capturing their city. Raqqa city fell in a matter of days in March 2013 (see Figure 4.2).5 Fig. 4.1: Map of Control in Syria, January 2013

Source: https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/reports/how-raqqa-becamecapital-isis/raqqas-reluctant-revolution-march-2011-march-2013

Before the Syrian civil war reached Raqqa, in November 2011, President Bashar al-Assad still felt comfortable enough among Raqqawis to celebrate the Eid al-Adha festival with them.6 Assad led the Eid prayer, then listened to a sermon by Sheikh Abdul Azim Shekho at Raqqa’s Rehab al-Nour mosque. Shekho delivered a political sermon exhorting Assad and the people of Syria to resist the same international intervention that had ‘destroyed’ Iraq, ‘burned’ Libya, and split Sudan into two states. Shekho then turned to Assad: ‘The secret is to go forward with all the people behind you,’ he urged, ‘God will guide your footsteps.’7 Shekho, a Sufi, would be murdered by ISIS in Raqqa two and a half years after those remarks.8 Fig. 4.2: Map of Control in Syria, End of March 2013

Source: https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/reports/how-raqqa-becamecapital-isis/raqqas-reluctant-revolution-march-2011-march-2013

Following Imam Shekho’s sermon, Assad spent an hour in the mosque shaking hands with local notables and receiving sometimes comically embellished pledges of support from the sheikhs of the area’s fourteen major clans.9 These sheikhs were justifiably excited. Besides meeting Assad (likely for the first time), they were paid 3–5 million Syrian liras (US$60,000–100,000) each, depending on the size of their tribe.10 This payoff was enough for the Syrian government to buy passive support but was insufficient to earn genuine loyalty in the face of an imminent takeover by opposition forces. These same tribes would quickly ‘flip,’ pledging their allegiance to ISIS in another contrived ceremony two years later,11 this time receiving US$5,000–10,000 in exchange for similar promises of loyalty.12 Afterwards, Assad walked into the wide boulevard fronting the mosque, shaking hands with the crowd that had gathered out front. SANA, the regime’s news agency, quoted Assad as saying he had ‘no choice left but to win every battle.’13 The war for Syria had already begun, but Raqqa was far from its frontlines. The Syrian armed opposition factions that captured Raqqa in March 2013 were splintered from the beginning. They had different sources of sponsorship and different geographic and ideological roots. Their battle for Syria’s sixth-largest city, although brief, epitomized their approach: opportunistic, uncoordinated, and ill-prepared. Ahrar al-Sham (AS) and Jabhat alNusra (JAN) led the battle and were supported by two separate coalitions of small brigades. The first was a loose collection of militant Salafists and the second was an even more disparate hodgepodge of militias who were either independent, affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, or connected to the nominally secular Free Syrian Army’s (FSA) Supreme Military Council (SMC).14 These fighters approached from the city’s west and took Raqqa, then a city of about 220,000 people, over three days of fighting. AS captured government buildings as the city fell and, more or less by default, assumed the task of maintaining order. The war for Raqqa city ended quickly: SARG forces retreated from Raqqa to military bases and airfields outside the urban core, and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights declared anti-Assad militants in complete control of the city on 6 March 2013.15 The Syrian government did not appear to want to fight for the city. This was a matter of prioritization on the part of Assad’s overstretched professional military: with battles raging on critical fronts like Damascus and Aleppo, by March 2013 the regime had neither the attention nor the resources to bolster its defenses in Raqqa. Suddenly, a loose coalition of rebels had captured their first provincial capital. Taking refuge in Raqqa before its capture were hundreds of thousands,16 possibly up to one million,17 internally displaced persons (IDPs) from western Syria. That these refugees chose Raqqa indicated how few believed the city would fall to the opposition, or even that the civil war would engulf the city at all. Once Raqqa fell, many displaced Syrians fled further east. Meanwhile, those who actively opposed Bashar al-Assad, in Raqqa and everywhere else, turned their eyes to the city to see what would happen next. Revolutionary Rule in Raqqa: March 2013–November 2013 For a time, Raqqa represented all that was exhilarating about Syria’s revolution: governance in the city was so democratic that no one appeared to be the leader. The revolutionary

environment—typical of newly liberated cities in civil war18—meant that anyone could, and initially did, have a say. But the same characteristics that gave the movement so much democratic promise also contained the seeds of its demise: since everyone was in charge, no one was. The range of actors with different social bases, ties to transnational social movements, and external patrons posed deep challenges as local groups grappled with the act of governing. Everyone wanted to make Syria’s first liberated provincial capital into a model for the rest of the country, but neither those in Raqqa nor those who supported them from afar were able to work together to make this a reality. The consequences of that failure would be devastating. The spontaneity and democratic spirit that so excited Syrians who had previously lived under a totalitarian government, with its reliance on rigid control and brutal repression, inspired many to risk their lives to protest against Assad. The mood in Raqqa at the time of its capture in spring 2013 was optimistic, as was evident in discussions with locals: ‘We didn’t fight and protest Assad to then have these fanatics,’ explained a secular activist, already aware of the presence of religious hardline militias. He continued, ‘one thing that keeps us activists hopeful is our society. Although Raqqa is a tribal area, people are open and tolerant. Even those who are a bit conservative, are very open-minded compared to Jabhat alNusra or ISIS. So, our society will resist [their] imposed regime.’19 The militants who seized Raqqa seemed astounded at the speed of their own success. While they may have had some plans to capture the city, they did not appear to have had plans to govern it. Residents exhibited a certain ‘learned helplessness,’ evident also in other places where people habituated by long exposure to authoritarian government expected the regime to decide the smallest issues, as for decades prior showing individual initiative had been a great way to get killed. This meant that even if they had been prepared, local civil society leaders often lacked the necessary management knowledge and experience to run the city. The result was chaos. Each of the various factions that had been involved in the city’s capture fought the others for control of parts of Raqqa while the Syrian government launched punitive air strikes on the city. ‘Security is controlled by [armed] battalions. Each battalion has its own policy,’ explained one resident, reflecting comments that were common at the time. ‘There is no policing system,’ explained another, while a third rated security conditions as extremely bad, simply saying: ‘There are so many armed battalions!’20 Alongside maintaining control, the factions quickly learned that procuring basic goods and delivering crucial services were as important to the conflict as its military aspects. For a while, the thrill of liberation papered over perceptions of insecurity and the lack of reliable services. In interviews during this time, there was a prevailing positive attitude of making do with what was available. ‘They evaluate the essential needs and try to secure them based on priorities and available resources,’ explained one resident of the local governing council in May 2013. But communities can only tolerate chaos and uncertainty for so long. Militants from Ahrar al-Sham became the de facto leaders of Raqqa after it was liberated because they were the largest, best-organized, and most powerful armed group in the city. When Raqqa first fell in March 2013, Ahrar al-Sham fighters captured the central bank, the

post office, and municipal offices that held personal information about local residents. This gave them an enormous advantage as governors of the city. But Ahrar al-Sham, like SARG before it, was overstretched. ‘They were foreigners to Raqqa,’ explained Mutasem Syoufi, Executive Director of the civil society group The Day After; many of Ahrar al-Sham’s members ‘were from Hama and Idlib. I think Ahrar al-Sham saw [the fall of Raqqa] as an opportunity to be the strongest group in the area and they took it.’21 While Ahrar al-Sham played a key role in capturing Raqqa, they were neither prepared nor necessarily interested in governing. ‘They came, they took the money, and they promised to give it to the city; and they did not,’ explained Syoufi.22 Ahrar al-Sham fighters generally stayed at their headquarters and did not come out to engage the population. For a while, they gave a weekly allowance to the local council to provide basic services in the city, but these funds were widely viewed as inadequate.23 Abdalaziz Alhamza, a Raqqa activist and founder of the group Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, noted that for the most part AS kept the money and assets it seized for itself, transferring them back to its base of operations in Idlib and Hama provinces of northwestern Syria.24 In some ways, Ahrar al-Sham adopted a strategy of control not entirely dissimilar from Assad’s, consisting of payments to local tribes in exchange for loyalty, the very strategy that had failed in the lead-up to the city’s takeover. Aside from their Sharia courts, Ahrar alSham’s main service was escorting aid deliveries to Raqqa. As one member of the local council explained: ‘As the Raqqa Local Council (LC), we are always escorted by members of Ahrar al-Sham when we try to get aid from the Turkish border crossing at Tal Abyad. When other armed groups see an Ahrar al-Sham flag on the car, they wouldn’t attack us.’25 But residents expected more from Ahrar al-Sham. They wanted effective administration of the city and economic support. And, when ISIS started kidnapping prominent civilian activists, the ineffectual response of Ahrar al-Sham’s fighters engendered tremendous resentment among Raqqawis, who had expected the group to protect them. By failing to keep the population safe, in effect Ahrar al-Sham failed to deliver the only service it had ever really provided, and its credibility suffered accordingly. As explained by Stathis Kalyvas in On the Logic of Violence in Civil War, and as observed directly by the authors in other war zones, popular collaboration with any particular group in Raqqa rested on that group’s ability to deliver safety and predictability for the population, via control of territory.26 Political support followed effective presence rather than vice versa, something that became increasingly evident as Ahrar al-Sham’s control, always halfhearted, eventually collapsed under pressure from ISIS. Raqqa presented a tremendous opportunity for Syrians to demonstrate that they could shape their post-Assad future. The revolutionary movement may have appeared weak in Raqqa before its capture, evidenced by the lack of protests during the Syrian revolution’s first two years. But its activists were ‘some of the most active and creative’ in Syria’s revolutionary movement, according to Assad al-Achi, executive director for a nationwide organization that helped coordinate civil society. After Raqqa was captured by opposition forces, dozens of civil society organizations were established, including youth movements, aid delivery organizations, and a variety of local coordination groups that tried to ensure that

basic services were available. Still, Raqqa’s activists were ‘completely unprepared for this liberation,’ according to al-Achi. In fact, the regime’s loss of control of the city revealed the groups’ lack of coordination and common mission; al-Achi explained that ‘their liberation gave them the first chance to realize how diverse they were.’27 But regional and international factionalism and poor planning undermined any unity of purpose among political groups working in Raqqa. Syria was not only a battleground between those trying to protect or depose the government, it was also a place where regional powers fought wars that would be too costly to wage on their own soil. Saudi Arabia and Iran fought a war in Syria, with Iran supporting the government and Saudi Arabia seeking to depose it in favor of giving rule to the country’s opposition, which was mostly based in Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority. But within this Sunni Muslim community, there was a perhaps equally bitter ideological struggle between religious nationalists—mostly supported by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—and those who supported the Muslim Brotherhood’s brand of political Islam, mainly Turkey and Qatar.28 These competing interests, along with others, fought each other on Syrian soil. But while their attention was focused on a chain of Syrian cities, from Damascus in the south to Aleppo in the north, they ignored Raqqa’s place within these conflicts. Within Syrian opposition groups, none faced a more important test than the Syrian National Coalition (the ‘Etilaf’). The Etilaf, founded in November 2012 in Doha, Qatar, was the Syrian opposition’s government-in-exile. At the time of the Etilaf’s formation, it appeared that the Saudi and Qatari governments—both among the Etilaf’s key patrons—had reconciled their differences. But dramatic shifts of power in the region, particularly the July 2013 ouster of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Morsi, who had been brought to power in the wake of the Arab Spring protests, would quickly reopen divisions and contribute to disunity within the Etilaf.29 Meanwhile, the United States was unprepared for how Syria’s uprising would unfold. American diplomats lacked the necessary leverage or support from the Obama administration, which remained wary of involvement in Syria, for influencing regional actors to make compromises in the name of unifying the Syrian opposition.30 This was a product of the Obama administration’s attempt to learn the lessons of the Iraq War and not intervene in complicated Middle Eastern conflicts.31 As a result, neither the Etilaf nor its backers could unify in a meaningful way. This became critical in the contest for control of Raqqa. As soon as the city was liberated, the Etilaf came under immediate pressure to show that it was a government, not just an advocacy group. Mutasem Syoufi, who worked for the Etilaf at the time, lobbied its leaders to establish an official branch in Raqqa to help residents develop a viable government. ‘Raqqa was the test lab for the whole revolution,’ Syoufi explained, ‘it was the first capital that was liberated from the regime. It was not highly populated … there were high hopes for the [Etilaf] at the time.’32 Syoufi decided to go to Raqqa on his own, just after it was liberated, for an impromptu fact-finding mission. When Syoufi arrived in Raqqa, he found utter chaos. ‘People looked at me and asked me what they should do,’ he explained. ‘I told them to establish a representative committee—a

“provincial congress”—of 1,000 people that would then elect a provincial council to help get life back on track.’ Syoufi promised to support this council with connections to the Etilaf and donors. He returned to Turkey to report on his findings. At the same time, even though the Etilaf was widely seen as a successful reconciliation effort bringing together diverse elements in Syria’s opposition, its flaws were apparent mere months into its existence. Its first president was Moaz al-Khatib, the former imam of Damascus’ 1,300-year-old Ummayad mosque. Khatib was inspiring but not diplomatic, and he struggled to build consensus in an organization that, at the time, was better described as a loose collection of individuals with foreign backers rather than an institutionalized opposition.33 For example, Khatib did not want the Etilaf’s leadership to accept a salary, for fear of the political consequences of their receiving foreign government support. Despite Khatib’s opposition, members of the Etilaf did accept salaries from the foreign governments who supported them.34 This meant that they rarely worked together, but instead pursued different (sponsor-influenced) agendas while nominally maintaining the same institutional affiliation. After he returned from Raqqa, Syoufi met with Khatib when he set up a meeting between Khatib and local organizers from Raqqa in April 2013. ‘They told him to visit,’ Syoufi explained of the meeting. But Khatib never went to Raqqa and never gave Syoufi an explanation for his decision. Khatib kept his own counsel and rarely shared his reasons for making one decision or another, which alienated potential supporters.35 Qutaiba Idlibi, a volunteer member of Khatib’s staff, did not disagree with this characterization of Khatib as a leader. But he emphasized that the Etilaf could not have had much influence on Raqqa even if Khatib wanted it to do more work there: ‘There was no institution to support him,’ he said, ‘they [the members of the Etilaf] wanted him to be the face of the Etilaf but with no authority. The first four months of the Etilaf was basically a fight for who would control it.’36 Syoufi suggested that Khatib and the Etilaf decided against establishing a headquarters in Raqqa because ‘their focus was on a different place—the politics of the Etilaf and on other parts of Syria. There was a dismissal of Raqqa as an important place in Syria; they wanted to know what was going on in Aleppo or Damascus instead.’37 Idlibi, a member of Khatib’s staff, agreed: ‘The opposition mostly came from metropolitan cities,’ he explained, ‘the way they understand politics is that the only two important cities in Syria are Aleppo and Damascus and that’s it.’ Raqqa was a poor and largely ignored region, and it received little attention from the Syrian opposition leadership.38 This disregard for Raqqa would expose the fundamental flaws that crippled the Etilaf: its internal political divisions, exacerbated by foreign donors, and its inability to form connections inside the country. In its parliamentary-style governing body, the Etilaf designated one seat for each of Syria’s fourteen main regions. Individuals were appointed as ‘representatives’ for each province, serving as the Etilaf’s liaison with local communities. The flaws and internal struggles of Syria’s opposition were embodied in its representative for Raqqa, a man named Mustafa Ali al-Nawaf.39 Nawaf was born in Turaif, a Saudi town on the Jordanian border. While nominally representing Raqqa in the Etilaf, Nawaf spent little time there. At the outbreak of the revolution, reports suggested he hadn’t visited the town for about fifteen years.40 Nawaf

did not know many people in Raqqa and had little understanding of the city’s political terrain. And, like many Syrians who grew up in Saudi Arabia, he was considered close to the Muslim Brotherhood faction of the opposition, led by Mustafa Sabbagh, Etilaf’s secretary-general at the time. This not only made Nawaf disconnected from events in Raqqa, but it also brought suspicion that he was using Etilaf resources to purchase support from specific individuals in Raqqa on behalf of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. As a result, in the first few months after March 2013, Raqqawis demanded Nawaf be replaced with someone who knew their city better and could help them. The Etilaf refused.41 By the end of April 2013, militants controlled Raqqa’s administrative buildings. But they did little to help manage the city’s affairs. In turn, dozens of local community organizations were formed to provide services, but they lacked leadership. In the absence of clarity as to who was in charge, Raqqawis struggled to build a functioning municipality. As one resident summarized at the time: The problem is that the local council is very polarized. They have been divided over minor differences … this is one problem of many. The local council can’t confront ISIS, JAN, or other Islamist armed groups; therefore, it tries to compromise with them. I don’t know whether that’s a good thing.42 While various external actors—not only the Etilaf, but also regional and international governments and networks of wealthy donors—sought to influence or control Raqqa from the outside, so-called local councils emerged from the bottom up. These self-organized groups quickly emerged in many liberated areas, forming the backbone of a structure of municipal governance in towns captured from the SARG across Syria. On the whole, the councils were locally representative and responsible for coordinating and managing assistance and service provision in their communities. The councils were, as the name suggests, local responses—akin to a self-help initiative for governance—to specific municipal problems. As such, they tended to work best in small-scale situations. Because they lacked broad representative structures or administrative reach, they were unable to address the needs of large cities. Furthermore, local councils lacked a unifying umbrella structure that would have enabled them to work together to form a larger governance network. This was partly due to the complexity of the coordination involved, as well as a failure on the part of the Etilaf to provide top-down support for these spontaneously formed, bottom-up institutions, which some Etilaf members saw as rivals. In the absence of clear leadership, the community created two distinct councils. One formed around a lawyer named Abdullah Khalil, who led the Etilaf’s council. Meanwhile, a group of activists elected by their peers formed another council modeled on other local councils in opposition-held Syria. After some early disputes, the two groups joined together several months later to form a single council for managing the affairs of the entire province of Raqqa.43 Under pressure, the activists agreed that the Etilaf’s council would govern Raqqa province under Khalil. This gave the Etilaf a critical inroad to build ties to Raqqa activists.44 Because there were so many armed groups in Raqqa, and in particular so many armed groups with fighters from outside the area, lawlessness and inconsistent policing were

frequent concerns for residents, according to interviews we conducted at the time.45 This was where Khalil was indispensable, since he had good relationships with local armed groups as well as with the political opposition abroad. In a broader, proxy warfare sense, it seems that intermediaries, or brokers, of this kind— individuals with strong connections both to local groups and external sponsors—are key players, and likely to rise to personal prominence. In Khalil’s case, his overseas connections and his working relationship with JAN and Ahrar al-Sham were critical. Even though JAN and Ahrar al-Sham were beginning to establish a court system of their own, Khalil was able to balance municipal responsibilities with his relationship to these militant groups because he was universally well liked and respected. A lawyer who had defended opponents of the Syrian government before the 2011 uprising, Khalil had been a vigorous supporter of the revolution and had been arrested several times before Raqqa was liberated.46 Meanwhile, the militant groups in Raqqa maintained an uneasy peace. Ahrar al-Sham’s forces were ensconced in the city’s main administrative buildings until the summer of 2013, while the FSA were based in locations dotted throughout the city. The main Salafist militant group, JAN, was based on the outskirts of the city, and it did not interrupt the work of the local council or impose its strict interpretation of Islamic law on residents. Despite (or perhaps because of) its tendency at the time to favor persuasion rather than coercion, JAN made the most substantial inroads into Raqqa’s society. Rania Abouzeid, a journalist who was reporting from the city at the time, covered JAN’s political outreach to other militant factions in the city. She recounted how JAN instigated, for a time, a ‘battle of flags,’ replacing the green Syrian revolutionary flag in the city’s main square with its own black flag with white letters depicting the shahada.47 JAN also penetrated Raqqa’s society in a more significant way: by recruiting Raqqa’s native sons via Islamist ties and the network of cross-border tribal connections linking eastern Syria with western Iraq. According to Hassan Hassan, an expert on ISIS from eastern Syria, around thirty-five of JAN’s most notable members came from rural Raqqa. These members were recruited by their relatives in Iraq through the active, extended kinship networks that are common in tribal societies.48 This process took months, and during this time JAN—in Raqqa and elsewhere—generally avoided confrontation. The group also accepted thousands of defectors from FSA groups across Syria.49 Still, despite building strong links into Raqqa, JAN did not appear to want to enforce its rule over the city’s residents. Protests against JAN’s activities went unpunished.50 And, during this time, ‘Nusrah never stopped the local council from working or imposed their order,’ explained Syoufi, ‘my conclusion [at the time] was that they didn’t have a project to govern Raqqa either.’51 Meanwhile, the foreign-backed Supreme Military Council, a body once envisioned as the ‘defense ministry’ of the Etilaf, failed to receive substantive international support, in part because its patrons were divided—in the Saudi-Qatari split noted earlier, as well as in regional competition between Arab powers and Turkey—and in part because of the lack of energetic engagement by the United States, one of the few actors that could have initially mustered the leverage to unify the group.

One month after Raqqa was liberated, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi released an audio statement announcing that JAN would be folded into a new creation called the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). Baghdadi, who had headed both groups’ forerunner in Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), claimed authority to issue the declaration, but quickly clashed with al-Qaeda core leadership. Ayman al-Zawahiri opposed the announcement, as did JAN leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, a Syrian who himself had served as a regional leader of ISI, responsible for Iraq’s Nineveh province. For the first few months, this dispute made little difference to the fighters and residents of Raqqa: people seemed to see ISIS and JAN as interchangeable.52 Even ISIS did not appear to draw an important distinction between the two in its internal documents.53 But, by July, a clear break in the leadership had appeared: Mohammed Saeed al-Abdullah (‘Abu Sa’ad alHadrami’), JAN governor in Raqqa, opposed ISIS’ manipulations and detentions of other armed groups. The former blacksmith from Raqqa reaffirmed his support for JAN as a separate entity from ISIS.54 Hadrami, with his supporters, fled to a town outside of Raqqa, where they would form the last resistance to ISIS’ control of the region,55 but on 12 September 2013, Hadrami was kidnapped and murdered—his body was recovered 150 kilometers outside Raqqa—and the JAN resistance soon dispersed.56 Meanwhile, the majority of fighters who had originally pledged allegiance to JAN remained part of the newly formed ISIS under Ali Moussa al-Shawakh (‘Abu Luqman’), formerly JAN’s deputy governor for Raqqa. In the 2000s, Abu Luqman had been in the business of smuggling jihadists to fight Americans in Iraq.57 One of hundreds of suspected jihadists released by the Assad government in 2011, he was a member of one of the four largest clans in Raqqa. His local prominence, combined with committed recruits from antiKurdish and Islamist elements of allied tribes, gave ISIS deep tribal ties in Raqqa. Abu Luqman, who personally killed his former boss Hadrami as proof of his loyalty to ISIS, therefore performed a similar intermediary role—connecting external sponsors with local groups—as noted earlier for Khalil. Luqman would become crucial for ISIS in Raqqa, including in his role its governor there. His current whereabouts are unknown.58 By the summer of 2013, ISIS had absorbed most of JAN, and the group was growing increasingly brazen in confronting and regularly detaining militia commanders and civil society activists, with local ISIS commanders either acting on their own initiative or through a so-called legal ‘process’ established by the Sharia courts they created. These detentions resulted in clashes between ISIS and other militant groups, which finally registered concerns from the FSA’s Supreme Military Council (SMC).59 Although the SMC formed a so-called Eastern Front group to address internecine conflicts in Raqqa, Deir Ez Zour, and al-Hasakeh, few SMC commanders knew Raqqa well.60 ‘In general, people—moderate Muslims and even some non-ISIS affiliated extremists—are afraid to even talk about what’s happening in Raqqa,’ explained J.S., a Christian in Raqqa. He continued: ‘There were small protests by civil society organizations but what can these guys do? They can’t do anything about a problem [like ISIS].’61 ISIS kidnapped (and almost certainly murdered) many local residents who played critical

roles in keeping the delicate peace needed to govern the city. One of the most devastating kidnappings of all was that of Abdullah Khalil, the head of the Raqqa local council. Khalil was traveling to his home in eastern Raqqa on 19 May 2013, when five armed men in a black Kia Rio stopped his car and demanded that he step out. Accusing him of being an Alawite and collaborating with the Syrian regime, the men grabbed Khalil and took him away. The three other men traveling with Khalil either managed to escape or were allowed to flee. This was a turning point, according to al-Achi, as Khalil was ‘the only respected middleman by everyone.’62 While Khalil’s whereabouts remain unknown as of this writing, and no group has claimed responsibility for his kidnapping, sources indicate the operation to abduct Khalil was planned and conducted by ISIS.63 In 2017, a Syrian media outlet obtained the notes of ISIS militants who were tracking Khalil in 2013, implicating ISIS in his abduction and likely murder, though the group did not take credit for his disappearance. The notes confirm what many believed at the time: that Khalil was the linchpin of civil society efforts in Raqqa. ISIS saw him as a significant threat: their notes about Khalil were meticulous. Describing him as a ‘civil society commander,’ ISIS militants noted who Khalil met with and where, his office location, the guards stationed there, and what cars were most commonly parked outside. ISIS believed Khalil had ‘unlimited’ foreign contacts and advocated for what they believed was an ‘absurd idea’: creating a civil state influenced by Islamic law.64 In effect— while not necessarily putting it in these terms—the militants had recognized Khalil’s critical intermediary role of connecting external sponsors with locally credible actors, and they moved to eliminate him as a threat. A separate set of leaked documents, first recovered by Christoph Reuter in the Syrian town of Tel Rifaat and described in an article for the German publication Der Spiegel in 2015, offered proof that Khalil’s kidnapping was not unique to Raqqa. Rather, it represented part of a general ISIS strategy of assassinating influential local leaders to capture and govern towns and cities across the region.65 These efforts appear to be linked to an ISIS strategy for infiltrating and capturing new territory. The strategy was developed by an Iraqi who went by the nom de guerre Haji Bakr, and whose given name is Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi. Haji Bakr was a colonel in Iraqi intelligence under Saddam Hussein, a regime that invested enormous resources over decades in linking detailed surveillance with brutal acts of repression. He lost his position due to the 2003 de-Ba’athification law imposed by the Coalition Provisional Authority in the early days of the American-led occupation of Iraq. Bakr was jailed, together with some of those who later became senior planners for ISIS, in Camp Bucca. After his release in 2008, Bakr gained enough influence in the group to help Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi become the next leader of the Islamic State of Iraq, ISIS’ forerunner, after the group’s previous leaders were killed in a raid in 2010.66 Bakr, according to the files reported by Reuter, not only developed an organizational chart for the entire ISIS state, but also made careful plans for seizing new territory with as little actual violence as possible. The newly announced ISIS, formed just as Raqqa was liberated, would expose the fault lines within Syria’s opposition and enact Bakr’s plan in Raqqa to devastating effect.

The first step in Bakr’s plan was to establish a Da’wah office (an Islamic outreach center). Centers of this type appeared innocuous and ubiquitous and therefore drew little scrutiny. Of those who attended the center’s initial lectures on religious life, several were recruited to serve as the group’s spies. They would be asked to ‘list the powerful families and the powerful individuals in those families, find out their sources of income, name the powerful rebel groups in the area and who controls them, find out their illegal activities (according to Sharia law), which could be used to blackmail them if necessary.’67 Using this information, ISIS then designed a strategy for penetrating the power structure of any village. ISIS also arrested and detained rival militants and local notables on trumped-up charges, bribing those for whom ISIS found incriminating evidence, and kidnapping and murdering the others. And, to cement its connections to local social networks, ISIS arranged marriages between its fighters and the daughters of influential households. Haji Bakr’s strategy was precisely the one that ISIS used to capture Raqqa. And, from that city, the group systematically implemented Haji Bakr’s careful plan throughout the country. ‘ISIS has large operation rooms inside Syria,’ explained a local source in October 2013, continuing: ‘They are mainly located in Raqqa. They are linked to high profile figures in Iraq. These guys are well organized. They have a comprehensive structure of how their future Islamic state would be. They don’t act based on reactions, because they have well-prepared plans.’68 As Reuter’s notes on Bakr’s strategy indicate, and as confirmed by our fieldwork, ISIS cells commonly killed opponents when they were unable to control them through bribes, threats, or blackmail.69 They would especially target activists working in media, according to Abdalaziz Alhamza, offering them money, equipment, cameras, and other opportunities.70 If their targets were popular, ISIS sought to co-opt their base of support. And, where this was impossible, the group kidnaped and killed both leaders and supporters, as was likely the case of Abdullah Khalil. In Raqqa, ISIS’ strategy was both devastating and effective. By getting rid of Khalil and other local leaders, the militants quickly dismantled a delicate peace that had just begun to work. Through brutal use of strategic violence to target and silence opponents and the intricate work of mapping the key individuals and networks—including the civil society networks—involved in efforts to control Raqqa, ISIS successfully disrupted the city’s emerging system of governance. In the absence of unified and powerful leadership among its opponents, ISIS achieved first-mover advantage in a social and political context of chaos and uncertainty. One of the last armed groups to confront ISIS in Raqqa was a militia known as Ahfad alRasul. On the night of 13 August 2013, an ISIS suicide bomber detonated a car full of explosives at the Ahfad al-Rasul headquarters, killing the group’s commander and at least five other fighters.71 This attack was significant for two reasons. First, it was reportedly ISIS’ first suicide bombing against another rebel group in Syria.72 Second, it killed key members of the only remaining group with ties to the SMC, the Free Syrian Army’s military council.73 ISIS arrested survivors of the attack. In response, the group’s remaining fighters joined JAN. As an FSA-affiliated rebel commander stated at the time, ‘half of the FSA has been devoured

by ISIS and the other half joined JAN.’74 On 15 September 2013, ISIS forced all remaining FSA fighters out of Raqqa and placed placards at every entrance to the city welcoming outsiders to the ‘Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham: Raqqa Province.’75 At this point, it may be useful to ask why Raqqa became ISIS’ launchpad. ISIS took the city when it seemed that every armed group was taking Raqqa for granted. The Syrian regime believed the city would remain loyal but did not expend the military resources necessary to protect it. Once liberated, Raqqa was also not a focus for the national Syrian opposition, who in 2013, were more interested in Damascus and Aleppo. Meanwhile, JAN had scouted and built strong links to Raqqa’s tribes but had not committed its own senior leadership to that place. When Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi sent a deputy to test JAN’s loyalty in 2013, he found that JAN’s leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, was in Idlib and his deputy, Abu Maria al-Qahtani, was in Deir ez-Zour. That meant JAN had assets in Raqqa that were well developed but were not being overseen by a senior leader. Whether ISIS leadership recognized this gap and deliberately exploited it is not entirely clear, but what is apparent is that Raqqa was a major city left unclaimed by other militias (JAN, Ahrar al-Sham, SARG, or FSA), who were more interested in larger prizes. By November 2013, ISIS controlled Raqqa. To celebrate, the group convened a meeting of local notables and chiefs from the fourteen largest clans in the area. The elders duly pledged allegiance to ISIS in exchange for payment, just as they had done for Assad almost exactly two years prior.76 Fig. 4.3: Map of Control in Syria, February 2014

Source: https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/reports/how-raqqa-becamecapital-isis/revolutionary-rule-in-raqqa-march-2013-november-2013

Raqqa: ISIS’ Capital ISIS’ rule initially offered residents relief from the chaos and violence of Raqqa’s tumultuous 2013. Still, much of the cruelty Raqqawis suffered before ISIS took the city was generated by the group’s deliberate strategy of provoking exactly that kind of violent uncertainty, allowing it to sweep in and rescue communities from the very fear it had itself created. Likewise, once in charge, ISIS maintained control through brutal repression, intimidation, and fear. That said, some locals held on to their initial hopes that ISIS might resolve Raqqa’s political and governance challenges. Having pushed out challengers for control of Raqqa, ISIS began consolidating its rule from November 2013 onward. This process was enabled both by ISIS’ soon-to-be-proven-false promise of bringing security and respite from violence, ISIS’ fueling of that very violence it promised to protect communities from, and its application of brutal, coercive measures. When ISIS began to consolidate its control over Raqqa, it gained support from people relieved by a reduction in violence in the city. As explained below, it is not easy to determine the reasons for this decline even as it provided a contrast with the dangers that preceded ISIS’ takeover. In writing this chapter, we worked with OMELAS, a security and risk advisory firm, to gather and analyze data on all deaths in Syria from 2011 to 2015 in all of Syria’s sixty-one districts (see Figures 4.4 and 4.5).77 While deaths are an imperfect proxy for military confrontation, we can identify time periods in the data when violence spiked in Raqqa relative to other regions in the country. Figure 4.4 shows that lethal violence first spiked when Raqqa was captured by the opposition at the beginning of March 2013. While Raqqa was under opposition control, there was a sustained period of several months during which the death toll was high for Raqqa but average relative to the rate of deaths across Syria. Some of this may be attributed to chaotic conditions in the city, but we suspect most deaths during this period were due to a sustained bombing campaign by SARG. As the International Crisis Group reported at the time, civilians ‘fled in droves’ in March and April 2013 because they feared ‘regime retaliation and in particular ballistic missile attacks.’78 Figure 4.4 also shows that deaths in Raqqa plummeted in the same period that ISIS gained total control of Raqqa. From January–May 2014, there were an average of eleven deaths per month, among the lowest death rate of any district in Syria (excluding pro-Assad Alawite regions). By contrast, during the March–July 2013 period when opposition forces tried to govern Raqqa, there had been an average of seventy-seven deaths per month, a dramatically higher number. Fig. 4.4: Number of People Killed in Each District in Syria, 2011–15 (per capita)

Source: https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/reports/how-raqqa-becamecapital-isis/raqqa-isis-capital Fig. 4.5: Cumulative Deaths by District in Syria, 2011–15

Source: https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/reports/how-raqqa-becamecapital-isis/raqqa-isis-capital Why did deaths initially decline so precipitously under ISIS? Our research, as well as mass graves discovered around Raqqa after ISIS was defeated in the city in 2017,79 demonstrates that the group engaged in systematic killing of opponents during this time. Part of the decline might be explained by the fact that ISIS deployed highly public acts of violence as a means of demonstrating its brutal monopoly on the use of force (as evidenced by videos of public executions) and thereby deterring other violent actors.80 Yet, there were also fewer deaths because other forms of killing—such as regime air strikes—did not occur in Raqqa during this period. Many analysts at the time argued that the lack of Syrian government air strikes was a sign that the two groups were, if not working together, then at least finding a common cause in fighting the opposition. Our own observation suggests that allowing ISIS to grow in Syria supported a general narrative bolstered by the regime, whereby President Bashar al-Assad sought to paint all rebels as jihadists in an attempt to gain international credibility. At the same time, we found nothing beyond circumstantial evidence for direct regime-ISIS collaboration. In effect, Assad

may have tolerated ISIS because it served his broader narrative (and because he lacked the troops or resources to do much about it), although he stopped short of directly collaborating with them. Since ISIS operatives had been in Raqqa for months and had captured the city through careful strategy using subversion and intimidation, they were familiar with the community and its needs, and were thus better prepared to govern than their predecessors. As the dominant local armed actor, ISIS applied a combination of brutal repression, persuasive measures, and administrative services to create a system of competitive control, corralling the population and ensuring collaboration.81 Nevertheless, ISIS leaders turned out to be incompetent governors when it came to Raqqa. Their failures were linked in part to overemphasis on coercion and minimal commitment to substantive governance, rendering their control both fear-based and brittle. The initial promise of security appeared genuine on the surface, but locals were quickly disillusioned as they experienced ISIS’ predation and gang-like rule. At first, ISIS’ control over Raqqa (see Figure 4.3) proved to be a boon for residents. ISIS fighters flooded the local economy with cash by overpaying at restaurants, spending extravagant amounts on basic goods from local markets, and purchasing equipment, mobile phones, and cars from local suppliers.82 They reopened flour mills in the countryside north of Raqqa, stabilizing bread prices in the area.83 They replaced imams at local mosques in most of Raqqa and issued four decrees demanding strict adherence to Islamic law, with a Sharia court system put in place to mete out harsh punishment.84 Yet, interestingly, they let the local council in Raqqa continue to operate and provide services to residents, providing it did not challenge ISIS’ rule.85 ISIS’ control of Raqqa thus—at least initially—brought some measure of stability. This is important because in war civilian populations aim to maximize predictability and profit, broadly defined, while minimizing risk and uncertainty.86 As noted, there were also very few Syrian government air strikes at the time, which made things much easier for residents than in March and April 2013, when the newly liberated city had been subjected to regular aerial bombardment. But the honeymoon period under ISIS did not last. According to surveys conducted by Caerus Associates starting from December 2013 until November 2014 (see Figure 4.6), most residents in Raqqa said security was at least ‘moderate’ and nearly everyone had over fifteen hours of electricity. (The 3 percent of survey respondents who did not have fifteen or more hours per day had more than eleven hours per day). By spring 2014, ISIS had started to stabilize bread distribution, yet most people said bread was inaccessible or unavailable. Meanwhile, electricity access had declined, and perceptions of insecurity had started to rise, from 37 percent saying security was ‘very bad’ or ‘bad’ in January 2014, to 48 percent by April. In July 2014, when Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared the ISIS ‘Caliphate’ in Mosul, 82 percent of Raqqawis described security conditions as ‘very bad’ or ‘bad,’ the highest of any region surveyed at the time. In addition, 76 percent of residents surveyed feared crimes or kidnapping on a daily basis. In the same survey, none of the respondents from Raqqa trusted

militia commanders in their city—a surrogate indicator for local support of ISIS, since this was the only militia in the area—whereas 32 percent of residents in other parts of Syria did trust militia leaders. It is notable that 93 percent of Raqqa residents reported that Islamic groups ‘don’t protect or help me’ or ‘don’t fight for the revolution.’ In the other communities surveyed, only 20 percent of people reported that Islamic groups failed to protect them or advance the cause of the revolution.87 By the end of 2014, living conditions in Raqqa had plummeted, becoming some of the worst in all of Syria. Only 8 percent of residents in Raqqa reported more than fifteen hours per day of electricity (down from 97 percent at the beginning of the year).88 The percentage of Raqqawis reporting fewer than eleven hours of electricity per day increased from zero percent at the beginning of the year to 58 percent. Everyone surveyed in the city reported that bread was unavailable or inaccessible. And every respondent expressed acute insecurity, not because of a lack of enforcement of security, but because as conditions in Raqqa worsened, ISIS’ rule became more capricious. Fig. 4.6: Living Conditions in Syria: Raqqa Compared to Other Regions (December 2013– November 2014)

Source: https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/reports/how-raqqa-becamecapital-isis/raqqa-isis-capital ISIS controlled Raqqa for another three years. It remained the dominant armed group in the city until October 2017, when an offensive by US-backed forces defeated the group and forced its last remnants from Raqqa. While some have argued that ISIS ran a ‘complex system of government,’89 in reality, our fieldwork—and our surveys of local opinion, which we continued to conduct in Raqqa even under ISIS rule—showed that the group governed poorly, creating a set of administrative mechanisms that, within the first half of 2014, largely failed to provide basic services to the city’s population. Raqqa has been historically known as Syria’s breadbasket.90 It is located on the Euphrates river and benefits from a nearby reservoir and hydroelectric dam, which has long provided residents easy access to clean drinking water and electricity. The areas around the city produce large amounts of crops, and Raqqa was the site of massive grain silos. Yet, despite ISIS’ complex bureaucracy, the group had few people with the technical skills to manage

electrical and water systems, or to make necessary repairs. ISIS leaders became ‘desperate’ when things broke down, as a US official explained in December 2015, ‘[they don’t] have a whole lot of engineers and staff to run the cities.’ A Syrian aid worker added: ‘They’re not smart, and they’re not capable. They have no expertise.’91 ISIS could capitalize on the chaos of Syria’s fragmented battlefield, but it was, in effect, little more than an organized criminal group trying to manage a state. Raqqa Post-ISIS The situation in Raqqa as of this writing dangerously resembles that of 2013, when Raqqa went from opposition rule to ISIS control in a matter of months. Before the city fell to opposition forces, it was largely ignored by the regime, which assumed that Raqqawis would remain loyal and would not support the insurgents. When Raqqa came under attack, SARG forces retreated, in effect acknowledging that Raqqa was not as important as bigger cities like Aleppo. Likewise, when the rebels captured Raqqa, they were no more committed to competently serving the local population’s needs than the regime had been. Ahrar al-Sham, the lead militia to capture the city, largely ignored its responsibilities to guarantee local security and help municipal services operate. While it is unclear whether it was the capacity to govern or the interest that Ahrar al-Sham leaders lacked, they certainly did not see themselves as responsible for governing Raqqa. The Syrian political opposition also did not put in sufficient effort to govern Raqqa. Like the regime, the Etilaf leadership was more interested in bigger cities like Aleppo and Damascus. As of mid-2019, the situation in Raqqa may seem to be an incipient (or resurgent) but lowlevel campaign being carried out by remnants of ISIS against a security force—drawn primarily from the US-backed SDF—that has broad popular support but lacks the numbers, resources, and international support to ensure it will continue to keep the peace. This interpretation has been challenged by some observers, who see the SDF as an occupying force, ethnically and regionally foreign to the population of Raqqa, and lacking the capability or support to achieve long-term stability.92 A more persuasive interpretation is that the conflict in Raqqa is, to draw on a concept from conflict transformation theory, ‘power-locked,’ or temporarily frozen due to a large power imbalance among potential combatants.93 In Raqqa today, disparities of military and political power among parties to the conflict are so pronounced—and so locally skewed in favor of the SDF—that none of the SDF’s rivals are in a position to restart the conflict. This power disparity-induced appearance of calm is very far from the true resolution and reconciliation needed to end the conflict. This means that a shift in the power dynamic—for example, the removal of US forces from Syria or a broader loss of support for the SDF—would likely presage a rapid resumption of conflict as the deterrent effect of the SDF’s currently dominant position erodes. The al-Na’im tribe, for example, has had an ongoing land dispute with Kurdish communities living nearby. While the Kurdish-dominated SDF currently controls the region, SDF’s military power has not produced a resolution to the dispute.94 Consequently, should the SDF lose their ability to control the territory before substantive steps to resolve

the land dispute occur, we would expect violence in that region to spike promptly. Without an enduring American-led presence, especially to try to mediate disputes in this region, there is no clear guarantor of security in Raqqa. This is a side effect of the proxyactor status of SDF, that its ability to dominate the region (and hence pacify unresolved conflicts by deterring rival armed groups) depends more on the actions of its American sponsor than on the proxy group’s inherent actions or capabilities. As a result, according to Lieutenant General Terry Wolff, former deputy head of the Counter-ISIL Coalition, in the event of a change in US posture, ISIS may well return and Raqqa may become the site of a renewed insurgency. Lt. Gen. Wolff explained that ISIS elements remain in Raqqa and that they are likely to compete with tribal leaders, the SARG, Russian forces, mainly Kurdish SDF forces, and, possibly, Iranian proxies for control of the population. All the sponsors of Syria’s proxy conflict have been buying up tribes in this area, meaning Raqqa will remain unstable for some time.95 This assessment has been corroborated by journalists visiting the city in February 2019. ‘Security was on the tip of everyone’s tongue when we would get out on the street and talk to people,’ a journalist who had recently visited Raqqa explained, ‘the first thing [people] would say is that the city is not safe.’ And, they emphasized, the uncertainty came from robberies, muggings, and kidnappings, not air strikes. People they met were still trying to figure out the logic of violence in their city: when someone was kidnapped, people did not just try to figure out what had happened to them, but also why they had been targeted. ‘So far, it did not appear to me that people could distinguish between random kidnappings and targeted kidnappings,’ the journalist explained. There were, of course, a lot of complaints about the local (SDF) security forces.96 Instability in Raqqa will complicate the city’s acute reconstruction needs. The first author interviewed an analyst who conducted a recent damage assessment in Raqqa. The analyst revealed that ten out of Raqqa city’s twenty-three neighborhoods have suffered at least 20 percent infrastructure damage. These neighborhoods were mainly clustered in the densely populated city center: over half the buildings were damaged in two central neighborhoods.97 And, although tens of thousands of residents have returned to Raqqa, the city’s current population is roughly just 15 percent its prewar size.98 Raqqa was once the breadbasket of Syria, but its agricultural output cratered during the war: one estimate found that it would cost half a billion dollars to bring Raqqa’s agriculture back to prewar levels.99 One might argue that Raqqa’s relatively small current population—down to under 100,000 from a prewar population of 500,000—should ease pressure on its agricultural production, but the United Nations estimated in 2018 that up to 95 percent of Raqqa city’s residents were food insecure.100 Most income earned by residents came from fuel sales or remittances, yet more than half of Raqqawis are unable to meet basic needs through household income alone.101 In one disturbing report published in October 2018, residents reported ISIS sleeper cells in the city, and felt that living conditions after liberation were harsher—by which they might have meant more unpredictable—than under ISIS.102 Some of the conditions that allowed ISIS to capture Raqqa in 2013 are also present today. As ISIS no longer controls territory in the conventional sense, many emphasize the

importance of addressing the causes that gave rise to the group in the first place.103 But Raqqa today is a perfect example of why ‘root causes’ are inadequate in describing the processes through which insurgents like ISIS emerge. In Raqqa—as in other areas affected by civil wars and insurgencies—whichever local armed actor can create order and provide basic necessities is most likely to end up in control of population and territory, regardless of ideology or whether it addresses, for example, people’s identity-based grievances. ISIS took advantage of chaotic conditions to make Raqqa the capital of its caliphate and the launch pad for its insurgency. This was not because residents of Raqqa had latent grievances that they needed ISIS to help them express. On the contrary, it was because ISIS deliberately created, and then took advantage of, chaotic conditions, thus allowing itself to impose order by solving the very chaos that it had helped create. ISIS militants may not be capable governors, but they are adept insurgents and highly skilled at manipulating local power structures. Absent any serious international or local effort to continue suppressing ISIS, the group thus enjoys favorable conditions for reemergence in Raqqa. Lessons from Raqqa for Understanding Proxy War Raqqa as a case study offers lessons that extend beyond the city as well as issues specifically related to Syria. The chaotic proxy war conditions in Raqqa created an opening for ISIS to capture its first city. The absence of unified leadership among groups trying to govern Raqqa was representative of the dysfunction of those leading the Syrian opposition: the national opposition (the Etilaf) and the FSA. These groups’ internal divisions were exacerbated by regional patrons who were unwilling to compromise with each other. The international community, though increasingly involved in Syria, either lacked or failed to employ meaningful tools to force regional actors to work together, and thereby they failed to help their Syrian proxies unify. Meanwhile, ISIS focused on mapping the human terrain, which they used for deliberate and targeted violence in order to infiltrate groups present in Raqqa and turn them on each other. ISIS built links with the community and used those connections for social and political support. It embedded itself in Raqqa’s tribal system and established a logic of violence that supported its campaign for competitive control. This, and not superior firepower, was what allowed ISIS to take over Raqqa. Later, as ISIS grew beyond Raqqa, it added a large arsenal to its tactics for taking over new territory. ISIS’ Raqqa strategy highlights the tendency of traditional conceptions of proxy warfare to ignore or downplay the complex mesh of individuals, social networks, and movements at work in civil wars. Actors ranging from the Syrian government to Ahrar al-Sham to the Etilaf and its varied state sponsors repeatedly viewed Raqqa as a peripheral or economy-of-force area, governable with limited investment in local influence. ISIS demonstrated that, far from being a peripheral site into which armed forces with a little bit of foreign backing could be moved like chess pieces, Raqqa was a complex region alive with local politics that could rapidly shift given changes in a delicate balance of power. ISIS was perhaps the only fighting force in Raqqa, with the possible exception of JAN,

that was neither a proxy nor a patron. The Syrian regime was a patron who paid tribal proxies to monitor the situation in Raqqa. Once threatened, SARG withdrew its troops to bases outside of the city and the tribes capitulated. Meanwhile, the Syrian opposition was both a sponsor and a proxy. As a proxy, it was unable to maintain unity under the pressure of competing aims from competition among roughly three types of international donors: 1) the Muslim Brotherhood-supporting faction in Qatar and Turkey, 2) other conservatives supported by Saudi Arabia, and 3) liberal secularists supported (albeit half-heartedly) by Western powers. The opposition’s reliance on external patrons resulted in key figures being promoted for their external political connections rather than local ties, as in the case with Nawaf being appointed Etilaf’s representative for Raqqa. This crippled the Etilaf’s own utility as a patron in Raqqa, which was already at risk due to the group’s general predisposition to treat Raqqa as peripheral. Raqqa’s experience suggests that proxy warfare is unlikely to be useful as a strategy for stabilization or state-building operations unless the proxy is uniquely and specifically local to that environment. The sponsor-proxy dynamic becomes even more complicated when multiple patrons or sponsors compete against each other, which encourages proxies to ‘patron-shop’ and promotes disunity among forces in the field. Proxy forces may be able to take territory temporarily, but they risk being more focused on maintaining ties to their foreign patrons than on governing effectively. This conclusion has resonance for other conflict zones. In Yemen and Libya, warring factions inside the country—the proxies—profit from foreign funding. Meanwhile, it is unclear whether the foreign patrons providing most of the funds that fuel these conflicts have a realistic end-game strategy or whether they are content simply fighting their real opponents (other sponsors) in another country’s battlefield. In all three theaters, jihadist insurgents with a focus on providing local services, rather than exclusively soliciting international funds, found safe havens. Raqqa experienced rapid shifts of control between armed groups in 2013. This was partly because the Syrian regime and its opponents took the city for granted, believing they could buy local support with minimal commitment. Meanwhile, ISIS executed its plan to play warring factions off one another in Raqqa and destroyed the locals’ nascent effort to govern the city themselves. ISIS’ plan was well designed, but it was easier to execute because local powerbrokers in Raqqa, and their patrons, could not unify in the face of a common threat. Sponsors did not understand what was happening in places like Raqqa and therefore paid little attention to events on the ground. This meant that their proxies either did not care or were not supported enough to deal with threats like ISIS. This gap in knowledge and interest gave ISIS the opportunity to capture its first town and launch its own conflict-changing insurgency. The critical lesson of Raqqa extends to the Syrian war in general: the United States, and others, can no longer base their understanding of proxy warfare on knowledge developed during the Cold War. The intractability of Syria’s civil war underscores that the international system is not bipolar, as it was during the Cold War, nor unipolar, as it was during America’s brief window of global dominance in the immediate post-Cold War era. Today’s multipolar international system means that regional powers have greater freedom to project power and

influence events in their own regions because they can appeal to multiple global powers for support. In turn, local proxies also have the freedom to appeal to a range of regional actors, patron-shopping among a larger selection of sponsors while exploiting greater ease of access to technologies and capabilities of warfare. That is why Syria was not only a battleground between global powers, but also a place where regional conflicts were fought. Saudi Arabia and Iran fought a regional proxy war in Syria, along with the ideological war between Sunni Arab nations who either supported or opposed the Muslim Brotherhood. Proxy warfare is sometimes characterized as moving pieces on a chessboard. Syria’s conflict was a multidimensional mesh of networks with competing interests. As these competing interests fought their wars across Syria, Raqqa’s place within these conflicts was forgotten by nearly everyone in Syria except the one group —ISIS—which recognized this weakness and exploited it, with devastating consequences.

5

‘THIS WAR IS OUT OF OUR HANDS’ LIBYA’S INTERNATIONALIZED CONFLICT SINCE 2011

Frederic Wehrey

One snowy morning in February 2020, in the small Russian hamlet of Akbulak near the Kazakh border, a line of funeral mourners filed into a movie theater to bid farewell to one of the village’s sons. The body of the deceased, a 27-year-old man named Gleb Mostov, had rested in a casket all through the night in the modest house of his father. Bereaved for his son, the father politely turned away reporters. ‘Sorry, guys,’ he told them, ‘I’m dealing with my grief here.’ Far less polite, however, were the plainclothes Russian security officers and soldiers who’d cordoned off the theater and prohibited the press from entering. The circumstances of Mostov’s death had remained a mystery until his parents disclosed the truth to a local newspaper: he’d been an officer in the Russian army, a trained sniper, who’d been killed on the battlefield in faraway Libya.1 For some of the mourners, the news hardly came as a shock. ‘First, Afghanistan, then Chechnya, Ukraine, and now Syria and Libya. Why are you surprised?’ a woman asked her husband as they entered the cinema. We don’t know exactly how or where Gleb Mostov died in Libya, though it was likely on the frontlines just a short drive south from the capital of Tripoli. There, from autumn 2019 until early 2020, roughly a thousand Russian paramilitary fighters from the so-called Wagner Group and some regular personnel fought alongside Libyan rebels led by a septuagenarian warlord named Khalifa Haftar in an effort to topple the internationally recognized government in Tripoli. This government, the Government of National Accord or GNA, itself relied on foreigners to bolster its ranks, most recently in the form of thousands of militia fighters from Syria, including veterans of the years-long war against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.2 Added to the mix were Sudanese and Chadian gunmen, fighting mostly on Haftar’s side, as well as pro-Assad Syrian fighters. Foreign belligerents in Libya are not only on the ground. High above the mercenaries, fleets of cheap but lethal drones and foreign fixed-wing aircraft filled Libya’s skies, piloted

by personnel from the United Arab Emirates (backing Haftar) and Turkey (backing the Tripoli government), as well as Russian aviators and mercenary pilots from other countries.3 In total, at least ten foreign states militarily contributed to the current Libyan conflict.4 For many Libyans, the presence of these foreign combatants outside the capital and across the country came as a shock. They were the most visible confirmation that the struggle for Libya’s future was being dictated not by Libyans, but by powerful outside states. ‘This war is out of our hands,’ a Libyan aid worker lamented to the author in January 2020.5 The story of how the post-2011 Libyan civil war reached this state of internationalization contains multiple chapters. First and foremost, the political and social fissures catalyzed by the country’s 2011 revolution saw outside powers, some of them geopolitical rivals, lend military support to locally based armed groups and factions. Many of these forces were deeply suspicious of one another but united to topple dictator Muammar Gaddafi.6 These fissures and competing narratives about the revolution contributed to the failure of Libyan elites to build inclusive political institutions and formal security organizations after Gaddafi’s death.7 The eruption of armed civil war in the summer of 2014, first in Benghazi and then in Tripoli, saw the foreign struggle for Libya move to a new level of militarization and violence, with a significant uptick in weapons shipments to two loosely constituted factions. The first was the eastern-based ‘Operation Dignity’ faction, led by General Haftar and backed by the Emirates, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and France. Opposing this camp was the Libya Dawn coalition based in western Libya and its militia allies in Benghazi, which was backed by Turkey, Qatar, and Sudan. The underlying driver for outside intervention during this phase was the ideological struggle over Islamists’ place in Libya’s political order, although it also centered on control of economic resources and how much of the old Gaddafi-led order to preserve.8 In April 2019, however, with the attack of Haftar’s forces on the outskirts of the Libyan capital, the mask of Libyan ownership of the conflict fell away. Although they continued to work through Libyan armed proxies and intermediaries, foreign states committed more of their own combat forces on the ground and in the air.9 The ideological component, while still a motive for the Emiratis and Haftar’s other backers, was accompanied by a fiercer geopolitical power struggle overlaid with a contest for economic spoils. A breakdown in global multilateral norms contributed to Libya’s post-2011 chaos, epitomized by the diminished authority of the United Nations. Post-Arab Spring strategic rivalries also played a role at various points. Although much attention—especially in the United States—has been focused on Moscow’s designs in Libya, the roles of the United Arab Emirates and Turkey have arguably been more consequential for the fate of the country. Both countries’ hegemonic aspirations have been enabled partly by the power vacuum that ensued when American leadership pulled out of Libya and partly by a degree of backing and acquiescence from Washington, given these states’ longstanding roles as US partners in the Middle East. Despite the active role of foreign actors, Libyans themselves have been essential in internationalizing the conflict. Bereft of institutions, Libya’s fragmented landscape has been

dominated by Libyan elites, many of whom solicited foreign patronage to bolster their position against rivals. One outcome of this personalized transnational activism was the erosion of Libyan sovereignty, a recurring facet of Libya’s modern history that has precedent in Libyan elites’ collaboration with the Ottomans, Italians, French, and British.10 In the post2011 period, this personalization of the foreign proxy war was exacerbated by Libyans residing overseas in Doha, Istanbul, Abu Dhabi, Amman, and other foreign metropolises, acting as powerbrokers and fixers for the flows of arms, money, and media support. Added to this, Libya’s hydrocarbon resources have long been a magnet for international involvement and predation.11 In the wake of the Arab Spring, competing Libyan factions vied for control over this wealth, which became a prize that disincentivized the forging of durable truces while enabling local actors to solicit outside aid with promises of contracts and payments. Relatedly, Libyan political elites and armed group leaders have parked oil-derived wealth in European and Middle Eastern banks and real estate, often cementing foreign partisanship but also handing a degree of leverage to foreign actors in the form of asset freezes and sanctions.12 The presence of economic incentives wielded by local Libyan proxies, though not uniform across the country, differentiates Libya’s war from the Middle East’s other proxy conflicts, like Lebanon and Syria, where foreign states are the ones providing funding to local allies. Yet the inability of a single Libyan faction to achieve territorial or political dominance and international norms against the illicit export of oil— especially in the case of eastern Libya—meant that local Libyan actors often failed to meet the economic expectations of their outside patrons.13 Seasoned observers have argued that Libya’s civil war, especially its post-2019 phase, embodies the intersection of several military and technological trends with potentially farreaching consequences.14 The nature of these shifts, combined with the multipolarity mentioned above, has given foreign competition in Libya a distinctive character marked by opacity, lethality, and toxicity. The widespread deployment of armed drones, mitigating personnel risks to interveners and affording them a degree of clandestinity, is the result of the proliferation of these weapons across the Middle East from foreign suppliers, namely China, as well as indigenous manufacturing advances in the case of Turkey. Air strikes in Libya from these craft, as well as fixed-wing airplanes, have been insulated from serious scrutiny due to the aforementioned international disorder and scorning of embargo norms, but more importantly because of Western diplomatic protection of the most egregious of the violators, the United Arab Emirates. In addition, all sides in Libya’s war have relied upon foreign contract fighters, mercenaries, and—in the case of Russian and even Turkish involvement—‘semi-state’ auxiliaries.15 This is reflective of a broader global trend of privatizing and outsourcing expeditionary military forces, driven in part by the lucrative rise of private military companies and availability of recyclable, pay-for-hire fighters from poorer, conflict-wracked states in Africa and the Middle East.16 While generally exhibiting low combat proficiency, the impact of these foreign ground and air forces on battlefield developments in Libya has arguably been more decisive than that of foreign combatants in the Middle East’s other proxy wars in Syria and Yemen.17

On top of these military developments, Libya saw an increasingly sophisticated informational battle for public opinion—waged by foreign states through traditional and social media channels, foreign lobby firms, and co-opted journalists—in which foreign influence is often difficult to discern. This disinformation war was another means for outside actors to shape the Libyan conflict with minimal blowback or penalties.18 Proxy Rivalries within a Revolution The foreign military rivalries unfolding in Libya stem back about a decade, to the 2011 revolution and the NATO-led intervention. The military conflict was hardly the binary rebelsversus-regime struggle that the media portrayed it as; in many senses, it was a civil war with some towns and communities arrayed in support of the regime and multiple local conflicts existing under the superficial rubric of a popular uprising. Similarly, the NATO-led coalition patrolling the skies was also riven with competing agendas. Tensions were especially visible among countries that put boots on the ground, that is, intelligence and special operations personnel who managed the flow of weapons shipments, provided training in some instances, and coordinated air strikes on behalf of local Libyan armed groups. The armed groups became, in effect, local proxies for foreign powers, most notably the Emirates (joined by France) and Qatar, who carried out their rivalry in the form of competing ‘operations rooms’ through which information, requests for weapons, and intelligence coordination flowed.19 Sudanese forces also played a role on both sides of the conflict: Libyan Islamists leveraged historic connections with Sudan to solicit help from Khartoum in the form of arms shipments and drones.20 At the same time, fighters from a Sudanese opposition group, the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), fought for the Gaddafi regime.21 Among these players, Qatar was the most assertive, sending senior officers and special operations forces across Libya. French and Emirati personnel were also involved, and British special operations forces were especially present in the city of Misrata.22 For their part, Libyan revolutionary leaders buttressed their authority and attracted fighters by demonstrating their access to outside arms streams. ‘Because there was no formal chain of command, the Libyan commanders had to establish power … and if you had access to Western (or foreign) arms or attention, you got power,’ noted one US military officer who was liaising with the Libyan revolutionary groups at the time.23 The competition among anti-Gaddafi political factions and armored groups started within weeks of the revolution’s uprising in Benghazi and eastern Libya and quickly spread to other theaters. But it was not predetermined, nor was it constructed along secular and Islamist lines; among the revolutionary armed groups, divisions between Islamists and anti-Islamists gradually sharpened and crystallized, partly due to Emirati and Qatari intervention. They also overlapped with a complex set of town- and region-based networks and elites inside Libya, as well as Libyan intermediaries residing in Abu Dhabi or Doha who often shaped the preferences of outside patrons and exerted a significant influence on where the arms went.24 The outlines of this conflict and, in some cases, its personalities continued into Libya’s

contemporary civil war. The United States, with intelligence personnel and special operations forces stationed across the country during 2011, was cognizant of these burgeoning divisions. It was not in a position, however, to temper or mitigate them during the revolution, especially after the fall of Gaddafi, when its diplomatic footprint was reduced and the Obama administration had adopted a policy of having no military personnel on the ground. Crucially, this approach arose from the administration’s preference to avoid an Iraq-like quagmire but also in response to Libya’s transitional authorities expressing their firm opposition to having any foreign armed personnel on the country’s soil. More specifically, with the experience of Iraq on their minds, Libyan officials forbade any armed private military contractors from entering Libya: an ironic prohibition, given the massive influx of mercenaries that would come into Libya in the coming years.25 Washington’s ceding of the post-conflict transition to Libyans, backed by the United Nations and the Europeans—what one White House official called a policy of ‘no ownership’—had profound implications for US leverage on what followed.26 ‘If we had had more assets and advisors on the ground, perhaps we could’ve shaped the outcome after the revolution,’ lamented another White House official.27 This was especially evident as the fissures that permeated the 2011 revolution sharpened and widened after Gaddafi’s fall. Much of the US military and intelligence community’s initial outreach went through a constellation of defected army officers centered around Colonel Abd al-Salam al-Hasi, a close confidant of the defected Libyan special forces commander Abd al-Fatah Younis. Initially, these defected officers worked closely, if uneasily, with other revolutionary armed groups. But the distrust between the groups widened, partially due to Qatari arms shipments that were routed to Islamist-leaning groups. The rivalries burst into open violence with the shadowy assassination of Abd al-Fatah Younis, allegedly by Islamists as payback for the general’s role in carrying out Gaddafi-era repression. The splits would continue to haunt Libya’s post-2011 transition and contribute to the eruption of civil war in 2014.28 Throughout the revolution, Qatar’s rise as the most effective foreign sponsor was occasioned by the outsized influence of Libyan powerbrokers, especially Doha-based cleric Ali Sallabi. Sallabi was instrumental in steering Qatari aid away from the Younis network, which was aligned politically with the Libyan technocrat Mahmud Jibril and a Libyan theologian-turned-businessman named Aref al-Nayed, and routing it to Islamist-leaning revolutionary armed groups in eastern and western Libya. In response, the Younis-Jibril camp leaned more heavily on Emirati and French support, using the Emirates-based al-Nayed as a broker.29 The fissures gradually afflicted nearly every corner of the conflict. The UAE established an operations room and channeled support to the town of Zintan, a tribal stronghold in the western Nafusa mountains. At the same time, Qatar favored another Nafusa town, Nalut, because of the presence of fighters from the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), led by Abd al-Hakim Bilhaj.30 French military aid also shaped local power relations; the French were initially drawn to Qatar (and were actually sympathetic to the Islamists), but they tilted toward the Emirates’ side during the summer of 2011, solidifying links to Zintani armed

groups through training and air-dropped weapons.31 The tensions culminated in competing designs for the liberation and stabilization of Tripoli, with the Emirati- and Qatari-backed Libyan factions each presenting their plans. The August 2011 uprising and attack on the capital proceeded in a pell-mell fashion, with locally based Libyan armed groups enjoying various levels of loosely coordinated external support. This marked another major turning point: during the fall of Tripoli, armed groups seized strategic assets like airports, armories, ports, and ministries, which they tried to convert into political leverage.32 Foreign rivalries played out first as a modest contest to shape the 2012 elections for Libya’s legislature, the General National Congress (GNC). Turkey’s Islamist government adopted friendly but largely passive relations with the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Justice and Construction Party (JCP), although these ties with the Brotherhood and other Islamists would later coalesce into more robust financial support and safe-haven networks.33 Mahmud Jibril’s National Forces Alliance (NFA) claimed attention from the Emirates, the United States, and Western media outlets on the basis of its purported secularist credentials, although the NFA included many religiously conservative Libyans, and Jibril himself had stated that Libya’s legal codes should be based on Sharia law.34 Qatar was especially assertive during the elections, funding a prominent political party, Al-Watan (The Nation), which ultimately failed to gain a single seat, partly because of voters’ perceptions about its links with Doha. The aftermath of the elections saw increased public animosity against Qatar for its alleged links with Libyan Islamists.35 The rivalry between Qatar and the Emirates and, concurrently, the contest between Libyan Islamists and their opponents, escalated in the summer of 2013 with the Egyptian military’s ejection of Mohamed Morsi from Egypt’s presidency, orchestrated by the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, as well as large swathes of Egyptian society. The seismic event reverberated across the Libyan political spectrum and heightened tensions between Libyan Islamists and antiIslamists in an already fraught environment.36 Taken in sum, these converging trend lines—polarization between Islamists and their opponents, worsening rivalries across the Middle East in the aftermath of the Sisi coup in Egypt, the growing power and politicization of Libyan militias, grievances over the distribution of Libya’s wealth and elite corruption, and mounting insecurity in Benghazi— would conspire to produce the Libyan civil war of 2014. Yet it is important to note that while foreign powers contributed to Libya’s tensions through media and political narratives—and, in the case of the United States and its allies, through aborted security sector initiatives— foreign military interference did not occur at significant levels during most of 2012 and through to late 2013. If anything, during this period, oil-rich Libya was itself a military intervener in foreign proxy wars, sending money, weapons, and Libyan fighters to Syria, Mali, and other conflicts, according to the United Nations.37 This outward direction of arms flow would be quickly reversed with the eruption of civil war on Libyan soil in the summer of 2014.38

Militarizing the Proxy Struggle: Foreign Actors in the Civil War of 2014–19 External military support was not a significant factor in sparking the Libyan civil war that erupted with the launch of Haftar’s Operation Dignity in Benghazi in the summer of 2014.39 Haftar’s attack on Benghazi militia bases on 16 May was executed by locally recruited Libyan forces drawn from Gaddafi-era military units, a meager air wing of aging MiG fighter-bombers, and, later that summer and fall, more defecting army units and neighborhood paramilitaries known as ‘support forces.’ These were all loosely constituted as the Libyan National Army, later designated the Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF).40 By that summer, his operation had attracted more substantial foreign military support from Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, with air strikes and special operations raids in Benghazi and Derna and the funneling of materiel, weapons, and advisors to the LAAF.41 The influx of Emirati arms—or, rather, alarm caused by this influx—was critical to the spread of the civil war to the Tripoli region.42 In July 2014, anti-Haftar Libyan armed groups from Tripoli and its environs attacked the Tripoli International Airport. According to its commanders and Western diplomats, the militia-led attack, later dubbed ‘Libya Dawn,’ was partly spurred by the perception among Tripolitanian factions that Haftar’s militia allies from the western town of Zintan, who controlled the airport, were receiving weapons shipments from the Emirates in preparation to assist Haftar’s move on the capital.43 Partly as a result of the July attack, Libya split into two loosely constituted camps: one was the Libya Dawn coalition in the west, represented by the National Salvation Government in Tripoli. The other was Haftar’s Operation Dignity in the east, linked politically to an ‘interim government’ in the eastern town of al-Bayda and the House of Representatives (HOR) in Tobruk (anti-Haftar members of the HOR boycotted this move to the east and remained in the west).44 As the political gulf widened, foreign intervention escalated. In late August, the Emirati Mirage aircraft, flying from Egypt, conducted a long-range strike on Dawn-aligned militia positions in Tripoli, using American-made laser-guided munitions, prompting anger among American defense officials and diplomats who were not consulted or informed.45 The Emirati strike was a significant escalation in foreign military intervention in Libya since 2011, but it also illustrated the unintended consequences, in Libya and beyond, of America’s policy of empowering and deferring to its Gulf ally. Washington had long supplied the Emirates with military training and technology, especially in the aerial realm, as part of a broader initiative to empower Arab allies to shoulder more of the burden for their own defense and advance American interests in the Middle East. But Abu Dhabi’s adventurism in Libya starting in 2014, as well as its similarly counterproductive intervention in Yemen in 2015, showed that Washington could not completely prevent that military capacity from being used in destabilizing ways that ran counter to American goals. On top of the strikes, this period of the civil war was also defined by outside powers stepping up the war of narratives they were waging. Satellite television outlets, funded and directed by foreign states, played a key role. So too did Libyan powerbrokers based abroad. In the social media realm, armies of Twitter trolls and bots—often from the Gulf—deployed fake news, slander, and hate speech, a trend that would intensify with the next phase of the

fighting in 2019.46 This output was in turn amplified by partisan Libyan media platforms that were themselves influenced by or directed from foreign states, including the Emirates, Qatar, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Russia.47 The war of narratives echoed the broader split in the region between the Emirates-led bloc and Qatar-Turkey expressions of these narratives. This period also saw the increasing use of African mercenaries by both sides in various Libyan theaters. This was fueled partly by the pull of payment from Libya’s oil wealth or foreign patrons, but also the push factor of failing, conflict-wracked African states to Libya’s south and southeast producing a pool of itinerant, pay-for-hire gunmen.48 Chiefly, Haftar’s LAAF started recruiting Chadian and Darfurian fighters for combat in Benghazi, the oil crescent, Kufra, and especially in the Fezzan, where pro-Dignity factions from the Tabu battled Tuareg (aligned with Misrata and Libya Dawn) in the town of Ubari, which was strategically situated next to the Sharara oil field.49 Misratan forces also hosted Chadian groups in Sabha and the anti-Haftar Benghazi Defense Brigades militia deployed Chadians in 2017.50 The Emirati-Qatari rivalry also played out on this Saharan battlefield, with the Emirates flying in weapons to Tabu fighters and reportedly paying Chadian opposition groups. For its part, Qatari mediation and cash proved instrumental in brokering an end to the fighting in Ubari in early 2016.51 Continued Emirati and Qatari involvement in Libya had prompted a mild scolding from President Obama at a meeting of Gulf leaders at Camp David in late 2015. This, according to one former diplomat, did in fact induce the Emiratis to stand down on air strikes, at least in western Libya.52 In Benghazi, however, the presence of designated terrorist entities among Haftar’s opponents, including individuals suspected of participating in the attack on the US diplomatic mission in Benghazi in September 2012, resulted in a more tolerant stance toward Haftar’s operation by some elements in Washington and even some tacit acceptance of Emirati and Egyptian support.53 In Benghazi, meanwhile, both sides received foreign support. The constellation of local and Islamist militias fighting Haftar, some grouped into the Benghazi Revolutionaries’ Shura Council (BRSC), enjoyed streams of materiel and weapons that came from Qatar, Turkey, and Sudan and were overseen by some of the very same Libyan intermediaries that had funneled weapons during the 2011 revolution.54 For its part, Haftar’s forces benefited from an injection of military aid in early and mid-2016 from the UAE and France.55 Their intervention came on the heels of UN-brokered negotiations among Libya’s two camps, which produced a unity government in Tripoli—the GNA—in late 2015. Almost immediately, this new government confronted an array of obstacles, especially opposition from eastern factions affiliated with Haftar and criticism for its reliance on powerful Tripoli militias for security. It also faced suspicions from some Libyans that it was essentially a stooge for Western powers who needed political cover and official authorization to channel assistance to Tripolitanian proxy militias involved in countering irregular migrant flows across the Mediterranean (in the case of Italy and the EU) and the Islamic State (in the case of the United States and Great Britain). This form of proxy warfare by the EU—and especially by Italy—against migrants has been widely criticized for its paying and

empowering unscrupulous Libyan militias and human traffickers disguised as police and coast guard, especially along the seaboard west of Tripoli.56 On the counterterrorism front, several pro-GNA Tripoli armed groups used their efforts against the Islamic State as a means to curry favor with foreign powers. Among the most powerful of these was the Special Deterrence Force, which broke up Islamic State cells in the capital and housed Islamic State militants in its sprawling prison at Tripoli’s Matiga airport.57 The GNA’s arrival in Tripoli coincided with a gradual but significant diminution in the level of Qatari and Turkish support given to anti-Haftar forces.58 But in Haftar’s eastern camp, Emirati, French, and Egyptian support continued, enabling the LAAF’s military gains in Benghazi, which Haftar then converted into political clout to oppose the GNA. The Emirates’ assistance in particular was pivotal. Emirati-provided armored personnel carriers afforded Haftar’s forces mobility and protection as they pushed into Benghazi’s dense urban areas.59 By 2017, Emirati close-air support in the form of air-tractor attack aircraft60— converted US-manufactured AT-802 crop dusters—as well as Chinese-made Wing Loong drones, helped Haftar’s forces defeat remaining militant pockets in seaside Benghazi neighborhoods, an offensive that was marked by widespread human rights abuses.61 Aside from its effect on the battlefield, foreign and, particularly, Emirati aid was critical to Haftar’s consolidation of political power, especially through his familial support base. His sons solicited much of the foreign assistance, stirring resentment among senior LAAF officers about Haftar’s nepotism.62 This trend continued with the Emirati provision of weapons to an elite LAAF unit, the 106th, informally headed by one of Haftar’s sons.63 French aid was similarly vital and decisive in Haftar’s battlefield victory. It came principally in the form of personnel from the paramilitary arm of the French DirectorateGeneral for External Security (DGSE), whose presence in eastern Libya was not officially acknowledged by Paris until 2016, when three DGSE officers were killed in the downing of an LAAF helicopter by an anti-Haftar militia.64 According to UN security sources, dozens of French DGSE officers accompanied LAAF forces on frontline missions and acted as forward spotters for mortars and artillery. Most importantly, they conducted clandestine reconnaissance for counter-sniper missions.65 What is remarkable about this policy, directed by the presidency and run through the DGSE, is its occurrence alongside professed French diplomatic support for the GNA, which Haftar opposed, and with the French knowing full well that Haftar had national ambitions for power that extended well beyond the battle in Benghazi.66 Around this time, Western diplomatic sources and local contacts were reporting an array of foreign military and intelligence cadres at the LAAF-controlled Banina Air Base in Benghazi, involved in varying levels of observation, liaison, and active support.67 Among them were Russian personnel. Russian intervention in Libya since the 2011 revolution until this point had been largely opportunistic, driven by the promise of energy control and arms and infrastructure deals and enabled by the American leadership vacuum and European disarray. In the informational realm, Russian propaganda highlighted the worsening post-Gaddafi chaos as a product of

NATO’s fecklessness during the 2011 intervention.68 Simultaneously, Russian officials and businessmen began engaging Libyan political figures and armed group leaders. One of the latter reportedly included Ibrahim al-Jathran, a former anti-Gaddafi rebel who controlled Libya’s central petroleum facilities, whom Russian officials had offered to arm in 2014 in exchange for Russia’s receiving a piece of the oil market share. Although the deal fell through, the episode underscores a) how individual Libyans have tried to leverage their access to the country’s resources to amass military and political power via outside patrons, and b) their fickleness as allies.69 With the rise of Haftar in eastern Libya in early and mid-2014, Russia found a new ally, even though it kept channels open to other actors. By late 2014 and early 2015, Russia was working with the United Arab Emirates and Egypt to send weapons, spare parts, and medical care to Haftar, as well as technicians, logisticians, advisors, and intelligence personnel.70 Moscow also printed dinars for the Haftar-aligned, unrecognized Central Bank in eastern Libya, bolstering this parallel administration’s solvency.71 One of most public expressions of Russia’s support to Haftar occurred in early 2017, when the Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetzov entered Libyan waters and hosted the Libyan commander for a tour and a video conference meeting with senior Russian military officials.72 In the coming months and years, Russia state media and other propaganda outlets would build on this by supporting Haftar’s rise with a sophisticated information campaign.73 In late 2015, US special operations forces and intelligence personnel arrived in Haftarcontrolled Benghazi to monitor and meet with Haftar’s LAAF. US law enforcement personnel were also working through his forces to apprehend and prosecute Libyan militants wanted for the 2012 terrorist attack on the US diplomatic mission in Benghazi.74 But, as noted, the Obama administration prohibited US military forces on the ground in eastern Libya from actively aiding Haftar unless he subordinated himself to a centrally controlled and civilian-led government. This imperative for Haftar to join the national government grew all the more pressing as US officials sought to encourage the LAAF to participate in a combined, east-west Libyan assault on the Islamic State’s stronghold in the city of Sirte, located in Libya’s central coastal region.75 When it became clear that Haftar wouldn’t participate—mostly for political reasons, but also because his lines of supply would be stretched—US forces curtailed their engagement with Haftar. The Islamic State had slowly embedded itself in Sirte in 2013 and 2014 by exploiting preexisting jihadist networks, political fissures, and social tensions. Foreign fighters also played a significant role in bolstering ISIS’ rank and file and filling out its leadership cadres.76 But more importantly, the terrorist group instrumentalized the fact that Sirte sat on the fault line between the Haftar’s Dignity camp in the east and the opposing, Tripoli-based Dawn faction in the west.77 In the latter camp, the city of Misrata and its militias were particularly wellpositioned to attack the Islamic State and forestall its expansion. Yet Misratan notables and armed group leaders feared that any commitment of resources against the terrorist group would distract from Misrata’s more existential battle with Haftar.78 By mid- and late 2015, however, US intelligence and special operations forces were

meeting with Misrata-based political and militia leaders for this assault, even as they simultaneously engaged Haftar’s LAAF.79 By early 2016, the Misrata leaders were reportedly lobbying for greater counterterrorism support from the United States and, to a lesser extent, Great Britain.80 In May 2016, they finally launched an attack on ISIS in Sirte after it had encroached on a checkpoint outside Misrata that threatened to cut off Misrata’s supply lines with southern Libya. As it became clear that the fight against the terrorist group in Sirte would be a Misratan-led battle, US special operations forces liaising with Haftar in Benghazi decreased their presence, and the United States threw its intelligence and airpower resources behind the Misrata-led operation, dubbed ‘Bunyan al-Marsus’ or ‘The Solid Foundation.’81 During the months-long war against the Islamic State in Sirte in 2016, American and British special operations forces channeled assistance to Misratan proxy militias while being mindful of the implications of this military support for the broader political conflict. The aid, mostly intelligence, was task-specific, limited in duration, and did not include lethal capabilities that could be deployed later against Haftar’s forces. For example, a Misratan militia leader accompanying British special operations forces to the site of a recently bombed Islamic State camp south of Sirte was given night-vision goggles, which were then promptly taken back once the mission had concluded.82 At its successful conclusion in December 2016, the anti-Islamic State campaign in Sirte was lauded in Washington as a counterterrorism template to be applied elsewhere: special operations forces working with indigenous proxies loosely tethered to a recognized political authority, backed by precision air strikes. As a national diplomatic strategy, however, the USbacked operation failed. US diplomats and military officials had hoped to use the Sirte campaign to unite the disparate Dawn and Dignity factions against a common enemy, but each of the two camps continued to regard the other as the more pressing threat. These unresolved fissures and continued foreign backing to each side for a variety of counterterrorism goals (defined more broadly and ideologically in the case of the Emirates and the French), contributed to the outbreak of another round of civil war in April 2019. The Interregnum: A Clandestine Proxy Buildup, 2018–19 With the defeat of the Islamic State and, more importantly, Haftar’s defeat of Islamist and allied militias in Benghazi and Derna in 2018, the civil war in Libya entered a cooling period that shifted, again, to behind-the-scenes jockeying and political competition from 2018 to early 2019. The foreign balance of power shifted as the hardline Islamist component in Misrata and Tripoli diminished significantly through a combination of attrition, exile and imprisonment in 2017. And, as mentioned previously, Turkish and Qatari military meddling had also declined after the arrival of the GNA in late 2015.83 In contrast, Emirati aid to Haftar’s forces—in the form of weapons, intelligence, and training—accelerated, especially to elite LAAF units like the 101st and the 106thBrigades.84 Importantly, pro-Haftar foreign support increasingly shifted to clandestine influence, diplomacy, and military operations aimed at controlling or influencing the disposition of Libya’s vital financial organs: namely the facilities in the oil crescent and the Tripoli-based

Central Bank of Libya.85 Reforming the Central Bank and removing its powerful governor Sadiq al-Kabir were especially contentious issues; the nominally pro-GNA militias who dominated in the capital had long been pillaging its funds through fraudulent letters of credit and other schemes, which contributed to an outbreak of serious intermilitia fighting in autumn 2018.86 Ending this predation, improving the bank’s transparency and accountability, unifying its western and eastern branches, and rationalizing Libya’s distributive system thus became a core focus of the United Nations and international diplomacy in late 2018, at the expense, some critics allege, of a more concerted effort to deter interference by outside powers, especially the Emirates.87 By late 2018 and early 2019, the Emiratis embarked on a strategy of engaging with and trying to co-opt armed group leaders inside Tripoli whom they perceived to be anti-Muslim Brotherhood, allegedly Haytham Tajuri and Abdelraouf Kara.88 As the Emiratis pursued these activities, their narrative shifted: anti-Islamism still existed as a reference point, but Emirati and pro-Haftar media outlets gradually emphasized the battle against corruption and the uneven distribution of Libya’s oil wealth, which the Emirates realized would gain greater traction in Western capitals. Alongside France, the Emirates backed Haftar’s advance into the oil crescent and westward across the Fezzan region from mid-2018 to early 2019.89 Deploying Emirati cash and the promise of goods and weapons, Haftar’s LAAF loosely drew local militias across the Fezzan into its orbit. The Emirates and France framed the operation as restoring order, eliminating criminal gangs, and denying safe havens in Libya to transnational rebel groups based in Chad.90 In addition, the GNA’s longstanding neglect and failed promises to southern communities in the Fezzan provided a pool of discontent for Haftar and his backers to exploit. But Haftar’s operation was hardly a panacea; in a number of southern towns, LAAF rule ended up stoking communal tensions and violence.91 Moreover, Haftar’s goal in the Fezzan all along was to seize power in Tripoli, partly to get access to the Central Bank and alleviate a worsening financial crisis within his eastern power base.92 International support and appeasement abetted Haftar’s encroachment toward Tripoli. As noted, Haftar believed that Emirati clandestine diplomacy and money had induced some proGNA Tripoli militias, namely the powerful Tripoli Revolutionaries Brigade, to flip to his side.93 But beyond this Emirati campaign, Tripolitanian actors, including Haftar’s erstwhile foes, showed some receptiveness to the general’s advances. Interior Minister Fathi Bashaga, for example, acknowledged in a February 2019 interview that Haftar was providing muchneeded law and order in the Fezzan and would be welcomed into a power-sharing deal, provided he subordinate himself to a civilian authority.94 In addition, some Salafi factions in and around the capital—known as ‘Madkhalis’ because of their reverence for an influential Saudi-based cleric named Rabi bin Hadi al-Madkhali— supported Haftar’s advance on Tripoli, driven mostly by self-serving calculations but also previous pro-Operation Dignity statements from al-Madkhali.95 Yet the notion of these Libyan Salafis acting in lockstep as proxies for the Saudi government does not accord with their actions on the ground or their relationship with foreign clerical authorities: The Libyan

Madkhali current has been riven by personality conflicts and local agendas, and Madkhalis sometimes ignored Rabi’s statements or adapted them to suit their own political aims.96 That said, the Saudi government did back Haftar’s Tripoli operation by reportedly promising him cash at a meeting before he launched his assault, followed by supportive Twitter campaigns and favorable coverage on Saudi satellite television outlets.97 Underpinning all of this was international appeasement of Haftar and acquiescence toward his advance to Tripoli’s environs. Starting in mid-2018, US and Western diplomats expressed confidence that Haftar would agree to a power-sharing formula and eventual elections.98 By early 2019, this confidence expressed itself as tacit support for his Fezzan operation as a way to jolt the moribund GNA into relinquishing power and set the stage for a more legitimate and inclusive government in Tripoli.99 Such a path, they believed, would occur through a UN-brokered plan for a national conference and elections, to which Haftar had vaguely agreed (his backers in Abu Dhabi also, in theory, supported the plan).100 Foreign ‘Boots on the Ground’: The 2019 Battle for Tripoli and Beyond In early April, weeks away from the UN-brokered national conference, Haftar launched a surprise assault on Tripoli, starting on the town of Gharyan on Tripoli’s outskirts.101 News of the advance came as such a shock that Libyans in Tripoli and some outside analysts still believed that this was just muscle-flexing on Haftar’s part to bolster his negotiating position ahead of the conference.102 Haftar’s disregard for that meeting—and his contempt for the UN’s authority more generally—became fully apparent when he intensified his assault on 5 April the very same day the UN Secretary General flew to Benghazi to meet the Libyan commander in a futile attempt to prevent a war. Longstanding Emirati support to Haftar’s campaigns in the east and south helped enable his Tripoli attack, although the Emirates maintained to diplomats and stated publicly that they had not sanctioned the actual assault on the capital. At the very least, they may have given Haftar mixed signals, or Haftar may have misinterpreted the signals. Once the attack started, however, the Emirati—and Saudi—hand became starkly apparent with the mobilization of pro-Haftar Twitter hashtags, amplified by bots and traditional media outlets, in what appeared to be a coordinated campaign by Abu Dhabi and Riyadh, with participation from Cairo.103 Egypt had initially opposed the Tripoli campaign but had reportedly been pressured by the Emirates into backing it diplomatically, militarily, and in the informational realm.104 As noted, France’s longtime accommodation of and clandestine support for Haftar’s ambitions was a key enabler as well. Aside from these states’ varying degrees of backing, the explicit approval that Haftar received from Washington, DC was perhaps the most significant boost. A day before the attack, Haftar spoke on the phone with then US National Security Advisor John Bolton, who reportedly urged the Libyan commander to ‘do it quickly.’105 This was followed weeks later by President Trump’s phone call to Haftar, which praised the Tripoli attack as a counterterrorism operation.

It is important to note that this was not the first time Haftar had sought American approval for a seizure of power in Tripoli: in late 2016, during the final months of the Obama presidency, he’d dispatched a delegation to Washington announcing his willingness to implement military rule. The response was a firm rebuke from senior State Department officials.106 US resolve and diplomatic leadership also prevented Haftar from illegally exporting oil and establishing a parallel oil administration in the east. But under the Trump administration, this pressure was exerted not necessarily to protect the GNA or prevent a Libyan conflict, but out of concern for the effect of Libya’s turmoil on global oil production.107 And, by late 2018 and 2019, the thinking in Washington toward Libya changed considerably, not only in the Trump administration but also among professional diplomats within the State Department, who held a cooler stance toward the GNA while welcoming Haftar’s participation in a political process. After the Trump phone call, which had reportedly been encouraged by the Emirates and the Egyptians, Haftar received further support at the UN Security Council, where the United States joined Russia and France in blocking a British-sponsored resolution for a ceasefire.108 It would be nearly a year before the United States finally singled out Haftar by name in its pronouncements on the conflict. These dynamics all played to Haftar’s favor in the initial stages of his assault, offering a clear illustration of how much the global order had split since the last phase of Libya’s civil war in 2014, and especially since the relative diplomatic consensus which had underpinned the NATO-led intervention in 2011. On the ground, the conflict quickly internationalized, with great powers, regional powers, and poorer neighboring states all contributing militarily.109 This was initially evident in the air with the widespread use of combat drones.110 Soon, ground-based foreign mercenaries played a major role as well. Importantly, because European states and America did not deploy military assets or fighters of their own in support of Libya’s warring protagonists, they effectively ceded political leverage to those outside states that did. Reflecting on the West’s reluctance to play by the rules of this new game, a European diplomat lamented, ‘we are relying on words, just words. These other countries have arms and fighters.’111 The United Arab Emirates was the most significant foreign intervener early on, especially in the air. Chinese-made Wing Loong drones, piloted by Emirati personnel and stationed at LAAF bases in western and eastern Libya (and possibly in the United Arab Emirates itself), struck GNA artillery, ammunition depots, and vehicles.112 The Emirates also conducted fixed-wing strikes using French Mirages. These strikes, along with those carried out by drones, incurred mounting civilian casualties in and around Tripoli, exemplified most notably by the 2 July bombing by an Emirati Mirage of a migrant detention center in Tajoura, which killed fifty-three people.113 However, UN reports on the strikes rarely singled out the Emirates by name; international condemnation of this and other incidents has been stymied by international divisions and especially by diplomatic protection of the Emirates by the United States and France.114 Yet the provision of Emirati aerial support, along with Emirati-supplied Tiger armored vehicles, still wasn’t enough for Hafar’s forces to break the stalemate or compensate for the

LAAF’s lack of manpower. Compounding this shortcoming, Haftar and his foreign backers, namely the Emirates, had hoped to flip GNA-aligned militias in and around Tripoli to his side though financial inducements.115 But the defections failed to materialize, and rival armed groups in and around the capital shelved their differences and offered up stiff resistance.116 By May, Turkey joined the war on the side of the GNA, though its military support in this phase was unannounced and clandestine. It principally consisted of armed drones —‘Bayraktar’ TB2s, manufactured by a company belonging to Turkish President Erdog˘an’s son-in-law—along with ‘Kirpi’ mine-resistant armored personnel carriers.117 The net effect of this equipment on the battle was limited. To be sure, the Turkish-piloted drones did prove useful in some close air support engagements, against infantry and armored vehicles. And Turkish support helped the GNA seize a strategic LAAF base at Gharyan in June. But overall, Turkish aid was not as decisive nor as substantial as the GNA might have hoped. Emirati drones outclassed the Turkish Bayraktars in performance and lethality, and by late summer 2019 they had destroyed most of the Turkish craft on the ground.118 Similarly, the Turkish Kirpi vehicles did not have an appreciable effect on battlefield outcomes; their value was mostly a ‘morale booster,’ according to one senior GNA official.119 By autumn 2019, diminishing Turkish support—mostly the result of battlefield attrition of Turkish drones—had shifted the momentum to the LAAF. Much of this was due to a redoubling of Emirati support after the fall of Gharyan, but also to the arrival to the frontlines of yet another foreign meddler. In September, hundreds of Russian paramilitary fighters from the Kremlin-linked Wagner Group arrived at the LAAF frontlines outside Tripoli, soon joined by a stream of hundreds of others.120 A notionally private paramilitary group tied to Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Wagner Group is in fact a clandestine arm of Russian ‘gray zone’ power projection.121 It has deployed to conflictwracked states in the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, with mixed results.122 In Libya, the Wagner Group fighters took on an increasingly active role in the LAAF advance on the capital. They were abetted by the United Arab Emirates, which reportedly paid the salaries of their fighters and put its drones and logistics assets at their disposal.123 But pushing Haftar into power through a brute-force military victory in Tripoli was probably not Moscow’s ultimate goal. Mindful of Haftar’s advancing age and poor health, contemptuous of his military competence, and suspicious about his historical ties to Washington via the CIA in the 1980s, Russia sought to use his assault on Tripoli for its own ends. By nudging Haftar into a stronger battlefield position, Russia would be able to mediate a diplomatic outcome that played to its favor and that would cement a prominent political role for the Gaddafists, who would reopen trade, infrastructure, and arms links between Russia and Libya.124 Here, Gaddafi’s son Saif al-Islam, wanted by the International Criminal Court and reportedly in hiding in Zintan, was an object of Russian attention. In summer 2019, GNA intelligence personnel captured two Prigozhin-linked Russian operatives in Tripoli who were trying to liaise with Saif al-Islam. According to the GNA interior minister, they were also

reconnoitering targets in Tripoli for LAAF air strikes and seeking to influence the Libyan municipal council elections.125 Russian interest in both Saif and Haftar was evident in a broadcast and online media campaign run by Prigozhin media firms in support of the two Libyan figures. The firms running these campaigns used local content creators to obscure Russia’s hand, as part of a broader Prigozhin strategy of propaganda franchising that is evident across Africa.126 Economic considerations were also important in Russia’s diversified portfolio of pursuing channels of influence with multiple Libyan actors. Even as it was sending Wagner personnel to assist LAAF forces, it continued to engage GNA. In late 2019, for example, the Russian oil company Tatneft conducted exploration activities in the GNA-controlled Ghadames basin.127 Wagner Group fighters were a cheap, flimsily deniable, and flexible means to accomplish these goals, without completely sacrificing Moscow’s ties with the GNA.128 The Wagner intervention in Libya, while hardly an exemplar of expeditionary warfare, was enough to make a difference in the context of Libya’s rudimentary militia fighting. Wagner personnel conducted frontline reconnaissance for mortars, artillery, and Emirati drones, as well as sniping. By December, they seemed to be moving from a purely advising and assisting role to exerting a degree of command over LAAF fighters. Wagner personnel reportedly directed the LAAF’s frontline forces in flanking maneuvers, something hitherto unseen on the Libyan battlefield, but a hallmark of Wagner’s Syrian engagement.129 And, according to Western diplomats, they tried to change the composition of LAAF units by requesting that Haftar send more fighters from eastern Libya to the Tripoli front, reportedly because they were displeased with the performance of the LAAF’s Tarhuna-based combatants.130 Buoyed by this support, in late 2019 the LAAF steadily gained territory, especially on the disputed Salahaddin front. But the more profound effect of the Wagner Group’s arrival on the battlefield was a sharp decline in GNA morale. Sniper shots from the LAAF side became far more lethal, with one GNA commander reporting that they now accounted for up to 30 percent of the losses in his unit. The volleys of LAAF mortars became more intense and precise, aided by drones.131 GNA commanders also reported that the Russians had brought in laser-guided artillery munitions, which struck GNA field headquarters with a newfound accuracy.132 Bereft of their own armed drones, or even surveillance variants, the GNA was left increasingly blind and exposed to LAAF air strikes and mortars. Young GNA fighters, already incensed at the government’s uneven payment of salaries and medical care, started leaving the front. For the first time since the start of the 2019 war, the prospect of an LAAF push into central Tripoli, while still remote and complicated by the capital’s dense urban terrain and the LAAF’s lack of sufficient manpower, appeared as a possibility.133 But in facilitating these advances, the Wagner Group had inadvertently spurred another round of foreign military intervention, arguably the most consequential and far-reaching since 2011. Turkey’s Intervention Changes the Game, November 2019

Fearing a potential collapse of its cordon outside Tripoli, the GNA in late autumn 2019 turned again to Turkey, its only substantive military patron. On 27 November, the GNA and the Turkish government signed a deal on an exclusive economic zone in the eastern Mediterranean that would grant Turkish exploration and drilling rights to offshore hydrocarbon resources. In return, President Erdog˘an promised to send military support to the GNA, subject to Turkish parliamentary approval.134 With a stroke of a pen, the agreement irrevocably transformed the Libyan war. Turkish military support to the GNA, always ambivalent and clandestine, suddenly became overt and more robust.135 Geopolitically, the maritime deal worsened tensions with the European Union, as it infringed on the hydrocarbon and territorial claims of Turkey’s longtime rival Greece and other Mediterranean states.136 Erdog˘an’s agreement with Libya was thus a major power play, part of a broader pattern of adventurism and militarization in Turkish foreign policy whose roots are partially domestic. It also aligned with Turkish strategic aspirations in the Mediterranean—the so-called ‘Blue Homeland’ doctrine—as well as Turkey’s economic penetration into Africa. In Libya, Ankara hoped to secure infrastructure projects, contracts for arms and training, access to banking, a market for Turkish goods, and, especially, to recoup economic losses incurred by the 2011 revolution.137 Outside of geopolitics and economics, the arrival of Turkish forces to Libyan soil had a resounding effect on the Libyan war of narratives and disinformation. Erdog˘an’s speeches and propaganda were tinged with evocations of Turkey’s Ottoman heritage and its historical ties to Libya, as well as Ankara’s duty to protect the Turkish diaspora in Libya.138 While not the primary drivers of Turkey’s deployment, these linkages were nonetheless seized upon and exaggerated by Haftar’s camp and his regional backers. On satellite television, in press conferences, and on social media, Haftar and his foreign supporters in Cairo, Abu Dhabi, and Riyadh painted Erdog˘an’s intervention as a redux of Turkey’s imperial Ottoman ambitions, opposed by a phalanx of Arab states.139 The propaganda war further escalated when Turkey took the far-reaching step of dispatching proxy infantry forces to Libyan soil in December 2019. These forces comprised an initial tranche of 2,000 fighters drawn from Turkish-backed Syrian militias, some of whose members had fought in Syria’s civil war and in Turkey’s subsequent intervention in the largely Kurdish province of Afrin.140 Delivered by civilian aircraft and ships into Tripoli and Misrata, the Syrian fighters, many of whom were ethnic Turkmen with close familial ties to Turkey, were offered lavish salaries and the promise of Turkish citizenship. While these factors certainly played a role, interviews with these fighters in January 2020 suggest they weren’t the only drivers. Fresh from battles in Idlib and northwest Syria, some of the fighters had arrived in Libya eager for payback against Russian forces, or motivated by a genuine desire to prevent a military dictatorship under Haftar.141 The Syrians’ deployment was shepherded by hundreds of uniformed Turkish military officers, intelligence advisors from the Turkish national intelligence service (MIT), and technicians.142 Turkish drones, artillery, air defense systems, intelligence assets, and electronic warfare equipment also arrived. In the coming weeks and months, this intervention

would have a decisive effect on the course of the battlefield, and would deal a devastating blow to Haftar’s ambitions. Turkey’s layered air defense systems, which targeted drones and fixed-wing aircraft, negated Haftar’s air advantage over Tripoli and Misrata. Free from this threat from the sky, GNA forces in Tripoli were suddenly afforded greater mobility. Turkish self-propelled artillery provided much-needed fire support and bolstered the GNA fighters’ morale. And the dispersal of thousands of Syrian fighters around Tripoli, intermixed with militias from Tripoli, Misrata, and other towns, helped stabilize the front and thrust into sharper relief the LAAF’s shortage in manpower.143 Yet the Syrians also stirred controversy and dissent. Some GNA commanders resented the intrusion of foreign infantry on the front, arguing that it was an insult to Libyan sovereignty and fighting prowess, and that what they really needed was advanced weapons and equipment, not manpower.144 Politically, the Syrian-Turkish presence created the impression with the GNA, and especially with Misratan circles, that the Muslim Brotherhood-aligned Libyan faction was again ascendant.145 Among Haftar and his foreign backers, the Turkish intervention was a propaganda windfall, and pro-Haftar media outlets portrayed the Syrians as al-Qaeda and ISIS members. This was false, of course, although a minority of the Syrians probably had jihadist proclivities, and some had committed abuses in the past.146 The Global Scramble for Libya, January 2020 Onwards By creating a newfound equilibrium on the frontline, the Turkish-Syrian deployment, following on the heels of Putin’s gambit of sending the Wagner fighters, dramatically altered global diplomacy with regard to Libya. Specifically, it enabled a push by Moscow and Ankara to try and mediate an end to the conflict, or at least shape its course to their interests.147 On 12 January, Vladimir Putin, in coordination with Erdog˘an, hosted a summit in Moscow attended by both Haftar and GNA Prime Minister al-Sarraj. The warring leaders held 8 hours of talks, resulting in their committing to a truce.148 Al-Sarraj signed, but Haftar only gave a verbal commitment and walked out of the meeting, reportedly at the behest of the Emirates. It was yet more proof that even the strongest outside powers could fully control their local Libyan proxies, especially when there were a multiplicity of patrons. On the ground, the meeting produced an uneasy lull in the fighting, with the Wagner personnel pulling back from the front, save for some desultory sniping.149 According to a Western diplomat, the GNA had reportedly gone to the meeting after Erdog˘an had ‘twisted its arm.’150 Meanwhile, some frontline GNA militia commanders were suspicious that a backroom deal was being struck in foreign capitals that would reward Haftar for his aggression on Tripoli. ‘Is this what our martyrs died for?’ one of these GNA commanders angrily asked the author in early 2020.151 Partially spurred by the Turkish and Russian summitry and the opening occasioned by Haftar’s walkout, the EU and Great Britain finally mobilized a consensus on talks of their own. A long-planned international conference hosted by German Chancellor Angela Merkel convened on 18 January but in the shadow of the Moscow summit. In the final fifty-five-

point communique, the international parties committed to enforcing the arms embargo and working toward a truce.152 Yet almost as soon as the conference ended, aerial and maritime shipments into Libya resumed, especially by the Emirates. In subsequent weeks, the Emirates contributed to the resumption of hostilities by encouraging Haftar to continue his military assault.153 The months of January and February 2020 thus constituted a buildup and regrouping of the two sides, abetted by their foreign sponsors, despite their pledges at Berlin. As it had in the past, the hypocrisy and recklessness of regional and great powers were plunging the country toward a new phase of war. Wrangling by these powers at the UN Security Council produced a watered-down resolution that endorsed the Berlin Conference’s communique but lacked any effective enforcement mechanism.154 America’s backseat role was instrumental in all of this. In a testimony before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on 20 February 2020, Assistant Secretary of State David Schenker was the first senior administration official to publicly mention the Emiratis’ negative impact in Libya. Although the secretary offered assurances that the United States was engaging Abu Dhabi behind the scenes, other US officials privately admitted to the author that the United States’ other priorities in the Middle East—namely Israel-Palestine peace efforts and countering Iran—in which Emirati partnership is deemed indispensable precludes Washington exerting more forceful pressure on Abu Dhabi.155 With this reticence as a backdrop, US diplomacy during this period focused on efforts to entice the Emiratis into a negotiating process by placating their fears about Islamist control over Libya’s financial institutions, a rubric known as the ‘3M,’ or ‘Money, Militias, and Muslim Brotherhood.’ Multiple US officials believed that these factors constituted the primary drivers of Libya’s endemic instability, downplaying the malevolent role of meddling by US Middle Eastern allies. The goal of the 3M, according to one US official in Washington, was to separate the Muslim Brotherhood from the GNA, ‘to bring the Emirates into the negotiating process.’156 Yet on the ground, such an initiative did not lessen the Emiratis’ buildup or the ferocity of the assault on Tripoli, mainly because the Emiratis’ 2019 intervention in Libya was not driven solely by a concern over Islamist influence in Tripolitania. At any rate, this influence had receded since 2017, but ironically increased following Haftar’s attack on Tripoli.157 As a corollary to this strategy, the United States pressured GNA Interior Minister Fathi Bashaga to accelerate his efforts at dismantling Tripoli’s more predatory militias and prying them loose from Libya’s state institutions. These efforts had actually started before Haftar’s attack but were placed on hold because of the GNA’s prioritizing defending Tripoli.158 Importantly, Turkish political and military backing and plans for security sector assistance bolstered Bashaga’s anti-militia program, especially against the Tripoli-based Nawasi Battalion and the Tripoli Revolutionaries’ Brigade, and, to a lesser extent, the Abu Slim Central Security Force led by Abd al-Ghani al-Kikli (a.k.a. ‘Gheneiwa’).159 Yet Bashaga’s policies and the prospect of incorporation into the formal security sector opened up fissures and competition for appointments, also spurring anti-Turkish sentiment among the Tripolibased armed groups targeted by the interior minister.

As the United States focused on this largely technical approach, regional powers were shaping the Libyan battlefield in ways that gave them increased leverage in the political sphere.160 In the weeks and months following the Berlin conference, the Emirates tried to compensate for the Turkish gambit by flying in equipment in heavy aircraft to eastern Libya.161 Turkey sent hundreds of advisors and officers, self-propelled artillery, tanks, trucks, counter-battery radars, surveillance and armed drones, and naval frigates with helicopters. This materiel would eventually be used in a counterattack on Haftar’s forces, dubbed Operation Peace Storm. In many respects, the military template followed a previous Turkish advance in Idlib, Syria, in late February.162 The Turkish-backed Syrian mercenaries were thrown into the battle en masse, suffering mounting casualties. Turkish air and drone strikes dealt a psychological blow to the LAAF by hitting its operations centers in Tarhuna, which included Pantsir air defense systems supplied by the UAE, and in Sirte, which Haftar had earlier seized. Turkish air forces were also able to threaten Emirati drones in Haftar’s rear areas, especially at the Jufra airbase, forcing the Emirates to redeploy them further east, to the Emirati-refurbished al-Khadim airbase and to western Egypt.163 Reportedly, Turkish commanders based on a frigate off the coast of Tripoli took an increasingly active role in selecting targets for air strikes; in many cases, they cut out elements of the GNA’s military leadership in this targeting process.164 By mid-April, the Turkish-led offensive had succeeded in ousting the LAAF from its bases on Tripoli’s western flank, in the towns of Sabratha and Surman.165 As this was happening, the Emiratis and their LAAF allies pressed on the attack in Tripoli, with indiscriminate targeting that produced mounting civilian casualties.166 They also sought to counterbalance Erdog˘an’s Syrian deployment with foreign manpower of their own. The Emiratis and the Wagner Group had recruited Chadian and Sudanese fighters, with the Emiratis luring the Sudanese with the false pretense of employment in the Gulf, rather than Libya.167 But these African fighters were no match in skill or numbers for the Syrians, and, like other LAAF soldiers, were increasingly vulnerable to Turkish air strikes.168 To compensate, the LAAF turned to a new foreign supplier of manpower. Following their rapprochement with the Assad government, Abu Dhabi (along with Cairo) brokered a defense pact between Haftar’s camp and Damascus. This resulted in the reported deployment of 2,000 pro-Assad Syrian militiamen to support Haftar’s forces.169 By early summer 2020, the two sides had squared off over the Jufra-Sirte axis. Russia continued its aerial shipments of weaponry, dispatched advanced combat aircraft to eastern Libya, and repositioned Wagner Group fighters in the Sirte environs, strategic air bases across Fezzan, and key oil fields (but not before seeding Tripoli homes with deadly mines and booby traps).170 For his part, Egyptian president Sisi issued bellicose statements that Sirte was a redline and threatened a military intervention to halt Turkey’s advance, a warning that was endorsed by the Egyptian parliament.171 But the scale of such a move, if it happens at all, would likely be modest given the Egyptian military’s limitations and Cairo’s competing strategic priorities.172

Meanwhile, Turkey has been streaming materiel of its own into Libya and repositioning its arsenal for an assault on Sirte.173 Yet it too faces risks: a further push eastward might dilute its political, security, and economic gains in Tripolitania and fracture the already fissiparous GNA coalition.174 Even so, Turkish military commanders in Libya are reportedly distrustful of Russian designs given Turkey’s recent experience with Russia’s support for an attack by the Syrian regime on Aleppo, which occurred in the midst of Turkish-Russian talks.175 A Turkish advance on Sirte would likely be accompanied by a deal with Russia on the redeployment of Wagner forces away from the central coastal city, a concession that Ankara hopes might be tied to Russian advances in Syria’s Idlib province and that would come at Egypt’s expense.176 As the fragmentation in Libya and in the global order worsens, it is unlikely that any one foreign state will be able to win Libya, especially given the multiplicity of outside actors on the landscape. Turkey is poised to build significant influence over Tripolitania’s economic sphere and security institutions. This will include fortifying its presence at key Western military bases, and training and equipping new security forces, with involvement by a Turkish private military contractor linked to President Erdog˘an and projected assistance from Qatar.177 Yet despite this growing entrenchment, Ankara would not necessarily benefit from a formal partition of Libya, which would be invariably marked by conflict: its longterm economic interests hinge on political stability and trade access to the east. For its part, Russia is spreading its forces across eastern and southern Libya and has been willing to cultivate ties to a broader swathe of Libyan actors, to include elements of the GNA and the Gaddafists. Similarly, the Egyptians, who have also soured on Haftar and have sought to bolster alternative Libyan military commanders and anti-Islamist figures, are eager to reestablish political and economic ties to Tripolitania, especially given the importance of the western region for Egyptian migrant labor. Some elements in Cairo, moreover, are also open to negotiating with Turkey over the eastern-Mediterranean gas dispute.178 Yet at the same time, the Egyptian government strives to preserve the LAAF (without Haftar) as the nucleus of a future security architecture in Libya. Consequently, the Egyptians, along with the Russians, have been trying shape a post-Haftar Libya in the wake of the general’s battlefield setbacks: Cairo and Moscow are both engaging Gaddafists, and both have endorsed a political roadmap by Aguila Saleh, the speaker of the eastern-based legislature, the House of Representatives (HOR), which effectively sidelines Haftar.179 Yet the most consequential outside power in the Libyan imbroglio remains the least talked about, especially in Washington and Paris: the United Arab Emirates.180 Reeling from Haftar’s losses in Tripolitania and bereft of appealing military options, Abu Dhabi started to diversify its outreach to eastern- and western-based Libyan actors, although not to the same extent as Egypt and Russia were doing. It is also deploying a range of spoiling and stalling tactics, designed to stymie Turkish consolidation in Tripolitania and thwart a potential Turkish-Russian entente by encouraging Egyptian belligerence and reportedly persuading Haftar to refuse a foreign-backed deal to lift his blockade of oil facilities.181 All of this diplomatic maneuvering is taking place against a backdrop of profound crises

and disarray in Europe and America. European policy on Libya in particular has been marked by paralysis and deep divisions. Nowhere is this more apparent than in France’s vocal and obsessive demonization of Turkey’s intervention in Libya—part of a broader French antipathy toward Turkey that has domestic and ideological roots—at the expense of Emirati and Russian support to Haftar, France’s longtime ally in Libya.182 Operationally, Europe’s disunity and lack of capacity became evident in its attempt to enforce the UN arms embargo on Libya with an EU maritime interdiction operation, the socalled Operation Irini, which started on 1 April 2020. Because the EU’s interdiction efforts were focused almost entirely on the maritime front, GNA supporters and outside critics charged, correctly, that Irini was biased against Turkey, since its shipments went by sea. In contrast, Haftar received foreign arms by air or overland from Egypt. Yet even with this focus, the actual disruptions of Turkish seaborne supplies have been spotty to nonexistent.183 On top of this, key European countries—France, Italy, and Germany—are threatening EU sanctions on Libya’s foreign meddlers. But, given their diverging approaches toward Libya— and, in France’s case, blatant partisanship in favor of the UAE—their list is unlikely to cover the most serious violators.184 In the summer of 2020, the ineffectiveness of European policy on Libya elicited a public rebuke from David Schenker, not just on Operation Irini but on Europe’s one-sided stance. ‘They could at least, if they were serious, I think, call them out—call out all parties of the conflict when they violate the arms embargo,’ the American diplomat told a reporter.185 Yet American diplomacy on Libya has hardly been a paragon of effectiveness and evenhandedness. Indeed, in its reluctance to formulate a clear policy on Libya and its reticence to exert diplomatic leadership, the Trump administration has in many respects followed the Obama administration’s paradigm of ‘no ownership’—what State Department officials have recently reframed as ‘active neutrality.’186 As noted earlier, part of this is structural and geo-strategic: Libya is just too peripheral for Washington to warrant significant commitment of US resources or pushback against American allies who have long been intervening, especially when those allies’ help is considered essential for other regional priorities. But under the Trump administration, authoritarian ideological preferences and a pronounced tilt toward the United Arab Emirates and Turkey have factored in as well. Having first backed the Emirates in their support of Haftar, the Trump presidency subsequently sent positive signals to Turkey once Haftar’s advance stalled and after the Russian presence in Libya expanded. As a result, US policy under Trump has been muddled and anything but neutral. Moreover, by issuing toothless expressions of regret on repeated violations and abuses but failing to take action, Washington has contributed to a prolongation and intensification of the war. By summer 2020, there were modestly encouraging signs that this reticence was changing. The United States took the positive and long overdue step of threatening US Treasury sanctions on Haftar, a US citizen, in conjunction with its application of sanctions on Wagner financier Yevgeny Prigozhin (but for his involvement in Sudan, rather than Libya).187 In tandem, the US Africa Command began waging a concerted public information campaign to highlight and criticize Russia’s buildup of military infrastructure in Libya, although such

measures, by themselves, won’t deter Moscow’s meddling.188 Diplomatically, the United States—along with Germany, the United Kingdom, and the UN—started pressing for a demilitarization zone in Sirte as a means of securing a return to a political process. The US ambassador to Libya engaged in robust shuttle talks with Ankara and Cairo, resulting in their supporting a ceasefire agreement announced on 21 August 2020 by GNA Prime Minister alSarraj and the speaker of the eastern HOR, Aguila Saleh.189 Alhough the agreement, which endorsed the demilitarization of the Sirte region, called for a resumption of oil production—and included a provision to place oil revenues in Libya’s foreign, rather than central, bank—was lauded by the UN and in Western capitals, it remains fraught with pitfalls. Most significantly, the signatories have a limited span of control over armed and political actors on the ground, illustrated in Aguila Saleh’s case by Haftar’s rejection of the deal and threats to restart fighting. For their part, al-Sarraj and the GNA coalition were shaken by widespread protests over poor administration and corruption, as well as a surge in coronavirus infections and deaths, which are also present in the east.190 The GNA was also riven by a worsening power struggle, which saw al-Sarraj suspend and replace the powerful interior minister Fathi Bashagha for allegedly encouraging the protests.191 These widening and deeply rooted fissures extend well beyond political elites, to armed groups and towns in and around Tripoli, and even to the Tripoli-based Central Bank, whose militia-aligned governor has emerged as a key obstructionist, along with Haftar, according to a senior Western diplomat.192 By early 2021, however, a softening of regional ideological and political enmities in the region—evident in Turkish talks with Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, and in the end of the Saudi-led embargo on Qatar—provided what for many seasoned diplomats was the first hopeful opening for a durable reconciliation and national unity. In the months that followed, however, that unity has proven elusive, evident most starkly in the failure of planned UNbacked parliamentary and presidential elections in December 2021.193 While the end of foreign-backed armed conflict has certainly been a respite to Libyan citizens, their long-term livelihoods and security are hardly well-served by the struggle that has ensued: a backroom contest for the country’s political and economic spoils among Libyan elites and armed groups, with foreign powers—especially Turkey and Russia with their still-entrenched military forces—still jockeying to advance their self interests.

For all the influence foreign powers wield on Libya’s scene, it is important not to completely deny agency to Libyan actors. Outside support has indisputably been a conflict amplifier and prolonger. And access to foreign patronage has long disincentivized Libyans from reaching an accord. And yet, in the near-decade since the overthrow of Gaddafi, Libyans have exerted more agency in these proxy conflicts than is commonly assumed. Many Libyans admit that it was precisely the divisions of Libyan society and politics—most of which were not primordial but arose during and after the 2011 revolution—which gave foreigners openings to exploit. Libyan political elites and armed group leaders have proven skillful at soliciting and

manipulating competing offers of outside patronage, and they often do not follow the wishes of any of their patrons’ lockstep, as evidenced by Haftar’s walking out of the January 2020 Moscow summit. Their willfulness in this regard is bolstered by their control of Libya’s oil wealth as a source of leverage. Personal networks of intermediaries, brokers, and fixers further complicate the patron-client relationship and dilute outsiders’ control over local allies. Taken in sum, Libya’s confluence of foreign predation and technological innovations has led some observers to speak of the latest iteration of Libya’s post-Gaddafi civil war, from 2019 to 2020, as a uniquely postmodern or conflict—or even one straight out of sciencefiction—conducted by robotic drones, Twitter bots, and foreign mercenaries, with Libyans acting as bystanders.194 But such a framing does not completely capture realities on the ground or aid in a clearer understanding of the conflict’s stakes or potential outcomes. To be sure, foreign mercenary fighters drawn to Libya’s conflict marketplace contributed to the prolongation and intensification of the combat. And Libya was indeed being used as a laboratory by outside powers for advanced drones and informational warfare tactics, whose full implications may not become fully apparent until deployed in future wars. Yet combat on the Libyan frontlines was always a viciously intimate and human affair, ultimately waged between Libyan citizens. And this human element is even more evident in the lasting devastation the war has wrought: in the shattered psyches and ruined bodies of the young fighters, in the hundreds of thousands of people uprooted from their homes, in the civilian lives lost to mines and booby traps, and in the tears to the country’s social fabric that, despite the recent cessation of hostilities, may still take years to mend.

6

THE PROXY AIR WARS OVER LIBYA

Melissa Salyk-Virk

On 6 June 2018 a thunderous air strike hit the town of Bani Walid in northwest Libya, about 100 miles from Tripoli, a town that used to be considered ‘Libya’s last stronghold loyal to Muammar Gaddafi.’1 A press release by AFRICOM stated that four ISIS-Libya militants died and no civilians were harmed.2 However, local reporting with photographic evidence, also confirmed by the United Nations,3 stated that that same strike had killed three civilians driving in the car with the UN-designated terrorist. Local television network Libya Alaan tweeted, translated from Arabic, ‘#Libya_ now A nightly raid on #Bani_Walid that resulted in the death of 6 people, including a prominent leader of the Islamic State # ISIS “Abd al-Ati Eshtiwi Abu Sita,” known as “Kiwi.”’ Earlier that same week, local news outlet Libya Observer reported that Africa Intelligence had alleged that France provided General Khalifa Haftar with a reconnaissance aircraft;4 French missiles, sold to them by the United States, were also found in a Libyan National Army (LNA) camp.5 France publicly stated its support of a democratic process and constitution building, but the possible supplying of weapons and/or aircrafts to the LNA was antithetical to that process. France had also hosted discussions at its Libya Summit on 29 May 2018, pushing for elections in Libya. Fast-forward to July 2019, when the BBC reported that there were French missiles on a pro-Haftar military base.6 On 16 June 2018, the LNA struck the town of Ra’s Lanuf, a coastal city about 400 miles from Tripoli. As many as three civilians were killed that day, two of them children.7 Ra’s Lanuf was assaulted for the next three days, and at least another two civilians were killed. That June, the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) reported there were at least thirty-one civilian casualties that month throughout Libya, and sixteen of those were deaths.8 Since the beginning of summer 2018, there have been many similar incidents. According to New America and Airwars data, the strike count in Libya is 1,863 from 1 June 2018

through 5 February 2020, and between 333 and 467 civilians have been killed.9 One of the worst-pummeled areas is Tripoli, which was struck over 1,200 times. When Haftar was unable to gain control of Tripoli, which has been part of his plan for years, he looked for the next best thing: the surrounding coastal cities of Misrata and Sirte, as well as Jabal al Gharbi, a district near Tripoli. According to New America and Airwars data, each of those cities was struck more than 100 times during the same period. At least seven foreign countries have conducted air strikes in Libya since 2012, highlighting the evolving proxy warfare nature of this conflict. However, the most recently active countries are the United Arab Emirates and Turkey, each fighting on behalf of local belligerents, the Libyan National Army or the Government of National Accord. New America and Airwars documented more than 4,300 air strikes reportedly conducted between September 2012 and 5 February 2020 in Libya, which resulted in at least 611 civilian deaths using the low-end estimate, and as many as 899 civilian deaths using the highend estimate. There are more than ten states actively contributing to the conflict in one form or another. Turkey, Chad, and Italy each conducted at least one strike since the release of our 2018 report. Russia, Jordan, Sudan, and Saudi Arabia support the LNA either with financing or by providing weapons, and Qatar financially backs the Government of National Accord(GNA). Moreover, France, Egypt, and the United States are involved in various capacities (from weapons support to deploying air strikes); however, the most alarming turn of events from the 2018 report are the recent strikes by Turkey and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Turkey entered the conflict in July 2019 with an air strike that allegedly killed one civilian. Six months later, they sent 2,000 Syrian troops to support the GNA. Strikes by the UAE in coordination with the LNA contributed to over 100 civilian fatalities between June 2018 and 5 February 2020. The 1,863 strikes since June 2018 account for more than half the number of civilian casualties throughout the entire conflict. This increased danger has caused a mass exodus from various cities throughout Libya. As a result, according to United Nations estimates, at least 823,000 people10 are in need of various humanitarian aid; there are at least 355,67211 internally displaced persons and 47,07912 registered refugees and asylum seekers due to the ongoing conflict across Libya. These high numbers of people face significant risks as they look for asylum. According to a United Nations report on children and armed conflict, ‘refugee and migrant children were reportedly subjected to sexual abuse, including forced prostitution and sexual exploitation, in conditions that could amount to sexual slavery, by traffickers or criminal networks allegedly associated with armed groups.’13 Those conditions are in addition to child and youth recruitment by belligerents in the conflict, as the United Nations has reported on.14 Families are not only attempting to escape for safety concerns, but also because they fear unprecedented economic instability. Petroleum exports account for nearly 70 percent of all Libya’s exports,15 and with oil production down the country is continuing to decline. General Haftar’s affiliates have blocked oil fields and export terminals at airports since 18 January 2020,16 which has drastically limited production. Crude oil production reportedly fell to 163,684 barrels per day; Prime Minister al-Sarraj believes the loss in revenue due to the

blockade is 1.4 billion USD and growing.17 Since Haftar’s Tripoli offensive in April 2019, growth in Libya’s GDP has declined by 66.6 percent.18 Furthermore, society in parts of Libya is deteriorating. Benghazi and other eastern Libyan towns cope with constant tension, manifesting itself in the form of blackouts that last half the day,19 fears of bombings, abductions of family members,20 attacks on women, and abductions of bank employees and administrators. Benghazi has become a central trading point for drugs and arms sales.21 Across the country, there are reports of disappearances and torture of individuals deemed to be dangerous by the opposing side. For example, The Independent reported in 2019 that during the fight for Derna, LNA affiliates allegedly committed war crimes, with actions that included ‘instances of torture, murder and mutilation of corpses.’22 Since Haftar’s Tripoli offensive, more than sixty attacks on healthcare facilities, workers, and/or ambulances have occurred, according to United Nations reports.23 Some international organizations continue to attempt to produce an accurate death toll of civilians in Libya and identify the responsible parties. However, a lack of reporting and selfreporting of strikes has enabled those responsible to often go unnoticed. The United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) consistently provides figures for civilian casualties of the hostilities in Libya. However, according to its press releases, UNSMIL is sometimes unable to ‘determine with certainty’ which parties contributed to the casualties, with the exception of the Libyan National Army.24 Human Rights Watch at times reports casualties from ‘unidentified aircraft[s],’ due to their inability to identify the party responsible. With some exceptions, typically no belligerents claim responsibility for these air strikes or their outcomes. The LNA and GNA each receive support from various countries (see Figure 6.1). Some provide financial support, like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, but others provide weapons and foot soldiers, such as the UAE (which supports the LNA) and Turkey (which supports the GNA). Those who provide weapons have each participated in deadly strikes, fueling the narrative of the opposing side. For example, on 3 July 2019 the UAE bombed a migrant center, killing at least fifty-three civilians, and then on 4 August 2019 they bombed the city of Murzuq, allegedly targeting militants from the Chadian opposition.25 That strike killed another fortytwo or more civilians.26 On 26 July, the GNA struck key LNA airbase Al Jufra by Turkish drone, destroying two cargo planes and killing a mercenary pilot from Ukraine.27 The next day, the LNA targeted a drone control room, as well as the Air Force Academy in Misrata,28 which was an area of the country that had been somewhat untouched, compared to other cities such as Tripoli, Benghazi, or Sirte. Enough Turkish drones had been destroyed that summer in air strikes by the UAE that they had to be constantly moved around in a desperate attempt at deterrence.29 Fig. 6.1: Strikes in Libya Each Month, by Belligerent

Source: https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/reports/americascounterterrorism-wars/the-war-in-libya Prior to April 2019, air attacks on Tripoli were relatively few in comparison to those of Benghazi, Sirte, or Derna. After all, the LNA only has 25,000 fighters (7,000 are army members, and the remainder are from militias, or are international mercenaries or Salafist fighters),30 which is five times the number of soldiers the GNA has.31 ISIS, at its height, ensnared Derna32 but lost the city in 2016, similar to Sirte. However, Haftar has long claimed that the intent of the LNA campaign across the country was to battle ISIS and other radical Islamists. By the time he attacked Derna in 2019, the city was still in recovery from ISIS occupation three years prior. Tripoli has been one of the hardest hit cities in all of Libya throughout the conflict. Most strikes between June 2018 and 5 February 2020 took place in Tripoli, with over 1,200 individual strikes resulting in nearly 400 deaths. Outside of Tripoli, more than 300 additional people died during that timeframe. Throughout 2019, the LNA conducted 910 strikes, 890 of which took place during General Haftar’s Tripoli offensive, resulting in between 62 and 93 civilian deaths. The GNA conducted 336 strikes during that same timeframe, 204 of which were in Tripoli. These strikes yielded between 38 and 53 civilian deaths, which is more than half of all civilian deaths by the GNA since 2012. The LNA and GNA continue to accuse each other of wreaking havoc across Libya; they remain caught in a vicious cycle of violence in which each considers their respective actions

against the other to be self-vindicating. Since 2012 through 5 February 2020, the LNA has reportedly conducted at least 2,348 air strikes, killing between 214 and 356 civilians. The GNA strike count is nowhere near that of the LNA, even with international intervention. The GNA’s 453 strikes have killed between 53 and 72 civilians.33 Strikes by the United Arab Emirates The United Arab Emirates (UAE) began its own intervention in Libya in March 2011 to help topple Muammar Gaddafi. Joining an international coalition that consisted of NATO countries and Arab nations, including Jordan and Qatar, and under the authority of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 (March 2011),34 the UAE and these partner nations were successful in helping to establish the National Transitional Council (NTC), which was set up as an alternative to Gaddafi’s authoritarian regime. The UAE is known for its regional interventions, as it continues to protest political Islam while promoting a version of the religion that supports its ideals, therefore ‘[politicizing] the secularization of politics’ to justify its geopolitical actions.35 Leaders in the UAE were concerned with how instability in Libya would influence their role in the region,36 so they decided to support Haftar in his campaign against what he perceived to be radical Islamists.37 From June 2018 through 5 February 2020 the UAE has conducted four individual air strikes, but as many as sixty-seven in coordination with the LNA. In some cases, it is not discernible whether the UAE operated independently. When the UAE conducts drone strikes, it uses Chinese Wing Loong models,38 which were originally designed after the MQ-1 Predators in the United States.39 These 67 strikes account for as many as 124 civilian deaths, taking the lowest count, and as many as 167, taking the highest count. Up until 5 February 2020, the LNA and UAE have conducted three strikes together, causing three civilian deaths, and the UAE has conducted one strike by itself. The UAE has breached the agreed-to arms embargo on Libya after the latest Libya Summits in January 2020.40 See Figure 6.2 for more on strikes by the UAE. Fig. 6.2: Strikes by the United Arab Emirates, 2016–20

Source: https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/reports/airstrikes-proxy-warfareand-civilian-casualties-libya/reported-strikes-by-international-belligerents Strikes by Turkey Turkey’s first known air strike in Libya occurred on 14 July 2019 in Tripoli, targeting a house,41 and it reportedly killed one civilian. Turkey deploys its own Bayraktar TB-2 drones in Libya, compared to the Chinese drones that the UAE uses.42 Two weeks later, a similar strike occurred outside Sirtre, this time striking a civilian vehicle, killing two and critically injuring one child.43 Two months earlier, Turkey allegedly began delivering drones and other equipment to Libya, totaling US$350 million.44 Turkey’s air campaign continued for the rest of 2019, striking Libya ten times, in addition to the seven strikes it launched in combination with the GNA. According to New America and Airwars data, these combined strikes killed between ten and twelve civilians in 2019. Seven of those strikes occurred in Tripoli. Turkey began sending troops to Libya in January 2020, after the Turkish parliament voted

to support and train GNA fighters and affiliates. This came after Turkey and Libya signed formal economic agreements at the end of 2019,45 one of which created official new maritime boundaries between the two countries.46 Turkey claims that because of these newly declared boundaries, it has access to natural gas that other neighboring states are also keen to get their hands on, especially since Egypt, Israel, Cyprus, and Greece left Turkey out of a their newly formed Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum. The EastMed deal, as it is commonly referred to, may be worth over US$6.7 billion.47 Many international law experts are calling into question the legality of Turkey’s maritime border move,48 especially its attempt to lay claim to waters that should be easily accessed by the EastMed cooperative. Fig. 6.3: Strikes by Turkey, 2019–20

Source: https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/reports/airstrikes-proxy-warfareand-civilian-casualties-libya/reported-strikes-by-international-belligerents Two thousand Syrian troops were transported through Turkey to support the GNA in

January 2020; however, they are not affiliated with the Turkish military, but are temporary contractors with the GNA.49 According to New America and Airwars data, from 1 January 2020 through 5 February 2020, Turkey conducted air strikes by itself three times, and in coordination with the GNA twice. None of those strikes have resulted in civilian deaths. See Figure 6.3 for more on strikes by Turkey. Strikes by France France offcially recognizes the United Nations-mandated Government of National Accord, led by Fayez al-Sarraj. Despite giving the GNA this professed support, it has also reportedly developed a strong relationship with and provided military support to General Haftar’s rival LNA forces.50 France’s support for both the LNA and GNA stems from its goals in Libya that directly impact its interests in the wider region.51 Concerned with minimizing the threat of jihadists in Libya, French President Emmanuel Macron has called for a unified national army and national government.52 France’s clandestine activities across the country thus demonstrate its preference for the LNA. France provided General Haftar with a reconnaissance aircraft,53 and missiles which France purchased from the United States were also found in an LNA camp.54 France publicly stated its support of a democratic process and constitution building during the Libya Summits, which France hosts. But the possible supplying of weapons and/or aircraft to the LNA conflicts with its public performance of beingin favor of allowing local Libyans to decide their future, or even of supporting the United Nations-backed government. France reportedly conducted seven strikes, likely in coordination with the LNA in 2018, but Airwars and New America have not recorded any additional strikes since then. Members of French intelligence were arrested in April 2019 along the Libyan border with Tunisia, with communications devices allegedly interconnected with the LNA.55 Strikes by Egypt The Egyptian government first publicly acknowledged conducting air strikes in Libya in February 2015. These initial strikes were in response to ISIS’ beheading of twenty-one Egyptian Coptic Christians.56 However, Egypt’s role in the conflict began in August 2014. Egypt provided military bases for the UAE to launch armed planes to strike in Libya.57 On 15 February 2015, Egypt launched air strikes in the Bab Shiha neighborhood and the headquarters of Jabal al-Akhdar Industrial Co. in east Derna. At least seven civilians were killed in those strikes, three or four of them children.58 Egypt opted for striking Derna, where ISIS had a stronghold, instead of Tripolitania province because the round trip was too far for its jets to travel without refueling.59 Amnesty International reported that Egypt did not take proper precautions to protect civilians while conducting those two air strikes.60 According to New America and Airwars data, Egypt’s most recent strike took place in February 2019 along the Libya-Egypt border, killing eight militants. This is the most recent

known recorded strike based on data tracked through 5 February 2020. Italy Italy may have conducted one air strike with the GNA in August 2018, although this is contested. Italy was a significant participant in the NATO intervention, in particular because it permitted the use of its airbases, as well as conducting strikes early on.61 The United States currently launches drones from the Naval Air Station Sigonella in Sicily, Italy. In 2019, the LNA shot down an Italian drone, mistaking it for a Turkish model. Chad On 1 September 2018, Chad conducted a helicopter strike in Murzuq, killing two civilians. In February 2019, General Haftar stated that the LNA had conducted air strikes against three groups of Chadian militants in Murzuq.62 France allegedly conducted strikes nearby, but it was it was unclear whether the Chadian groups were the same targets for both France and the LNA, or if they were located in different places. Strikes by Libyan Belligerents: The GNA and the LNA The local warring factions are the Libyan National Army and the Government of National Accord, each with international backing, financing, and weapons support. Tensions between General Khalifa Haftar, who leads the Libyan National Army faction, and President Fayez alSarraj, who heads the government recognized by the United Nations, have left Libya fractured despite several formal attempts to broker an agreement between them. The two strongmen lead the main forces operating on the ground in Libya: al-Sarraj’s internationally recognized Government of National Accord (GNA), which controls the capital and territory in western Libya; and the Libyan National Army (LNA), which maintains influence in eastern Libya and has seized major oil ports. The LNA currently controls more than twothirds of Libya’s territory.63 Various militias, some of which have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, back the GNA.64 Compared to the funding that Haftar’s LNA receives from countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the UAE, the GNA militias reportedly use old Soviet weapons from Gaddafi’s regime.65 Turkey attempted to fill that gap by selling hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of equipment to the GNA,66 but it is only one country compared to the numerous financial backers and strike partners that the LNA has. The LNA in its early stages promised to liberate Libya from what Haftar perceived to be corrupt and radical Islamists, particularly those governing the country. Haftar launched the Benghazi o ensive in 2014 to cleanse the city of jihadist militants, followed by multiple unsuccessful attempts to take over Tripoli. Over time, Haftar’s secular focus has shifted to him seeking out help from just about anyone who is willing to assist, from Salafists to former

Gaddafi affiliates.67 (Note that support from Salafists is something the UAE has had difficulty reconciling, since its leaders are staunch supporters of containing political Islam.)68 This is in addition to the local tribal leaders Haftar allegedly pays off69 in exchange for their permission to absorb their land into the jurisdiction of the LNA. With air support from the United States, the GNA has sought to hold territory and protect its legitimacy as Libya’s central government. However, over the years, Haftar has significantly increased LNA territory, and between 2018 and 2020, civilian fatality counts drastically increased. See Figure 6.4 for more on GNA and LNA strikes. Fig. 6.4: Air/Drone/Artillery Strikes Resulting in Deaths by GNA or LNA Compared to All Belligerent Deaths, 2014–20

Source: https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/reports/airstrikes-proxy-warfareand-civilian-casualties-libya/strikes-by-libyan-belligerents-the-gna-and-the-lna Strikes by Government of National Accord

GNA Prime Minister al-Sarraj has continued to try to reach a compromise with Haftar’s LNA. However, he has been unable to negotiate a successful ceasefire or disarm militias as the United Nations has hoped. Since the conflict with the GNA began, Haftar and the LNA have effectively dodged multiple scenarios where sanctions should have been implemented.70 Furthermore, Haftar’s campaign continued without him signing and following through on any agreements made in official diplomacy negotiations. The GNA declared a state of emergency in September 2018 after a declared ceasefire broke into conflict again.71 Six months later, Haftar began his Tripoli offensive, hoping to take over the capital. According to New America and Airwars data that captures public reports of GNA strikes from June through December 2018, the GNA conducted two air strikes, and may have conducted an additional joint strike with Italy. However, the GNA was much more active in 2019, conducting 338 strikes with 39 civilian deaths, taking the lowest estimate, and as many as 54 taking the highest estimate. The GNA conducted ten additional strikes with Turkey, which yielded between seven and nine civilian deaths. In some cases, it is not discernible whether Turkey operated independently. There are another 22 strikes that were either undetermined or conducted by the GNA and LNA simultaneously, which resulted in between twelve and thirteen civilian deaths. In 2020, there were twelve strikes conducted by the GNA through 5 February, two strikes with Turkey, and possibly an additional four that were either GNA or LNA, resulting in one civilian casualty. Cases where either the GNA or LNA is listed implicate more than one combatant, which could mean either or both parties were responsible for the strike. Strikes by the Libyan National Army The LNA’s relentless air strike campaigns across the country have yielded them a vast territorial gain since the summer of 2018. After the battle for the city of Derna, which started in 2018, the LNA refocused its attention on the southern oil crescent. According to New America and Airwars data that capture public reports of LNA strikes from June through December 2018, the LNA launched at least sixty strikes with eight to eleven civilian fatalities, as well as another seven strikes likely in coordination with France. By the end of January 2019, Haftar had taken over the southern city of Sabha, and continued capturing other cities until he announced his pending overtake of Tripoli. The LNA’s controlled territory now encompasses more than two-thirds of Libya.72 ‘Operation Flood of Dignity,’ while an impactful offensive in terms of the number of strikes and resultant deaths, was unsuccessful in taking over the capital in 2019. The day after this offensive commenced in western Libya, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres flew to Benghazi to meet with Haftar.73 He beseeched the general to change course, without success. Later that day, as he departed, Secretary-General Guterres tweeted, ‘I leave Libya with a heavy heart and deeply concerned. I still hope it is possible to avoid a bloody confrontation in and around Tripoli. The UN is committed to facilitating a political solution and, whatever happens, the UN is committed to supporting the Libyan people.’74 The LNA launched 910 strikes over the course of 2019. As a result, there were 67 civilian

deaths taking the lowest estimate, and as many as 114 taking the highest estimate. The LNA also conducted at least 67 strikes in coordination with the UAE, causing 125 civilian deaths taking the lowest estimate, and as many as 167 taking the high estimate. There are an additional unidentified twenty-two GNA or LNA strikes, which resulted in between twelve and thirteen civilian deaths. Cases where either the GNA or LNA is listed implicate more than one combatant, which could mean either or both parties were responsible. The LNA and its affiliates launched a few blatant attacks on civilians that received significant international coverage, as well as backlash from the international community. For example, on 3 July 2019, the LNA and UAE jointly struck a migrant detention center in Tajoura, right outside Tripoli. Between 40 and 80 civilians died in that strike out of 120 individuals in the building. The LNA denied that its strike hit that location, but local media associated with the LNA reported that there were air strikes taking place in that exact area of Tripoli.75 Then there was the Janzur Equestrian Club strike that injured six children, killed several horses, and destroyed club facilities outside Tripoli.76 The United Nations investigated the nature of the strike location, determining that there were no military targets located in the facility.77 The Role of the United States Libya is one of the many countries in which the United States conducts air and drone strikes —part of its robust counterterrorism campaign in countries outside of conventional war zones, such as Afghanistan and Iraq. Other countries include Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen.78 The United States has the highest standard of reporting strikes among international parties to the aerial conflict in Libya, and it has one of the lowest number of strikes that have been reported to result in civilian fatalities, according to New America and Airwars data.79 However, there are reasons to doubt some of the Pentagon’s reports of strikes and casualties, and to continue to push for greater transparency. This is increasingly critical after President Donald Trump replaced the Obama administration’s 2013 Presidential Policy Guidance (PPG) with the Principles, Standards and Procedures (PSP) in 2017.80 Many of the policies outlined in the document were not drastically different from its predecessor, but a couple of policies stood out in stark contrast to old protections. For example, the Trump administration lowered the threshold at which the United States can track and kill an alleged terrorist, and drone strikes under the United States’ counterterrorism program going forward would not require the same assessments as before, meaning that the previous number of approvals before launching a strike were no longer required.81 Between June 2018 and 5 February 2020, the United States conducted at least eleven air strikes, killing at least fifty-nine militants. Reports suggest that one of those strikes may have killed up to three civilians. Many of those strikes occurred in the southern area of Murzuq, where ISIS resides. See Figure 6.5 for more information on US strikes. Fig. 6.5: Strikes by the United States, 2012–19

Source: https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/reports/airstrikes-proxy-warfareand-civilian-casualties-libya/strikes-by-libyan-belligerents-the-gna-and-the-lna The LNA mistakenly shot down a US drone in November 2019.82 Representatives from the LNA stated that the drone looked similar to a Turkish drone. Around the same time, an unarmed Italian Air Force Reaper drone83 was also shot down. The LNA also claimed that the drone looked similar to the Turkish drones supporting the GNA. Since 2012, we have documented 550 total air strikes that were attributed to the United States in media reports. Strikes in our database attributed solely to the United States resulted in a minimum of eleven and maximum of twenty-one civilian deaths. See Figure 6.6 for more information on deaths due to US air strikes. Fig. 6.6: Deaths from US Drone and Air Strikes in Libya by Combatant Status, 2012–19

Source: https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/reports/airstrikes-proxy-warfareand-civilian-casualties-libya/strikes-by-libyan-belligerents-the-gna-and-the-lna International Diplomacy Interventions: United Nations Resolutions At the time of data collection, 12 February 2020 marked the most recent UN Security Council Resolution (2510) to order a ceasefire. It was passed almost unanimously, with Russia abstaining instead of voting it down. The resolution focused on supporting the continuing Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL), as well as the promises made at the Berlin Summit.84 Furthermore, the resolution emphasized the Security Council’s ongoing concerns about terrorist activity in the country, intervening mercenaries, and the need for significant ongoing humanitarian aid. United Nations talks held in early February 2020 in Geneva, Switzerland, showed promise, according to Special Representative of the Secretary-General and Head of Mission Ghassan Salamé.85 The Libya Joint Military Commission—or 5+5 talks, as they are commonly known —includes selected representatives from both the GNA and LNA at the decision of al-Sarraj and Haftar. Al-Sarraj last spoke at the United Nations during the 74th session of the UN General Assembly gathering in September 2019.86 He addressed the General Assembly with an update on the status of the war in Libya, pleading with the international community to recognize what he referred to as war crimes by Khalifa Haftar and the LNA: the targeting of hospitals and airports, the bombing of neighborhoods, and child recruitment. He highlighted

that this conflict has yielded 3,000 casualties and hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons, stating, ‘No one wins in a military conflict, and only Libya loses.’87 He asked the International Criminal Court to investigate the allegations against Haftar and asked the United Nations to complete a fact-finding mission, particularly after the Haftar’s April 2019 attempted overtake of capital city Tripoli. Conclusion Since the 2011 NATO intervention, Libya remains quite unstable as two competing militaries —that of the internationally recognized GNA, and the forces of General Haftar’s LNA— struggle for power. Both of these militaries deploy air strikes, and both are supported by foreign countries also launching air strikes. From 2012 through 5 February 2020, 4,349 strikes were recorded, 2,348 of which were launched by the LNA alone. According to news reports and accounts on social media, at least 1,820 individuals in total were killed in these strikes taking the lowest estimate, and as many as 2,440 killed by the highest estimate. Of these recorded deaths, between 611 and 899 are civilians. The GNA receives support from the United States—which carries out strikes against ISIS and al-Qaeda—and Turkey, which has responded to the GNA’s request to support them against the LNA. Egypt and the UAE conduct their own strikes, either in support of the LNA or against Islamist militias. France also strikes Islamist militant targets in Libya, yet while it claims to support the GNA, its actual support through weapons and strikes is in alignment with the LNA. The air strikes by these five countries—as well as those of the GNA and LNA —continue to amplify the conflict, since more than half of all strikes have taken place in the last twenty months. Since 2011, each state has had a strategic interest in Libya and wider region. France and Egypt have each defended their air strikes in Libya, citing self-defense in that the strikes are an attempt to protect themselves from terrorist groups. This is similar to the United States’ post 9/11 justification for beginning its drone program in Pakistan.88 Egypt’s forty-two strikes have resulted in at least thirteen and at most fourteen civilian deaths, according to local and internationalsources. France’s five strikes have resulted in a minimum of four and potentially as many as eight civilian deaths. France might also be responsible for seven strikes in 2018, likely conducted in coordination with the LNA. TheUAE’s 131 strikes since entering the conflict in 2016 have resulted in at least 135 and potentially as many as 185 civilian deaths. Turkey, who entered the conflict in 2019, has conducted strikes unilaterally as well as with the GNA twenty-two times, resulting in between ten and twelve civilian deaths through 5 February 2020. General Haftar’s LNA, while not the internationally recognized government of Libya, has nevertheless been relatively transparent in declaring its own military actions. Despite this transparency, the resultant civilian casualties from the LNA’s air campaign has drastically increased, ushering in unprecedented levels of devastation. The LNA accounts for more than half of all strikes, more than one-third of civilian deaths, and one-third of overall deaths over the time data was tracked.

Civilian noncombatants have faced the brunt of the danger, from economic instability to air strikes and artillery shelling to other concerns along the path of escape, such as abuse and exploitation. International intervention attempts have widely failed, as multiple Libya Summits have taken place, yielding documents with stipulations of ceasefires and arms embargoes that have fallen through within days of signing, if indeed they were signed at all. As the international community attempts to broker peace deals though diplomatic interventions, only time will tell if face-to-face interactions with al-Sarraj and Haftar will put forth legitimate options for the citizens of this conflicted state.

7

THE VIEW FROM THE CITY OF TAIZ LIMITATIONS OF THE PROXY WAR LENS FOR UNDERSTANDING CONFLICT IN YEMEN

Adam Baron and Raiman Al-Hamdani

In 2019, Taiz—Yemen’s third most populous city and the capital of its largest governorate of the same name—was engulfed by war. Long seen as the cultural heart of the country, Taiz emerged in early 2015 as the center of what many observers describe as a proxy war between the Saudi-led coalition and the Houthis, an armed Zaidi Shia revivalist movement with ties to Iran. The military situation in Taiz in 2019 was a stalemate between the Houthis and a diverse, loosely formed coalition of anti-Houthi groups. Having surrounded and besieged the city of Taiz, the Houthis remained in possession of most of its entrances and exits, controlling the passage of goods and people along with a strategically critical north-south gateway. The conflict in Taiz was emblematic of the way regional rivalries between the Gulf states and Iran, along with hyperlocal competition for power and influence, played out and intersected across Yemen. Foreign powers played an important role in the conflict by seeking to impose their own goals through sponsorship of armed factions and political groups. As a strategic location abutting Saudi Arabia’s southern border and the shipping lanes of the Red Sea, Yemen holds importance for several foreign powers’ regional agendas. This led many commentators to analyze the conflict through the lens of proxy warfare. Yet this lens easily misrepresented the war as one in which Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and Iran moved their proxies like chess pieces seeking comparative advantage, and it also reduced the war as a whole to these movements. It was not only a matter of misdiagnosing the dynamics involved; framing the conflict as primarily a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia complicated efforts to resolve the conflict. The framing provided strategic advantages for many of the belligerent parties, who used it to fuel their war efforts. The narrative itself further internationalized the conflict, obscuring the essential nature of the war in Yemen,

which was at heart an internal Yemeni political conflict. The internationalization of what was originally a domestic political struggle made the conflict more complex, in turn making it more difficult to resolve, but it did not fundamentally alter the goals of the original domestic combatants. If the war is ever to end, the goals of Yemenis must be recognized for what they are, and elevated in importance above those of the international parties to the conflict. Various military forces in Yemen used the proxy war frame as a propaganda tool to recruit and raise funds, but the day-to-day experience of the conflict was highly local. In many cases, far from there being a top-down proxy relationship of control, local forces exercised substantial agency despite receiving sponsorship, pursuing their own interests and using foreign sponsorship opportunities for their own purposes. The complex web of forces and sponsorship opportunities empowered individuals—in addition to groups—to act as major players in Yemen’s war. Abu al-Abbas, the leader of the Abu al-Abbas Brigades, for example, skillfully drew on Saudi, Emirati, local, and potentially al-Qaeda support to drive his rise in influence. Although the Houthis increasingly aligned with Iran, they continued to enmesh themselves in Yemen’s wider body politic. Prior to the war being waged in 2019, the Houthis waged six wars against the Yemeni government in the twenty-first century, during which there was little evidence of firm Iranian command and control. Iran’s reported provision of missiles and drones shaped the conflict, but its roots were local and would not disappear were Iran to fully abandon the Houthis. Foreign powers’ development of proxy relationships in the form of external sponsorship made the conflict more complex and difficult to resolve via negotiations. Such foreign relationships resulted in an interplay between an expanded and shifting set of local forces, national political factions, and international parties, each of which had their own interests and aims. This expanded set of armed and political groups fueled tensions and complicated efforts to end the violence through a negotiated settlement. Uncritical adoption of the proxy war narrative posed challenges for peacemakers and policymakers, increasing the risks of escalation and frustrating efforts at conflict resolution. The narrative obscured the true localized nature of the conflict and ignored the goals and ambitions of key domestic stakeholders. These wider divisions dragged out the battle against the Houthis. This chapter utilizes field research conducted in the Yemeni city of Taiz to illustrate the limitations of viewing the Yemen war through the lens of proxy conflict.1 The chapter reviews how the war came to Taiz, the development of both local and proxy competition in the war, and how multiple belligerents use the proxy narrative to support their war efforts despite maintaining local interests. It also provides an overview of the various forces active in Taiz and their tensions, with a consideration of political, military, and governance issues. It concludes by drawing lessons from the Yemen war in Taiz for the country, and for the Greater Middle East and its periphery, which is wracked by proxy and civil wars characterized by similar dynamics.

Yemen and the Proxy War Narrative On 21 September 2014 the Houthis, a Zaidi Shia military group, seized the Yemeni capital of Sanaa, sparking the latest round of internationalized conflict in Yemen. While the Houthis had waged six battles against the Yemeni central government in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the effective takeover of Sanaa by the Houthis and their allies spawned a political and military crisis unparalleled since the 1960s. This crisis included the Houthi kidnapping of Yemeni President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s chief of staff, Ahmed Awad bin Mubarak; the mass resignation of the Yemeni cabinet; the extended house arrest of Hadi himself; and Hadi’s subsequent declaration of war on the Houthis following his escape from Sanaa to Aden, which he then declared Yemen’s temporary capital.2 On 26 March 2015, the Saudi-led coalition began bombing sites in Yemen on the basis of an invitation from the internationally recognized Yemeni government to aid the state in its fight against the Houthis.3 The invitation for intervention was warmly received, as it appealed to widespread Saudi and Gulf State anxiety regarding the Houthis’ relationship with Iran and their perceived role as Iranian proxies. The Saudi-led military coalition, therefore, quickly decided to intervene in Yemen under the framing of restoring the internationally recognized Yemeni government to power. The warring parties and media coverage largely cast the ensuing internationalized conflict as a proxy war, a ‘Saudi war on Yemen’ or ‘Iranian … aggression’ using the Houthis as ‘tools.’4 In this framework, the primary narrative of the conflict was a story of war between Arab states (mostly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) and Iran, tied to broader regional tensions but fought by those states’ respective proxies. Over the summer of 2019, the war in Yemen and its internationalization escalated. The separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC) took hold of Aden and southwestern Yemen.5 The Houthis took credit for a series of increasingly brazen drone attacks within the Saudi interior, most notably claiming credit for the 14 September 2019 strikes on the Saudi Aramco oil facilities in Abaqiq and Khurais that reportedly disrupted up to half of Saudi oil production.6 Given the widely reported Iranian provision of drones to the Houthis, the target’s relevance to the Iranian-Saudi rivalry, and the Houthis’ claim of the attack, many initially described the strike as a Houthi attack on behalf of Iran. However, later reporting suggested that the strike may not have come from Yemen at all but rather from militias in Iraq or from within Iran itself, illustrating the ways in which the proxy narrative of the Yemen war is capable of separating itself from the facts of the conflict, all the while underlining Yemen’s increasing integration into regional battlefronts, if on a symbolic basis.7 France, Germany, and the United Kingdom joined the United States in ascribing responsibility to Iran, but left conclusions regarding the strikes’ specific origins vague.8 All the while, the peace process, led by UN Special Envoy Martin Griffiths, continued to stall, with initial momentum from the December 2018 Stockholm Agreement all but dissipating.9 The narrative of a grand proxy war continued to hold sway, particularly in the wake of the attack on the Saudi Aramco oil facilities. Playing into the narrative generated funds, recruits, and international public support for both the Saudi-led coalition and the Houthis. Yet, the

character of the war in Taiz challenges representations of the Yemen war as primarily a clash between external states conducted via proxy agents. Yemen’s third-largest city, Taiz, had been under effective siege by the Houthis since the conflict started. One of the most significant battlefields in the country, owing to its strategic importance as the gate between North and South Yemen, Taiz remained the site of some of the war’s strongest and most devastating battles. The battles and struggles within Taiz were not only between the Houthis and the rival Saudi- and Gulf-led coalition, but also within and across the coalition itself. Instead of a conflict between external states waged through well-controlled proxies, Taiz was the center of a militarized scrum between an amalgam of military and political factions, some of whom had proxy relationships with external powers. Where they existed, proxy relationships were often weak and unstable, subject to the complex political dynamics of life in Taiz and in Yemen more broadly. The political party Islah, despite working with Saudi Arabia, retained substantial local roots in terms of financial and political support. Islah’s dominance over political and military life in Taiz, and its ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, led the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to seek to counter its influence at the same time, often relying on other locally rooted political factions. The various military groups that made up the Saudi-led coalition were products of local, popular uprisings against the Houthis, and, despite efforts to regularize them, they continued to operate with considerable de facto autonomy. In some cases, individuals like Abu al-Abbas fueled their rise as independent power centers by playing different sponsors off of each other. The variety of sponsorship opportunities and local resources made this a viable strategy, even as it opened space for proxy relationships outside of formal lines of command. Nor was this a matter only for the coalition. The Houthis retained an identity deeply rooted in multiple rounds of warfare that predated the expanded relationship with Iran that emerged over the course of the war. The power of local politics to interrupt efforts at alliance formation involving both the Houthis and the coalition was demonstrated by the decision of General People’s Congress party leaders in Taiz to reject their deceased national leader’s decision to align with the Houthis, instead viewing the Houthis as an invading force. The sponsorship underlying these relationships took many forms. Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE alike provided financial support to their allies, in some cases going as far as to pay fighters’ salaries and provide homes in their capitals for the leaders of allied military groups. The coalition provided military and air support, coordination, and equipment, while Iran and its regional allies provided the Houthis with access to a regional network and the resultant training and technological depth. It is difficult to assess what the war would have looked like without this support; regardless, the support undeniably deepened various groups’ capacities and bolstered their ability to continue fighting. These proxy relationships had the potential to benefit sponsors, particularly those whose strategies did not require substantial control over the more routine activities of their proxy agents. The ambiguity—at least publicly—generated by Iran’s ties with the Houthis— regardless of the level of control Iran exerted, or whether it existed at all—may have served Iranian strategic purposes when it came to strikes alleged to have come from more tightly controlled Iranian forces, like the strikes on the Saudi Aramco facilities. The existence of

such proxy relationships and strategies must be distinguished from narratives that view those relationships and strategies as defining either the identity and interests of the local parties to the conflict, or the conflict as a whole.10 Yemen is strategically located, and the international and regional components of the conflict are important and worthy of analysis. However, true understanding of the conflict in Yemen can only be achieved through knowledge of the Yemeni forces on the ground, their reasons for fighting, and how their fight is reshaping the wider dynamics in the country. War Comes to Taiz The city of Taiz has historically played a key role in Yemen’s political life. Long considered the cultural capital of Yemen, Taiz has occupied this space for roughly a millennium.11 Historically, Taiz was described as the ‘Damascus of Yemen’ for its impressive agricultural and academic production. A cosmopolitan urban center in the 1960s, Taiz provided refuge for southerners agitating against British colonial rule and republican revolutionaries fighting to oust the Zaidi isolationist Imamate, rendering the city a strategic urban space for leftist movements to exchange ideas.12 Home to much of Yemen’s educated class, Taiz often functioned as the urban fulcrum of opposition to the political elite based in Sanaa, Yemen’s capital. In the 1980s, Taiz played a key role in the advancement of negotiations between the north and south in the lead-up to national unification.13 Taiz was also a focal point of Yemen’s 2011 Arab Spring, which resulted in the ouster of longtime President Ali Abdullah Saleh. During the Arab Spring (between 2011 and 2012), Taiz was described as the ‘heart of the revolution.’14 Given its historical importance, foreign powers competed for influence in Taiz prior to the Houthi seizure of Yemen’s capital, with the Gulf states in particular funding political parties within the city. Qatar, a major international player in the lead-up to the current conflict, provided significant financial backing of Islah (particularly during the 2011 Arab Spring) and continued to back the party after the revolution.15 Iran, for its part, launched an influence campaign—albeit largely on the political front—early on, building ties with some Taizis both directly and through Lebanese networks. Iran reached out particularly to disaffected leftists, and even (according to interviews conducted for this chapter) in some cases literally sponsored trips to Iran.16 All the while, Saudi Arabia and the UAE maintained decades-old ties with Taiz, including through key political figures, business families, and social and political networks. The governorate of Taiz is in southwest Yemen, about 160 miles south of the national capital, Sanaa. Technically located in Yemen’s geographic south, the governorate and its main city were both part of the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR), also known as North Yemen. Taiz remained the third-largest city in the country in terms of population size, although its population is estimated to have declined from 600,000 to 200,000 due to displacement.17 The population of Taiz city is majority Shafe’i Sunni, with a handful of Taizi families belonging to the Zaidi sect.18

Already the poorest country in the Arab world before the current war, in 2019 Yemen was in a state of economic crisis. Yemen’s GDP has contracted by 39 percent since the end of 2014; 80 percent of the country currently relies on some form of aid to survive.19 Historically a bastion of the middle class, Taiz was not an exception to this dire situation. The conflict has harmed a staggering 95 percent of Taizi businesses.20 Agriculture dominates the area’s economy, with a focus on the growth of crops such as grains, vegetables, and fruits, as well as livestock cultivation and fishing along the Red Sea coast.21 Taiz is also rich in minerals, including copper, nickel, cobalt, and platinum,22 and endowed with many important historic sites.23 Despite these resources, Taiz’s economic outlook was dismal. Taiz is the native home of many of Yemen’s most important business dynasties, most notably the Hayel Saeed Anam family. Hayel Saeed began operating in Taiz in 1938; in 2019, the business, which focuses on manufacturing and imports and exports, was a global conglomerate generating around US$8 billion dollars in annual revenue.24 The Hayel Saeed family remained the largest employer in Taiz, and it continued to be active in philanthropy and social welfare projects throughout the city. Despite being forced to lay off 40 percent of its workforce and reduce the salaries of remaining employees, the company maintained its day-to-day operations, and even persisted in paying the salaries of employees at its semioperational factories.25 Still, the siege of the city and internal fighting devastated the city’s industrial sector. Many factories were shuttered, and many more were damaged or destroyed by the fighting. For many Taizis, armed groups presented some of the only available jobs. The humanitarian situation in Taiz was also dire, with locals struggling to access basic services such as healthcare and education. Even access to clean drinking water was limited. The Houthi siege of Taiz and the ongoing shelling and sniping from outside of the city hindered access to basic supplies, as well as complicated the activities and responses of civil society and relief organizations. This also made the rebuilding and stabilization process in Taiz difficult. Many homes and shops remain abandoned out of fear of leftover explosive munitions or mines. Despite the ongoing destruction and danger, desperate civilians who fled Taiz returned home from rural areas of temporary refuge. In 2019, what had used to be a 15minute trip to the east of the city took about 5 hours due to the partial blockage of roads by the Houthis. Freight truck drivers attempting to transport their cargo to residents of the southern neighborhoods in Taiz were forced to use a long stretch of dry riverbed—a path inaccessible during the monsoon seasons—while all other roads into the city traverse daunting, unpaved hills. Finally, the governorate absorbed the lion’s share of the violence in Yemen. According to a June 2019 report by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), Taiz has experienced the most conflict-related violence of any governorate in Yemen since the war began in 2015.26 From 2015–19, more than 18,400 people have died in Taiz, including 2,300 civilians killed in violence that targeted them specifically as civilians.27 Significantly, these figures did not include the conflict-related deaths from cholera and other preventable diseases, which proliferated throughout the four and a half years of siege-related hardship. The death toll for the war in Yemen stood at a staggering 100,000 deaths,28 with Taiz making

up a fifth of the national death toll.29 Houthi Incursion into Taiz The Houthi rebel movement, whose political branch is called Ansarullah, seized the Yemeni capital on 21 September 2014. The capture of Sanaa was the culmination of decades of Houthi resentment toward the Yemeni government. Former President Ali Abdullah Saleh fought six wars with the Houthis throughout the 2000s.30 The collective result of these wars was the near-wholesale destruction of Saada, the historic capital of the Houthis’ native region, and a lingering resentment of the Houthis toward the government in Sanaa, which they accuse of withholding resources and targeting them unfairly.31 The Houthis largely drew their support from elements of Yemen’s Zaidi community, a branch of Shia Islam that predominates in northwestern Yemen, representing about one-third of the Yemeni population. Upon capturing Sanaa, the Houthis spread outward in an attempt to conquer the rest of the north, including Taiz.32 They also went south, fighting their way almost into Aden before finally being repelled by the Popular Resistance, a series of militias that organized to resist the Houthi advances. At that time, this resistance was an amorphous collection of armed groups that emerged organically to push back against armed militants flooding into their towns (although, as they formally intervened in Yemen, the Saudi- and Emirati-backed coalition moved quickly to organize and support groups resistant to the Houthis).33 The Houthi presence in Taiz, however, predated their takeover of Sanaa. The Houthis first moved to establish an open presence in Taiz during the 2011 Arab Spring-inspired protests, in which men and women across the Middle East took to the streets in mass demonstrations against decades of authoritarian governance.34 The protests, which began in Tunisia and soon embroiled the region, quickly reached Yemen, where demonstrators targeted longtime Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh.35 Calling for expanded rights and services from the government, poverty reduction, and an end to state corruption, protestors also called for Saleh to cede power, which he did, finally, in February 2012.36 The Houthis were active in the Yemeni Arab Spring, initially making themselves known largely through the Steadfast Youth (Shabab al-Sumud), a Houthi-affiliated youth group prominent in protest encampments across the country. During this period, tensions between Houthi-affiliated figures and other political groups occasionally turned violent, mainly in the form of scuffles with those youths who supported Islah and those who supported the Houthis in protest squares across the country.37 There were deeply local aspects to the Houthis’ early political efforts in Taiz. According to interviews conducted by the authors, several prominent Taizis rose through the ranks of the Houthis’ power structure, most notably Mahmoud Al-Guneid, a Taizi poet and political activist who eventually served as a Houthi leader. Al-Guneid was appointed as Director of the Presidential Office during the tenure of Saleh al-Samad38 from 2015 through 2018.39 Other figures who aligned with the Houthis include Sultan al-Samei, a socialist member of parliament; Salah al-Dakak, a prominent leftist activist and journalist; Talal Aqlan, who

served as the Houthi-affiliated government’s acting prime minister; and Salim Mughalis, a member of the Houthis’ governing Supreme Political Council in Sanaa and delegate to UNsponsored peace talks. Many of these figures, who hailed from leftist political streams, framed their alignment with the Houthis as an outgrowth of their frustration with Islah and other traditional power centers. Islah’s dominance over the transitional process that emerged in the wake of the Arab Spring was one reported factor in uniting the Houthis with some on the left, but some Yemeni political activists also suggested that leftist support might have been financially motivated.40 The Houthis took control of parts of the Al-Mokha district in the Taiz governorate as early as March 2015.41 In their campaign, the Houthis often joined forces with groups loyal to ousted former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, owing to their mutual aims of pushing back against various figures aligned with the transitional government. On 22 March 2015, a joint Houthi-Saleh army swept into the Taiz governorate, capturing military bases and strategic spaces around the city of Taiz, including the town of Al-Turbah, 50 miles southwest of Taiz city and 70 miles east of the port of Al-Mokha on the Red Sea coast. Initially, the Houthis faced little organized military resistance from local Taizis, and the joint HouthiSaleh forces moved quickly through the governorate, capturing the airport and the local Central Security Forces (CSF) based in the capital city. Local demonstrations against the Houthi incursion began almost immediately, with protests in Taiz and across Al-Turbah. Anti-Houthi demonstrators were met with violence, and demonstrations were quickly suppressed where they occurred. On 24 March, two days after the Houthis entered the Taiz governorate, six protesters were killed and dozens of others were wounded in Taiz and Al-Turbah.42 In reaction to the deaths, Taizi Governor Shawqi Hayel Saeed—grandson of Hayel Saeed Anam, Taiz’s wealthiest and most successful modern businessman—announced his intention to resign from office in protest against the security forces’ failure to implement his mandate and directives.43 Saeed was originally selected for this position because of his reputation as a capable technocrat and his family’s long history and influence in Taiz. However, his resignation paved the way for a violent confrontation in the increasingly fractured city, spurring the wider conflagration that continues to embroil Taiz. In response to Saeed’s resignation announcement, officers and members of the 35th Armored Brigade in Taiz, one of the most powerful military units in the city, declared their support for President Hadi. This announcement was prompted by the alliance of then 35th Brigade Head Major General Mansour Mohsen Mu’ajer with the Houthis. General Mu’ajer handed over the Al-Arous air defense base on top of the mountain Jabal Saber, and he sent two battalions from the brigade to reinforce the joint Houthi-Saleh forces in their southern campaigns.44 The brigade camp was located to the west of the city of Taiz; the territory mandated under the control of the brigade radiates outward from the western entrance of Taiz to the port city of Al-Mokha near the Bab Al-Mandab strait. Demonstrations denouncing the brigade’s anti-Houthi stance occurred at the city’s old airport, which was under the control of the 35th Brigade. On 2 April 2015, President Hadi appointed General Adnan Al-Hammadi commander of

the 35th Brigade.45 On 9 April President Hadi issued a decree appointing Brig. Gen. Sadiq Ali Sarhan commander of the Twenty-Second Armored Brigade, a move that was rejected by the brigade’s former commander, Hamoud Dahmash, who remained loyal to Saleh.46 On 11 April pro-Houthi and pro-Hadi soldiers dispersed throughout Taiz.47 On 22 April after twenty days of intense fighting, the Houthis captured the 35th Brigade headquarters at the old airport.48 In November 2015, seven months after he announced his intent to do so, Shawqi Hayel stepped down as governor of Taiz.49 This marked a watershed moment for Taiz: the end of technocratic governance and the disintegration of local authority. The Saudi Coalition and the Proxy War Narrative Shawqi Hayel’s resignation came only a few months after the official start of the Saudi-led coalition’s Operation Decisive Storm, which began on 26 March 2015.50 This marked the point at which the war in Yemen became increasingly internationalized. The Saudi-led military operation aimed to oust the Houthis and restore Yemen’s internationally recognized government to power. Decisive Storm was also framed by its proponents as pushing back against what they portrayed as an Iranian-backed threat to their national security. The UAE played a key role in the coalition from the beginning. In the wake of the Saudi-led coalition’s military intervention in Yemen, the war was often described as a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. This narrative took different forms. Some cast the Houthis as proxies for Iran, while others framed the Yemenis fighting against the Houthis as mercenaries for Saudi Arabia or UAE. Both narratives were oversimplifications. The Houthis were ultimately a locally rooted group whose leadership’s decisions appeared to be largely driven by Yemen-related concerns.51 Still, despite their local roots, the Houthis’ ties to Iran were undeniable. The group derived ideological influence from both the Iranians and Hezbollah, firmly placing itself in the so-called Resistance Axis, a transnational grouping allied with Iran in opposition to the hegemony of US allies in the region.52 While the extent of Iran’s role in the war remained largely opaque, Western officials continued to highlight Iran’s deployment of ground advisors to Yemen, while UN expert reports pointed to Iranian technology transfers to the Houthis, particularly with regard to drone and missile technology.53 The Houthis received logistical support from Iran, but this did not mean that they were a proxy over which Iran exercised substantial control. Despite shared ideological affinities, there is little evidence that Iran exercised firm command and control over the Houthis during the earlier rounds of warfare throughout the 2000s, although the relationship between Iran and the Houthis had clearly strengthened since the start of the war.54 Saudi Arabia encouraged the grand proxy war narrative to garner both political and materiel support for its war efforts. By describing Iran’s involvement in Yemen as an existential threat to Saudi and regional security, Saudi Arabia successfully persuaded Western governments of the necessity of its Yemen campaign, even in the face of declining

international public support for the conflict.55 While the United States scaled back its indirect involvement in the Saudi campaign—most visibly in November 2018, when it halted its midair refueling of Saudi military planes—the United States continued to provide weapons and logistical support to both the Saudis and their Emirati partners.56 The prevailing manner of framing the coalition was similarly reductionist. Houthi-aligned media often portrayed Yemeni soldiers fighting on the coalition’s side as mercenaries or extremists, often going so far as to paint them as traitors to Yemen.57 For the Houthis, framing their battle as one against a foreign enemy allowed the group to mobilize fighters, even as the battles were largely directed against fellow Yemenis. This messaging of the wider conflict as a ‘Saudi war in Yemen,’ particularly in a significant portion of Western discourse, also served to benefit the Houthis and their sympathizers, who have aimed to capitalize on some Western politicians’ and publics’ antipathy to Saudi Arabia —particularly after the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi officials—to generate international sympathy for their cause and opposition to Saudi Arabia’s military efforts.58 However, in the eyes of many Yemenis, not just in Taiz but also in areas like Marib and the formerly independent south, the Houthi incursion constituted a virtual invasion, leading them to frame their decision to take up arms as a locally rooted, defensive manner, regardless of whether they eventually linked up with powers outside of the country for financial and military support.59 Al-Qaeda in turn sought to benefit from both versions of the grand proxy warfare narrative. The group used its propaganda to portray the war as being defined by foreign intrusions, casting the Houthis as Shia tools of Iran and a reflection of a region-wide sectarian threat, while simultaneously criticizing the presence of the UAE as being a foreign tool of the United States.60 At the same time, al-Qaeda sought to burnish its ties to local tribes by proclaiming its local rootedness. When it had success in Yemen, that success largely came from its deft manipulation of local dynamics amidst the larger war.61 While a variety of local, national, and international actors invested in Taiz shared an interest in battling the Houthis, there were differences at each level over how it should be done and who should be the force behind it.62 As the conflict and humanitarian crisis intensified, tensions over tactics and strategy broke out in the open, which in many ways reflected longstanding friction between political factions in Taiz. Interaction between Local Political and Military Competition and Foreign Sponsorship Islah maintained political and military dominance in Taiz over the course of the Yemen war. This resulted in many prior rivals having to accommodate the party. However, it also led to blowback from rivals who were able to benefit from foreign sponsors wary of Islah’s Muslim Brotherhood ties. At the same time, political and military entrepreneurs taking advantage of hyperlocal facets of the war economy increasingly shaped and challenged Islah’s power. Apart from the Houthis themselves—and with the GPC party’s split into pro-Saleh and pro-coalition factions at the time—Islah’s affiliates and allies constituted the most organized

and experienced fighting forces in the city. With Saleh’s eventual death at the hands of the Houthis, the GPC in Taiz was able to fully align itself with Islah and the coalition. Military leaders who had broken with Saleh and backed key military leader Ali Mohsen alAhmar63 during the 2011 fighting—most notably, Sadiq Sarhan, Saleh Al-Thaneen, and Hameed Al-Qushaibi—aligned against the Houthis, in numerous cases cooperating with Islah paramilitary forces. Local social figures who led militias during that same period, most notably Hamoud Al-Mekhlafi, were largely drawn from Islah as well. Islah used organizational structures that it developed for its charitable, educational, and political outreach programs as the bedrock for organizing local resistance against the Houthis. The presence of many connected Taizi Islah supporters and allies in circles close to the internationally recognized government eased the process of obtaining military and financial support from the Yemeni government, while the disproportionate representation of Taizis amongst the Yemeni press corps granted a steady stream of media attention. The 2016 exodus from Taiz of Hamoud Al-Mekhlafi, the first leader of the Popular Resistance there, deprived the city of a key figurehead and potentially unifying figure, while exposing the realities of the divisions amongst coalition forces in Taiz. It did little, however, to diminish the continuing influence of Islah’s networks in Taiz, which only solidified in the coming period, although power shifted to less well-known figures on the ground. Even so, Islah and its allies’ perceived dominance resulted in blowback from anti-Houthi forces in Taiz. Local powers, like the Nasserists and individuals such as Abu al-Abbas and his eponymous brigade, who distrusted Islah or resented what they saw as Islah’s undue influence, sought to shore up their own standing.64 Foreign powers—most notably the UAE —which were anxious about the potential resurgence of Muslim Brotherhood ideologies in Yemen, eagerly built relationships with and bolstered these local forces within the wider framework of battling the Houthis.65 Local groups and individuals took advantage of the overarching regional narrative of a Gulf (particularly Emirati) conflict with the Muslim Brotherhood to fuel their own political ends.66 In turn, the UAE’s support for Islah opponents generated greater anti-UAE feeling among some Islah-affiliated factions. Meanwhile, various smaller groups—or even individuals—sought to control local funding streams and develop their own political and economic bases of support. Issues ranging from the collection of taxes to the manning of checkpoints became key focuses of political and military tension. While the wider ideological differences and geopolitical tensions apparent in foreign sponsor relations served as the kindling, it was consistently these hyperlocal issues that provided the match, spurring clashes between anti-Houthi armed groups. For example, in July 2018, there were a total of forty-eight revenue-generating checkpoints on the road between Taiz and Hayjaht Al-Abd (connecting south Taiz to the south of Yemen) controlled by either Islah affiliates or their opponents.67 Groups also clashed and profited from the trade of qat, a mild narcotic leaf chewed across the country, and one of the few thriving industries in Yemen’s war-economy.68 In January 2019, fighters loyal to Ghazwan al-Mekhlafi, an unruly adolescent member of the 22nd Brigade, fought with militias over control of qat taxation in the Ashbat market, in Al-Thawra neighborhood of Taiz.69 Ghazwan was related to Sadiq Sarhan, commander of the 22nd

Brigade, and hailed from the same village as the famed Popular Resistance figure Hamoud Al-Mekhlafi.70 Throughout this period, officials allied to the internationally recognized Yemeni government repeatedly organized security campaigns to clear elements they described as being ‘outside’ the law, using the local police and authorities to clear government buildings and institutions occupied or held by groups challenging the government’s authority. Many of these campaigns proved unsuccessful. For instance, coalition fighters from the 35th Brigade ignored government orders to relinquish control of vital revenue-generating checkpoints around the southern entrance of Taiz.71 Most of these campaigns failed to progress due to infighting, the willful ignorance of government orders by certain militias, and the ability of these factions to act independently with impunity. The last of these security campaigns was launched in March 2019 by Governor Nabil Shamsan. It had little success, as the local authorities struggled to come together under Hadi’s umbrella and often chose to halt the campaigns to avoid a clash of interests between differing armed groups responsible for helping to keep the peace.72 Bouts of infighting between anti-Houthi armed groups often ended in ceasefire agreements. For example, a truce committee under the auspices of Taiz Governor Nabil Shamsan reached an agreement with the Abu al-Abbas Brigades to hand over wanted individuals and evacuate Abu al-Abbas fighters from the residential neighborhoods in the Old City.73 Yet the wider structural issues encouraging and allowing for such clashes remain. Absent greater consolidation of power—whether in the hands of one group (unlikely) or in the form of a more coherent and cooperative coalition of factions (a tall order)—a lasting accord remained a challenge. This was particularly true given the enduring weakness of civilian government, a trend which continued in 2019 under the governor, Nabil Shamsan, regardless of his best intentions. The war also became an enterprise in and of itself, infecting nearly all aspects of daily life in Taiz. Fighters were overwhelmingly reliant on their salaries, which enabled leverage for military leaders and their funders at all levels. Even those not directly reliant on war-related monies could not fully disentangle themselves from the wider system.74 In this context, Taiz’s situation continued to be shaped by local tensions and its war economy—which saw powerbrokers clash over everything from weapons smuggling to checkpoint profiteering—as much if not more than it was by the grander proxy conflicts between external states or even by Yemen’s more traditional political divides. The military forces battling the Houthis in Taiz illustrated the complexity of the Yemen war and the difficulty of encapsulating its dynamics within the framework of a grand proxy war where the conflict is defined by the aims of external sponsors who exert substantial control over their proxies. Many of the armed groups active in Taiz initially emerged as irregular Popular Resistance forces operating outside of the government. External funding facilitated their activity, but often struggled to catch up with the actions of locally motivated groups. Over the course of the war, those forces were increasingly brought into the chain of command of the Yemeni government, at least nominally. The hierarchy of the military

decision-making in the Yemeni government was as follows: forces under the Yemeni army ostensibly fell under the leadership of Yemeni President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi; then, Minister of Defense Mohamed al-Maqdashi; and finally, Armed Forces Chief of Staff Taher al-Aqill. Those in Taiz fell under the de jure leadership of the Fourth Military Region (one of four military regions in Yemen designated since 2013), which included both Aden and Taiz. According to interviews with military figures, the process of absorbing these forces into the government military brigades began in July 2015. However, the formalization of the Popular Resistance groups did not turn the Yemen war into a clash between unified military forces under the sway of foreign sponsors that could be understood primarily through a proxy warfare framework. Despite formalization, the conflict remained locally rooted, and sponsors had to contend with local loyalties and political competition. Forces within the Yemeni army in Taiz witnessed leadership changes as the central government, the Yemeni armed forces chain of command, various Yemeni political factions, and the coalition sought to bolster their favored figures within Yemen’s military structure. External backers, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE, played a role in this dynamic. However, this often saw a degree of back and forth, with partnerships evolving due to differing internal and external dynamics. Although the Yemeni government was often reduced to a proxy for the Gulf states, it actually had discretion over how Gulf support was distributed on the ground. Hadi’s government provided the salaries for soldiers in the Axis. Hadi’s government in turn received financial support from the coalition countries, which it distributed to its military and political leaders on the ground, demonstrating the multilevel nature of its alliance with its Saudi backers. While forces in Taiz were increasingly brought nominally under the official chain of command, military leaders in Taiz retained substantial autonomy from both their military superiors and coalition sponsors, owing in equal parts to the dispersed status of the Yemeni armed forces and the besieged nature of the city. Both media reports and Taizis themselves frequently referred to brigades by their pre-reorganization name, continuing to view Popular Resistance groups as discrete entities, despite their having been ostensibly subsumed into the national army. This dynamic was compounded by the interaction of internal party politics with foreign power sponsorship, particularly in the case of divides between Islah and its rivals. There were two broad military groupings in Taiz. The first, the Taiz Military Axis, was generally viewed by international observers as being aligned with Islah, and it incorporated the bulk of the Popular Resistance groups. The second grouping, also aligned against the Houthis, consisted of the 35th Brigade and the Abu al-Abbas Brigades. The 35th Brigade and Abu al-Abbas received UAE support in part to counter the strength of Islah, whose ties to the Muslim Brotherhood worried the Emiratis. In turn, this pushed Islah’s traditional backers to increase support to their preferred agents. Both the 35th Brigade and the Abu al-Abbas Brigades—in contrast to the majority of the groups within the Taiz Military Axis—were seen by Taizis as being backed primarily by the UAE, rather than Saudi

Arabia. However, these alignments were often more ephemeral than they were represented as in the grand proxy war narrative. In reality, both groupings benefitted from coalition funding— which was composed mostly of support from both the UAE and Saudi Arabia—at different points in time, underlining the dynamic nature of proxy-sponsor relationships in Yemen. The military groupings were fluid in structure, and the outlines of the groups were constantly mutable and evolving, with individuals and battalions merging with other battalions and brigades. On the ground, personal relationships, geography, and familial ties often had as much, if not more, to do with allegiance and alliance than ideology and geopolitics. In addition to the two major military groupings, al-Qaeda also maintained a latent presence in Taiz. Although its presence had diminished due to counterterrorism operations, it had not disappeared and in the past had demonstrated an ability to use the chaos of the war and the propaganda framings of proxy war to its advantage. Taiz has historically had a strong government, both on a governorate and local level. Though local governance has been challenged over the course of the conflict by both the influence of external sponsors and the decentralization of power resulting from the war, local government has retained much of its independent and locally rooted identity. This legacy of strong governance was used by the government and its supporters in much of their rhetoric in the battle against the Houthis. Key allies and spokespeople for the government framed their battle as one to restore the state in response to the Houthis’ takeover, focusing particularly on the restoration of the civilian governance. On the ground, it was more complicated, owing to the constellation of armed groups and foreign influence. The three governors who had served since the start of the conflict all struggled to do their job amidst the insecurity and violence resulting from the ongoing war against the Houthis, but also from the competing armed groups, many of whom operated with relative autonomy, de facto running the more lucrative governance roles themselves. Since the resignation of Governor Shawqi Hayel Saeed in 2015, Taiz saw three governors come to power: Ali Al-Maamari, Amin Mahmoud, and Nabil Shamsan, all of whom hailed from the GPC party.75 Nonetheless, owing to the city’s divided political affiliations, the rise of party-aligned militias, and the wider divides of the conflict, Taiz’s governors were ultimately forced to maintain consensus among the governorate’s various political and military factions. Yemenis tended to view Taiz’s governors within the prism of their ties to outside powers. Maamari, a native of Taiz, had previously distinguished himself as a member of parliament with his acerbic criticism of the Houthis and his resignation from the GPC in support of Yemen’s Arab Spring-inspired uprising in February 2011. However, he was often viewed in Yemeni political circles in terms of his cooperation with Islah-affiliated figures in Taiz, and his critics often cast him as an undeclared member of the party (this information is based on interviews with Yemeni MPs and political figures who repeatedly highlighted this relationship). His successor, Amin Mahmoud, a former local government official who had spent most of the previous decade in Canada, was viewed by interviewees through the prism

of his cordial relations with the UAE (in contrast with his predecessor), something which raised the ire of many local backers of the Islah party. According to close sources, Amin Mahmoud came from an affluent family from Saber and was married to one of the daughters of former Yemeni Vice President Judge Abdulkarim AlArashi. This illustrated how the element of social status was often used in appointing political figures. Taizi governors found themselves deeply constrained and shaped by the local dynamics of the city. Maamari resigned in protest two years after taking office, complaining that the Central Bank in Aden refused to pay salaries to his employees and claiming that he wasn’t given sufficient resources to carry out his job.76 Mahmoud, as local rumor had it, was sacked, not due to issues with his performance, but because of pressure from officials in the Islah party, who viewed him as a threat to their interests due to his perceived close relationship with the UAE. Under all governors, security concerns meant limited accessibility, with many spending significant time abroad in Riyadh and Cairo, or in the temporary capital of Aden. As with Taiz’s larger political culture, Taiz’s governance structures were challenged by increasingly hyperlocal sources of authority empowered by the war economy and the government’s inability to project its power. Many state institutions across Taiz (including the police and security services, local courts, and public civil institutions) had been defunct since 2015, when Houthi shelling and coalition air strikes battered the city. According to the Yemen Polling Center, an independent research organization, the role of tribal sheikhs and aqils, or neighborhood leaders,77 increased in the absence of the state’s ability to provide security, with traditional governance figures stepping in to fill the vacuum.78 As the war went on and the political and security vacuum widened across Yemen, local governing authorities and informal local authority brokers began operating more independently. Over time, local authorities became more isolated from what was happening elsewhere in the country and more inclined to serve their own personal agendas rather than those of the government. In 2019, local authorities were often assisted in the pursuit of individual, localized ambitions by the foreign backers who made up the coalition. Support from international powers has led to an increase in the number of nongovernmental groups exerting influence over local affairs, as well as growing groups of local players. Four and a half years of intensifying conflict and insecurity at the national level led to a general collapse in security. Local police forces and entire branches of the judiciary, which once helped to maintain a degree of order, could no longer guarantee a safe environment for local authorities to operate. At the same time, local councils across Yemen lost much of their funding. In 2015, the internationally recognized government was forced to reduce funding to local councils due to conflict-related declines in oil and gas revenues.79 Additionally, the January 2018 budget exclusively allocated funds to pay the salaries of local authorities at the expense of 50 percent of the operating costs for the areas under their control.80 In the eyes of many of its backers, the battle for Taiz was about restoring and/or preserving state institutions, as well as preventing the Houthis from consolidating control. Nonetheless, in many regards, the battle to restore the rule of the internationally recognized government served to weaken formal governance structures even as it facilitated the government’s return,

something that was fueled, in part, by foreign sponsorship of armed groups in the city. However, foreign sponsorship did not eliminate the relevance and power of local governing parties.

The conflict in Taiz was ultimately rooted in decades, if not centuries, of history. The city— the ancestral home of much of Yemen’s educated middle and upper-middle class—came to epitomize the country’s wider unrealized dreams and lost potential owing to misgovernment, underdevelopment, and corruption. The uprising of 2011 represented an opportunity to push back against this; Taizis took the lead in protests, not just in Taiz but in Sanaa itself. The collapse of the transitional period and the Houthis’ subsequent takeover of Sanaa (and attempted takeover of Taiz) subsequently plunged Yemen and the city into a state of continuous conflict. The battle for the city between the Houthis and the local tribal, social, religious, and military leaders left Taiz the most devastated front in Yemen’s ongoing war. Longstanding political and factional divides were weaponized, in many cases transmuting partisan cleavages onto wider regional divides. As civilians were caught between belligerents, extremist groups thrived in the resulting insecurity. The influence of foreign powers in Yemen led many to frame the conflict as a proxy war between the Arab States (Saudi Arabia and the UAE) and Iran. It is certainly true that these foreign powers cultivated proxy relationships with various military and political groups in Yemen. But on the ground the complications were plainly obvious. Internal divides between political parties and branches of the military spawned street wars, and petty personal grievances fueled battles within the coalition. Above all, young men continued to find themselves in the line of fire, fighting to defend their city even as wider, more complicated agendas interfered. Within this context, locally based individuals and networks demonstrated their agency and ability to shape the conflict, playing foreign powers off each other, using the very framing of proxy war for their own ends. Though increasingly challenged both by the internationalization of the conflict and the decentralization—and, in some cases, the collapse of traditional forms of governance—Yemeni political and military forces continued to express locally rooted identities and compete on that basis rather than become pawns of foreign powers. As tensions in southern Yemen unfolded, which saw clashes between the UAE-backed, separatist Southern Transitional Council (STC) and the Yemeni government—and as phenomena like the splintering of the Syrian opposition demonstrated—local politics can often upend the plans of ostensibly more powerful external forces. Reporting from cities like Taiz underlines the multiplicity of dynamics driving what are often seen as binary conflicts. Understanding—let alone working to help resolve or deescalate—the Yemen war and similar conflicts across the Greater Middle East requires embracing multiplicity, both within armed groups and with regard to the hierarchy of interests driving conflicts. It is a mistake to ignore the role of external powers and their proxy relationships in Yemen, but it is also a

mistake to ascribe to those relationships primary explanatory power. At the end of the day, there will be no peace in Yemen until the local interests of Yemenis are recognized and addressed. The war had relevance for regional proxy conflicts, but it was, indeed, a Yemeni war.

PART III STRATEGIES

8

DECODING THE WAGNER GROUP

Candace Rondeaux

Russian private military security contractors (PMSCs) are pivotal players in ongoing proxy wars in the Greater Middle East and its periphery. They provide targeting intelligence, training, logistical support, infrastructure protection, and backstop proxy militias and paramilitary groups in key hotspots around the world, including Ukraine, Syria, and Libya. Their covert operations—real and imagined—are also critical in shaping Russia’s strategy for escalation management as well as relations with adversaries and allies. Moscow denies any links to Russian PMSCs like the Wagner Group, a paramilitary group linked to Kremlin insiders close to Vladimir Putin. Yet, mounting PMSC casualties in Ukraine, Syria, and more recently Libya have undermined the plausible deniability of their Kremlin connections. Still, questions remain about the degree of control the Kremlin exerts over PMSCs. Are they simply patriotic volunteers, as the Kremlin claims? Are they on official assignment for Russia’s GRU intelligence service? Are they mercenaries, corporate warriors, or frontline soldiers? Social media data on hundreds of Russian PMSCs and other evidence collected for this chapter as well as field research in Ukraine and Syria suggest they are at times all the above. Above all, Russian PMSCs are frontline agents of a Russian grand strategy that prizes a multipolar world order. The Kremlin stretches legal definitions and obscures its control over PMSCs to benefit its strategic ends. The active reservists and veteran volunteerswho make up the ranks of Russian PMSCs operate under a patchwork of national and international law. PMSC detachments are often registered in offshore corporate havens, technically lying outside the constitutional order of the Russian Federation, but their Kremlin-connected sponsors oversee strategic state-run enterprises that are vital for the survival of President Vladimir Putin’s vertical of power. PMSCs bridge barriers to sustained expeditionary campaigns. Their relationships with local proxies are a force multiplier that allows the Kremlin to extend its influence beyond Russian territory. PMSCs like the Wagner Group will consequently remain a critical part of Russia’s proxy war campaigns, which are likely to far outlast Putin’s tenure. Many conflate

Russian PMSC operations with a new form of hybrid warfare, but in fact they are less novelties and more in line with Soviet-era efforts to cloak military assistance to insurgent paramilitaries operating far beyond enemy lines. The Wagner Group and other Russian PMSCs are also products of disjointed phases of privatization, industrial reconsolidation, and military modernization over the last thirty years that have spurred the growth of state-backed corporate armies. Neither fully within the state nor outside of it, PMSCs are, in theory, an attractive way of lowering the costs of intervention while extending Russia’s reach. In practice, the Kremlin’s reliance on PMSC operations in fragile states has rendered many benefits for Putin and his closest political allies. However, PMSCs also pose substantial risks for a regime determined to keep a lid on domestic outcry over its military adventurism. The advent of the digital age means PMSC activities are often hidden in plain sight, and disinformation is no longer a failsafe remedy when the secrecy of covert operations is compromised. The narrative of a chess grandmaster—whether Putin, a Kremlin insider, or a mercenary group—singlehandedly orchestrating Russia’s proxy warfare strategy is a useful fiction for the Kremlin. Russian PMSCs did not begin with the Wagner Group or Wagner’s titular head, Yevgeny Prigozhin. The Wagner narrative, in fact, conceals a larger, more enduring system of intertwined state and private networks. Russian strategic aims have been shaped by the economic interests of Russian PMSCs as the privatized beneficiaries and overseers of much of Russia’s core exports of energy and arms. Russian proxy warfare strategy long predates Vladimir Putin, and although his skill should not be dismissed, he is shaped and enabled by the historical dynamics that gave rise to Russia’s PMSCs. Russia deployed PMSCs as proxies to manage escalation risks in Ukraine and Syria, but the free flow of information about their activities imposes limits and risks to Russian proxy warfare strategy. Although opaque, information about the complex networks of Kremlin insiders and PMSCs can often be uncovered by the public, as well as by Russia’s strategic competitors. Russia’s diminished deniability with regard to PMSCs places a premium upon information warfare and deception in Russian strategy, as has been demonstrated in Syria and Ukraine. Growing global capacity to de-anonymize digital data poses risks for covert proxy networks, a fact that should prompt a strategic rethink for the United States and its allies. This chapter combines open-source investigative techniques with an interrogation of the historical record to elucidate the broader framework under which Russian PMSCs operate and explain the underlying strategic aims that guide their activity. It seeks to decode what is known and unknown about the role of Russian-backed irregulars in current conflicts and separate myth from fact with regard to how Russian-backed contract paramilitary proxies fit into twenty-first-century Russian grand strategy. The analysis traces the evolution of Russian PMSCs from small-scale domestic providers to the tip of the spear of Russian military intervention and influence. The chapter focuses primarily on the Greater Middle East, with a particular focus on Syria.1 This orientation is partly based on the fact that the region and its periphery have long been central to how successive generations of Russian leaders have formulated military doctrine and diplomatic

approaches to power projection. However, it is important to note that Russia has also begun to use PMSCs to extend its influence in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere.2 The chapter is based on primary and secondary sources in Russian and English, field research trips to Ukraine, and more than seventy expert interviews.3 In addition to a review of primary and secondary sources and expert interviews, we excavated online sources to gain deeper insights into Russia’s private security industry.4 Much of that work corroborated insights inferred from fine-grained analysis of a database of online social media accounts of more than 300 individuals killed in Syria who had reportedly previously fought in Ukraine. Additional findings were culled from a database of roughly eighty individuals who identified themselves as ‘soldiers of fortune’ in an online forum dedicated to the Wagner Group PMSC, and who indicated that they had served officially at one time with Russian military units. Under Cover of Night in Deir ez-Zour In February 2018, US forces operating in northeastern Syria engaged in a pitched battle with hundreds of forces loyal to the regime of Bashar al-Assad.5 The fighting took place in the oiland gas-rich province of Deir ez-Zour, near a small village called Khasham close to the eastern bank of the Euphrates River, and the nighttime battle resulted in scores of casualties. The dead and wounded included a large contingent of Russian paramilitaries reportedly employed by the Wagner Group, a shadowy private military security contractor with ties to Kremlin insiders close to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.6 Media and scholarly accounts of the battle initially suggested it marked the first time in decades that the US military directly fired on Russian forces.7 After the American air strike on the column of purported Wagner fighters, 5th Assault Corps fighters, and other pro-Assad forces, US officials later said that it wasn’t the first Russian-American firefight in Syria and that casualties in Deir ezZour may have reached as high as 200.8 Some news accounts placed the total number of Russians killed in action at more than 100 people. The Kremlin initially claimed none of its citizens were present but Moscow’s later admission that ‘several dozen’ Russians were killed in the battle at Khasham and a constant drumbeat of posts on the popular Russia-based social media platform Vkontakte appeared to corroborate US claims that hundreds of Wagner fighters had been killed.9 Several user groups, or ‘clubs,’ popular with Russian mercenaries, wannabes, and military veterans on the popular Russian-based social media platform Vkontakte began pinging their members for information about what they may have heard about the battle thousands of miles away in Syria.10 Investigative journalists later confirmed the identities of several Russian citizens whose names appeared on a leaked casualties list, and the Kremlin reversed its denials.11 The pitched battle in Deir ez-Zour on the line of de-confliction between American-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and Russian-backed paramilitaries is illustrative of the potential for miscalculation in proxy war and escalation risks. Narratives about who is fighting whom matter as much as definitions and norms in proxy war. On paper, Russian

PMSCs appear to be private security providers, but they operate far outside the bounds of international law and widely accepted international industry protocols. Russian legal prohibitions against private expeditionary forces bind organizations like Wagner closely to a quasi-state shadow network of oligarchs, state enterprises, and security agencies. In form, Russian PMSC operators, such as the Wagner Group, appear to be private actors, operating independently of the Russian military and ostensibly providing protective security services. In function, Russian PMSCs are often full combat operators who coordinate closely with the Russian military both on land and sea. If, as Sun Tzu has said, ‘all warfare is based on deception’ and ‘subduing the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill,’ then transmission, control, and perception of information about who is fighting whom and why is the sine qua non of proxy war. Achieving a degree of plausible deniability or, at minimum, ensuring that unacknowledged covert activity in support of paramilitaries does not trigger retaliation or blowback—as Wagner did in both Deir ez-Zour and Ukraine respectively—depends as much on sponsors’ behavior as it does on that of the proxies. Whether sponsors use surrogate forces to communicate resolve to competitors, lower costs, manage escalation risks, delimit the bounds of conflict, or all of the above, the underlying goal of employing proxies is often to influence an adversary’s behavior. The use of proxies signals that the sponsor possesses both reach and determination to deter threats and deny rivals access to contested space by asymmetric retaliation for perceived adversarial breaches. The success or failure of such a proxy strategy is bound up in the degree to which sponsors are willing (or are forced) to acknowledge covert connections.12 Deception is a key component when it comes to shaping narratives around the logic of conflict, and to shaping an adversary’s threat perception. It can also be important in influencing alliances; when socalled ‘dirty tricks’ and covert military operations are exposed, alliances can shift, and along with them the strategic balance.13 For sponsors like Russia, then, controlling narratives around covert connections and command responsibility for operations is critical to containing costs and preventing escalation.14 Paradoxically, however, the need for secrecy—when provided via using surrogates as a proxy warfare tactic—greatly complicates sponsors’ ability to insulate themselves from escalation risks. As seen, for instance, with Russia’s use of PMSCs in Syria and Ukraine alongside pro-Russian separatist forces, the pressure to conceal can greatly complicate the command structures and impose limits on sponsors’ ability to exert control over proxies.15 Extensive reporting on the Deir ez-Zour clash and the downing of MH17, a Malaysian Airlines commercial plane that was shot down by Russian-backed forces as it flew over Ukraine airspace in 2014, are examples of how proxy strategies can result in exposure that leads to blowback. Open-source information found largely through online social networks ultimately led to the shootdown, which killed 298 people, being attributed to Russian-affiliated forces. This in turn prompted stringent sanctions against Russia.16 Both incidents illustrate the high risks of deploying proxy forces as a signaling strategy. They also indicate how the digital age is transforming secrecy, and along with it proxy war. The battle in Deir ez-Zour on the line of de-confliction between American-backed Syrian

Democratic Forces (SDF) and Russian PMSCs with the Wagner Group has since emerged as a central thread in competing narratives spun by Moscow and Washington. To the extent that anything is concretely known about how PMSCs like the Wagner Group operate, there are many more known unknowns.17 Officially, Putin denies any Kremlin link to PMSC operations.18 Still, the Kremlin has done little to publicly contravene the dominant media narrative portraying Putin’s favorite caterer, Yevgeny Prigozhin, as the puppet master behind both the Wagner Group and the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA), an organization which promotes disinformation about Russian PMSC activities.19 In fact, the Kremlin’s only known public response to allegations of Prigozhin’s links to the IRA and the Wagner Group, beyond attempts to portray the groups as purely private actors, surfaced in October 2019 after the US Treasury Department levied a raft of sanctions against jets and yachts Prigozhin had allegedly used to ferry himself from one warzone deal to the next.20 This was the third time Prigozhin’s businesses had come under US scrutiny in as many years,21 and the Kremlin threatened to relatiate with sanctions of its own against US citizens and companies, in response to what it considered an effort to isolate Russia as a pariah state. But even in that instance it was not entirely clear whether it was the US asset freeze against Prigozhin specifically that triggered the Kremlin’s threats of retaliation, since the sanctions had named IRA employees as well. Debates rage over who controls Wagner and whether Wagner’s operations and the disinformation campaign surrounding their activities are indicative of a new form of hybrid warfare. Given reports of political meddling by the IRA in places where the Kremlin seeks to project power, there does seem to be a pattern that lends credence to that view. The Mueller report on Russian interference in the 2016 US elections certainly backs up allegations that Prigozhin has largely acted with informed consent from the Kremlin.22 Much of what is known today about Prigozhin, the Wagner Group, and other PMSCs is a direct result of the work of intrepid journalists and researchers who have collected digital data on members of Russian-backed paramilitary groups and the oligarchies that support them. The most notable among these are Bellingcat, the Conflict Intelligence Team, C4ADS, the Dossier Center, and StopFake.org, a Ukraine-based, citizen-driven organization that promotes transparency and combats disinformation.23 It has been reported that the Russian PMSC fighters killed in Deir ez-Zour were attempting to seize control of a Conoco gas plant near the banks of the Euphrates river on behalf of a Prigozhin-linked company called Evro Polis.24 So far, however, no direct line has been traced between Prigozhin and the events that took place that fateful day in February 2018 in northeastern Syria. Whether the Russian men cut down by the US air strike there were acting entirely of their own private volition, working for Kremlin insiders, or whether they were servicing the Russian state remains debatable. But that may be by design. Focused attention on one part of the sprawling networks that facilitate PMSC operations diverts attention away from other parts of the network, providing strategic value to Russia, Russian PMSCs, and their clients. The ambiguity surrounding the battle of Khasham in Deir ez-Zour raises puzzling questions about the strategic value of allowing narratives about the Wagner Group and

Prigozhin to go unchallenged and uncorrected. What objectives are served by obfuscation in the Wagner Group’s case? Why has the Kremlin seemingly endorsed the spread of disinformation about other ‘fake’ PMSCs?25 What does Moscow gain from the ‘ghost army fights hybrid warfare’ narrative surrounding the Wagner Group? Defining Terms and Probing the Edges of Russia’s Proxy Strategies In order to understand the role of Russian PMSCs in Russia’s proxy warfare strategies, it is necessary to define what both PMSC and proxy warfare mean in this context. Given the deliberate and extensive use of deception, definitions can be slippery. This study focuses only on groups that provide operational or logistical support to Russian military expeditionary campaigns, military-technical advisory missions outside of Russia, or a blend of the two, as appears more often to be the case.26 However, two definitional questions are significant: what defines a PMSC, and do Russian PMSCs qualify as proxies? The literature on the privatization of security is voluminous, and so too is the array of terms used to refer to private security organizations.27 The general consensus view defines organizations that primarily provide semi-passive protective services, such as unarmed site security, police advice and training, and intelligence as private security contractors (PSCs). Organizations that provide armed operational support in armed conflict settings, such as logistical and training support for operational campaigns and military advisory missions, are private military security contractors, or PMSCs.28 The groups this chapter addresses as Russian PMSCs fall into the latter category. Our frame of analysis is primarily based on precepts contained in the International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers (ICoC) and the Montreux Document, a set of international protocols designed to guide best practices for private security organizations.29 Published in 2008 by the International Committee of the Red Cross and government of Switzerland, the Montreux Document reaffirms state obligations under applicable international law and sets forth nonbinding standards and practices for business entities that provide military or security services. Known as the ‘Swiss Initiative,’ the Montreux Document reinforces customary norms under International Humanitarian Law (IHL) that ascribe responsibility for PMSC actions to contracting states. ICoC was developed in a follow-on process supported by the Swiss government and driven in large part by representatives of the PMSC industry, notably the US International Stability Operations Association (ISOA) and the British Association of Private Security Companies. Driven in part by the controversies that erupted over US contractor practices in Afghanistan and Iraq, such as the killing of civilians by Blackwater employees in Iraq in 2007 and later legal battles lodged in 2009 in connection to that incident in Nisour Square in Baghdad, PMSC industry leaders pushed the code of conduct initiative with a view to building bridges with the aid community in the field as well as getting ahead of the regulatory curve.30 Central to the Montreux Document’s normative framework is an emphasis on the specific roles PMSCs take on and the legal structures under which PMSCs operate. Additional

guidance on the Montreux protocols expressly states that whether PMSCs can be treated as civilians is dependent on their employment status and how they perform their functions.31 In most cases, individual PMSC operators are treated as civilians, where bilateral status of forces or military-technical agreements or other local laws on security actors apply. In the rare cases where PMSC employees are ‘incorporated into the armed forces of a state or form groups or units under a command responsible to a party to an armed conflict,’ they do not enjoy protection of civilian status.32 Fifty-six states are signatories to the Montreux Document, including the United States and Ukraine, but neither Russia nor Syria are signatories.33 A related definitional question is: what distinguishes PMSCs from mercenaries? This study draws heavily on works about private security widely cited in the English language as authoritative—including Deborah Avant, Sean McFate and Peter Singer—to address these questions. Although each variously uses the terms PSCs, PMSCs, and private military companies (PMCs), all three point out the differences between those types of privatized security organizations and mercenaries, which are defined under Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions as any individual or group recruited abroad to fight in armed hostilities by a third party that is not a direct party to the conflict and is ‘motivated to take part in the hostilities essentially by the desire for private gain.’34 When it comes to Russian PMSCs, many of the contractors could arguably be categorized as mercenaries. The broad array of fighters from a variety of countries, who have joined conflicts in Ukraine and elsewhere under the banner of PMSCs, suggests financial interest almost certainly plays a role for some. However, this analysis forms no broad conclusions as to whether Russian PMSC operators can be strictly categorized as mercenaries. This is because the mercenary tagline is somewhat subjective and fails to capture the bigger picture of the role Russian PMSCs play as a strategic tool in conflicts that Russia is effectively a party to. It also fails to describe how Putin’s promotion of the ‘Russian World’ ideal has influenced the interests of many who join Russian PMSCs.35 They are neither volunteer private civilians nor entirely, or even primarily, financially motivated mercenaries. They are motivated as much by the revival of Russian nationalism and romanticism about Russia’s special forces as they are by their own economic and social displacement in wider Russian society. Above all, however, they are tools of state enterprises looking to capture new markets for the Russian state. As detailed below, substantial evidence suggests that the organizational structure of PMSCs should be categorized as state-backed combatants. In addition to contracting with Russian state enterprises, Russian PMSCs often draw from an active reserve of veteran recruits from special forces, or spetsnaz, units whose core mission sets include influence campaigns, conducting reconnaissance and sabotage, and undertaking lethal targeting operations. They typically operate undercover in tandem with other surrogate forces, deep behind enemy lines on special assignments designated by Russia’s military intelligence, counterterrorism, and national emergency services. It is clear those functions, which sit outside the realm of PSCs, can be ascribed to the Wagner Group and several other Russian PMSCs that have overlapping ties to the same

clients, contracting entities, managers, brokers, and financiers. Such forces have been ideal for pushing the limits of norms around nonintervention, long a central pillar of Russian foreign policy dating back to when Putin’s predecessor at the KGB, Yevgeny Primakov, was still pulling the levers of Russia’s state security architecture. If PSCs cannot be categorized entirely as mercenaries, what framework best captures the role of Russian PMSCs? They may at times fulfill traditional PSC roles based on circumstances, but they have also fought in offensive operations alongside local forces that they trained. Russian PMSCs, in this respect, are at once force multipliers and agents of deception. This chapter argues that they are best understood as agents of Russia’s proxy warfare strategy, a strategy that relies on the sponsorship of conventional or irregular forces that lie outside the constitutional order of the state.36 While the Russian legal system regarding the activity of PMSCs is often deliberately opaque, Russian PMSCs do not fit wholly under the Russian constitutional structure. Technically, Article 359 of Russia’s 1996 Criminal Code prohibits Russian citizen civilians from participating in armed conflicts abroad for material reward.37 Parliamentary representatives in Russia’s state Duma have in recent years tried but failed to update national laws to permit PMSCs to operate in an expeditionary capacity. Some Russia scholars suggest resistance in Russia’s parliament to legalization of PMSCs reflects the fear some political leaders have that privatization of military force could see a return to the ‘bad old days’ of the 1990s, when the prospect of a successful military coup loomed large.38 Others, such as Columbia University scholar Kimberly Marten, posit that the quasi-legal status of PMSCs is a tool that allows Putin and relevant security agencies such as the FSB and GRU to manage foreign policy objectives outside formal institutional channels, such as parliament.39 Both of these reasons seem plausible. Whatever the explanation, the unique status of Russian PMSCs in this legal gray zone suggests that Wagner and other related affiliates do not fall under the standard chain of command overseen by the military or other constitutionally mandated security organs. Absent any legislative oversight or concrete means of enforcing rules about PMSCs, the Kremlin can exert pressure on oligarchs, like Prigozhin, when something surreptitious needs to be done expediently in Russia’s zones of interest abroad. Since most decrees pertaining to the status of Russian forces operating abroad are classified, it would seem then that PMSCs are proxies at least in name. The classification of Russian PMSCs as proxies does not absolve the Russian state of responsibility for PMSC actions under international law. If anything, the historical roots of PMSCs in the Kremlin’s official state security apparatus, their organizational structures, their contractual missions, their contractual arrangements with Russian state enterprises, and the centrality of Russian PMSCs in the combat training and equipment of local proxies in conflict zones—such as Ukraine and Syria—grants Russia an extraordinary ability to extend its military reach inside sovereign nations, and may generate corresponding legal responsibilities. Russian Military Reorganization, Modernization and the Market for Private Force

Cold War Foundations and Yevgeny Primakov’s Foreign Policy Legacy The activity of Russian PMSCs in the Greater Middle East and its periphery shows great continuity with prior Russian and Soviet strategies and tactics. During the Cold War, the Kremlin deployed hundreds of ‘Comrade Tourists’—essentially covert military operators—to Russia’s near abroad under military-technical agreements. Today, covert operators acting as PMSCs reinforce Russia’s national security interests in areas of the world where it can ill afford political instability that would adversely affects its leading exports, energy and arms. In contemporary terms, as Stephen Blank aptly notes, a direct line can be drawn between Russia’s twenty-first-century grand strategy of the Putin era and policies long promoted by Yevgeny Primakov during the twentieth century.40 An Arabist and former Middle East correspondent for the Soviet party daily newspaper Pravda, Primakov later became Russia’s foreign minister and one of the most influential architects of Moscow’s foreign policy; he would later, during the 1990s, also serve as the head of Russian Foreign Intelligence as well as prime minister. Over the fifty years that he covered the region as a journalist, spymaster, and diplomat, Primakov came to know the leading Arab politicians who would transition the Middle East from British and French rule. From the 1950s forward, Primakov insisted that exerting influence was the key to maintaining Russia’s great power status. The Middle East, Primakov once said, ‘is nothing short of Russia’s “soft underbelly.”’41 For Primakov, influencing the region meant being on the most intimate of terms with Arab nationalists and, perhaps more importantly, with the armies that supported them. Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Algeria’s Houari Boumediene, and Syria’s Hafez al-Assad, in Primakov’s view, were the Kremlin’s path to influence. Col. Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, too, later became important in this respect, but Moscow’s relationship with him was often prickly. All military men, they were the real catalysts behind the pan-Arab movement in the Cold War era.42 The military forces they led provided not only the muscle, but also the political leadership in the absence of a substantive political party structure.43 During the early half of the Cold War, from the late 1940s through the 1970s, the Soviet Union concentrated much of its focus on Egypt and Syria. The Kremlin viewed the fate of efforts to penetrate the Middle East as bound up in Nasser and Assad’s political fortunes. Nasser’s pan-Arabism was construed in Moscow as an Arab version of proletarian internationalism and a convenient political entry point for the region writ large.44 The 1956 Suez Canal crisis further spurred the growth of a close Soviet-Egyptian relationship, and Soviet military support to Cairo and other regional regimes more broadly was critical in this regard.45 After Egypt’s defeat in the Six Day War and expulsion of Russian military advisors from the country, the Kremlin shifted its gaze to Syria.46 Military advisors traveled to Syria as ‘tourists’ from the Soviet Black Sea ports—mainly via the Ukrainian port city of Nikolaev— and were dressed in Syrian military uniforms upon the arrival.47 The exact number of socalled Comrade Tourists is unknown, but the memoirs of veterans and Soviet diplomats suggest that the number of Soviet anti-aircraft forces alone who specialized in servicing S200 surface-to-air missile systems in Syria may have reached into the thousands in the

1980s.48 Russian veterans of such missions to Syria claim it was not uncommon for secrecy to surround casualties from such missions, much as it appears to do today.49 Whatever the actual total number, it was likely significant judging from the accounts of some of the 800 survivors of the Syrian ‘tourist’ covert military advisory program who appealed in 2015 to the Kremlin for compensation for their service.50 Present-day Russian foreign policy in Syria, and other countries where Russian PMSCs are active, draws on these antecedent lines laid during peak periods of Russian investment in Arab client states. Throughout the Cold War, major Russian state energy and military-industrial companies supplied the men, money, and materiel needed to cement a strong foothold in the region. Moscow’s deployment of military advisors with weaponry deliveries was a hallmark of Primakov’s influence on Soviet policy that lasted right up to the end of the Cold War. In the immediate years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, during the bridge from the tenures of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin to that of Putin, there was a marked downshift in Russian involvement in the Middle East as the Kremlin sought to reorient itself on a friendlier footing with Israel, the United States, and Europe. Primakov as prime minister continued to push the line that Russia’s great power status was bound to Moscow’s relations in the Middle East. The bitter end to the Soviet incursion in Afghanistan and the post-Soviet bloody wars against Islamist separatists in Chechnya, however, greatly undercut the Kremlin’s credibility in the region. Despite the downshift in the 1990s, Russian strategy in the Greater Middle East during the Cold War established patterns that would continue in the post-Soviet era. First, it established arms sales and military aid as a core part of Russia’s economy, a legacy which continued even after the fall of the Soviet Union. Second, Soviet fears that exposure of the details of that investment could escalate tensions with the United States led Moscow to build a clandestine arms pipeline with secret transfer points in Warsaw Pact countries, such as Czechoslovakia, and forge surreptitious maritime routes from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean and onwards to the Red Sea for the transit of key military personnel and goods.51 Many of these routes remain sites of competition and key hubs of Russian military influence today, linking Russia’s involvement in proxy wars in Syria and the Middle East to the proxy war in Ukraine. Lastly, much like their contemporary compatriots who ran Soviet efforts to cultivate influence with Hafez al-Assad’s regime in Syria, the obsession with secrecy and discretion led Moscow to send military advisors as ‘tourists,’ a tactic that would replay itself in Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Chechnya, Georgia, and Ukraine.52 In each of these Kremlin-led interventions, political warfare, espionage, and influence campaigns supported covert reconnaissance and sabotage missions that paved the way for direct military incursions, much as they have more recently in Ukraine and Syria. The playbook of deploying deceptive maskirovka tactics to mask mobilization and hide true objectives is the same, but, in the post-Cold War era, globalized supply chains and finance have substantially shifted the configuration of players who deploy the means to reaching Russia’s strategic ends.

Early Origins: The Gorbachev-Yeltsin Years, 1989–99 Most Russian PMSCs trace their origins back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the chaotic dissolution of the Soviet Union saw the privatization of state-run industries and a massive reorganization of the Russian military. The transition precipitated a nearly wholesale retooling of the Russian military-industrial complex as it cast off large numbers of soldiers and workers dependent on the country’s defense industrial base. The loss of these jobs generated substantial social upheaval. During Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev’s tenure in the 1980s, one US assessment placed the number of active-duty forces at 4.9 million, with an additional 1 million soldiers active in Warsaw Pact countries.53 Overextension in Afghanistan saw that number progressively downsized to a considerable extent, though estimates vary as to how many forces were standing on the eve of the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. After the Soviet collapse, the Kremlin reportedly slashed its nearly 3 million-strong forces roughly by half, leaving a little over 1 million soldiers active.54 The massive downsizing of the Russian military that began as Yeltsin consolidated power in 1990–1 created a pool of thousands of experienced veteran soldiers available for hire. Coinciding as it did with the end of Russian intervention in Afghanistan in 1989, the wave of military cuts and mass demobilization of so-called Afghantsy veterans spurred the growth of dual-hatted veterans clubs-cum-protection rackets. Isolated, psychologically battered, and marginalized amid a public backlash against the war in Afghanistan, many veterans clung together on Russia’s politically nationalist fringes. They consolidated cliques that conformed to their prior mission sets in Afghan provinces. St. Petersburg scholar Vladimir Volkov estimates that at least one such group—the Herat Association—boasted an 8,000-strong membership when it was initially set up as a military sports club in 1991.55Afghanvet, another equally famous veterans club protection racket, hailed from St. Petersburg, which was a key feeder city for many of the military’s most elite units and later became a central node in the PMSC industry. Many veterans’ association leaders had served during an upsurge in the deployment of spetsnaz groups sent to Afghanistan as a bulwark against agile mujahideen guerrillas. These groups included Russia’s Airborne Forces (VDV) paratrooper divisions and spetsnaz forces affiliated with the former KGB and its successor organs.56 Among the most prominent of the KGB spetsnaz units in this category were Alpha Group and its sister unit Vympel, counterterror and counterespionage units whose lineage traces back to World War II partisan warfare units and the creation of specialized irregular reconnaissance task forces in the 1950s.57 Alpha and Vympel (also known as Vega Group) were formed under the auspices of the KGB Development Courses for Officer Personnel training regime, known by its acronym KUOS,58 later known as the KGB Higher Red Banner Training Academy or Higher School, the KGB (and later FSB) equivalent of an officers training corps. Most of the higher-ranking veterans of these elite higher-academy trained groups were skilled in foreign languages and trained as advance reconnaissance strike forces. Officers trained under the KUOS regime typically wore plainclothes, operated

clandestinely, and served as either stay-behind forces behind enemy lines or as core members of guerrilla partisan forces in the event of invasion. Alpha was expressly designed to protect Soviet leaders from blackmail and assassination, while Vympel—in addition to its sabotage brief—was tasked with assassinating heads of state and other political targets. In the 1990s, these specially trained units were additionally tasked with safeguarding transports from terrorist acts and protecting military-industrial infrastructure.59 Like many elites of the KGB Higher School, the men who served in these special units were tasked by the KGB’s First Main Directorate with supporting and training Soviet-backed guerrillas in partisan warfare tactics, including most famously Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization.60 The specialized training cemented long-lasting relationships between elite Russian officers and counterparts in proxy war hotspots across the Middle East—as well as outside it in places like Angola and Cuba—links that would come in handy again as much of the Soviet military began to be absorbed into the private sector in the post-Soviet era. The end of the Cold War saw the doctrinal focus of these elite troops switch from preparation for war with NATO to containing instability in breakaway republics of the Soviet Union. Spetsnaz units once controlled by the Kremlin were effectively transferred to the control of newly independent states, such as Ukraine, while others that remained in the Soviet sphere were shuffled and reshuffled. When Soviet leaders began scrambling the organizational structure of its elite forces on the heels of the 1991 coup by communist hardliners against Gorbachev, Yeltsin-era reforms placed Vympel for a time under the command of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, or MVD. Alpha remained under the control of the KGB. Later, both were placed under the FSB after the KGB was reorganized again.61 Throughout the 1990s, as noted by Yuri Felshintsky and Vladimir Pribylovsky, Russia’s premier state security apparatus generally retained its primary mission and organizational character, even as the intelligence agency underwent a massive reshuffling through at least a half-dozen different executive orders issued by Gorbachev and former president Boris Yeltsin.62 It bears noting, however, that under Putin the KGB’s successor organ, the FSB, and related security agencies—such as the Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR—have become much more pervasive in their powers, as has been observed by Russian investigative journalists Yuri Soldatov and Irina Borogan.63 In the Yeltsin era, mounting financial pressures resulted in late pay, poor housing conditions, and a general downgrade in status for many in Russia’s elite security forces.64 Vadim Volkov estimates that more than 20,000 KGB officers resigned or were discharged within a year of the failed military putsch.65 As with their spetsnaz counterparts in the airborne VDV, the constant churn decimated morale in Vympel and Alpha, leading many of its members to term out their service. Small, elite, and extremely close-knit after years of service in the shadow of Kremlin powerbrokers, several MVD and FSB Vympel and Alpha unit leaders opted to start their own security companies in the heady 1990s, when mafia groups ruled the streets of major cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg. After the passage of Russia’s first law on domestic private security companies in 1992, the

Alpha and Vympel brand proved enduring, propelling the private industry careers of dozens of leading KGB/FSB officers, who would go on to head up security for major banks and financial service companies.66 A significant number of such PMSC companies even took the name of their parent organs. One Alpha-linked PMSC offshoot was apparently purchased by the US-based Armour Group at the peak of the privatization fervor in the 1990s.67 Another, named Alpha-B, proudly touts the elite lineage of its Moscow-based owner-operators on its website and states that many of its members served in Alpha before the company was formed in 1992.68 Yet another, Alfa Unit 1, which advertises its services in Crimea, appears to be headed by Alpha members that were at one point affiliated with the MVD.69 There is no known complete list of various companies that come from the Alpha and Vympel line of private security companies, but by 1998 an official Russian government estimate placed the total number of private security companies operating in Russia at around 5,000.70 Given the number of firms that were unregistered and often incubated in sports clubs across the country, the total was likely higher.71 These antecedent clubs would continue to figure prominently in the evolution of Russia’s private security industry, serving as important nodes for recruitment, training, and other organizational management tasks. The Rise of the Corporate Army Elites The transition of elite security cadres from government service to private security overlapped with several phases of the privatization and reorganization of state enterprises that had strategic importance for Russia’s export base. State-backed energy firms soon emerged as a key incubator for the PMSC industry.72 A few years after the Soviet Union’s collapse, Yeltsin issued an executive decree that allowed Gazprom and Transneft to set up their own militarized armies to protect newly built infrastructure.73 Transneft and Gazprom subsequently joined a wave of state-run firms in the finance and energy sectors that staffed their specialized security divisions with former top KGB officers at the time. A few years later, in 1997, Yeltsin issued a series of decrees that essentially reconsolidated Kremlin control over Rosboronexport.74 Volkov estimated in 2002 that Gazprom’s security division had some 13,000 employees with 41 distinct subdivisions.75 With roughly 300,000 employees total on the books by 2006, Gazprom stood as one of Russia’s single largest employers, while tax revenues generated by the gas giant accounted for approximately 25 percent of the country’s entire state budget, according to a 2010 study by American military analyst Cindy Hurst.76 By 2007, Gazprom employed 20,000 or more in its security service.77 When Russia’s parliament, the Duma, began considering that same year whether to prohibit private security companies from arming their staff, Gazprom and other state majors, such as Transneft, put up stiff resistance. The successful lobbying effort led the Duma to ultimately include in the Federal Law on Armaments a work-around for strategic enterprises and corporations like Gazprom and other majority state-owned energy firms.78 It was around this same time—2005 to 2007—that Putin led an effort to quietly privatize

still more portions of the Russian economy by handing the reigns of major exporting industries to longtime KGB/FSB associates and a handful of politicians with ties to state security organs. As documented by Vadim Volkov, shortly before stepping down after his first term as president, Putin signed into law the creation of a raft of ‘nonprofit nongovernmental organizations dubbed goskorporatsii, or “state corporations.”’79 It was under this scheme that Putin appointed his two close colleagues Sergei Ivanov and Igor Sechin to head the first of these special strategic state corporations, the United Aircraftbuilding Corporation and United Shipbuilding Corporation respectively.80 This approach facilitated the reconsolidation of state properties as joint-stock firms in which the Russian state is the majority shareholder. The 1999 Law on Non-Commercial Organizations, as Volkov has noted, established a second type of state cooperation in which state funds or property were donated to create and secure public goods.81 The assets of Rosboronexport, the defense industry giant headed by Putin’s other close colleague Sergei Chemezov, were first consolidated in a 1999 statute and would later form the majority state-owned enterprise known as Rostec.82 Part of a package of 1990s legislation that seeded a massive reorganization of Russia’s military-industrial complex, and put the GRU effectively in charge of managing military-technical cooperation agreements for foreign arms trade deals, the moves to transform parts of strategic industries continued through the early years of Putin’s first presidential term. Putin’s Revival and Revision of Primakov Doctrine in the Middle East Consolidation of Russia’s military-industrial complex would prove a boon for Rosboronexport, Gazprom, and other Russian strategic enterprises, as would subsequent efforts to restructure the massive debts incurred by Syria and other major Middle East arms and energy clients. In 2005, Russia agreed to wipe out US$9.78 billion of a total of US$13 billion debt owed by Syria to the Russian state for Soviet-era energy and arms deals.83 Both moves—the militarization of state strategic enterprises and debt consolidation among major energy and arms trading partners in the Middle East—were critical for Russia’s progressive push to recalibrate its role in both the Middle East and Africa. They also represented a new, more robust extension of Primakov’s doctrine of leveraging the Kremlin’s tight hold on the Russian military-industrial complex to gain influence in the region and project power. Putin, who inherited Primakov’s one-time role as head of the KGB/SVR successor agency, the FSB, subsequently revived the Primakov Doctrine, even surpassing his predecessor’s legacy by building on old patterns of cooperation with Moscow’s longtime Middle East client base and at the same time tapping what Kimberly Marten has called Putin’s ‘informal political networks’ to manage relations with Middle Eastern elites.84 In addition to powerful ministries such as energy and internal security and defense, leaders of Russia’s defense, energy, and maritime industries form part of Putin’s powerbase. Where state enterprises such as Gazprom, Rostec/Rosboronexport, and Sovcomflot turn their attention, so too does Russian foreign and domestic policy. Rich in energy and geopolitically pivotal, the Middle East and Africa, therefore, are just as important for power projection as they are as a conduit for Putin’s ability to corral rent-seeking Kremlin insiders.

Russia’s dependency on oil and gas exports as its central economic pillar is well known, and Putin’s singular focus on positioning the country as an energy superpower has been well documented.85 Russia’s state-dominated oil and gas industry is both a critical strategic export and a key source of Putin’s personal wealth, according to several well-known Russian and Western experts.86 Gazprom, Tatneft, StroyTransGaz, Zarubezhneft, Rosneft, and Surgutneftgaz—not coincidentally—are helmed by longtime close associates of Putin and lay claim to the bulk of the export and transit network infrastructure for energy production networks that span the Middle East and parts of Africa. Like most energy majors, the fortunes of state-run firms such as StroyTransGaz, or STG, have fluctuated overtime with structural changes to globalized markets, as occurred during the shale gas boom. Rosboronexport is another such example. Geopolitical shifts in Asia during the first twenty years after the Soviet collapse saw a reorientation of many of Russia’s traditional markets for arms toward greater integration with the West. As a result, demand for Russian arms in Russia’s largest arms market fluctuated, making expansion in one of its largest markets—the Middle East and Africa—even more critical for economic and political stability.87 Building on its Cold War importance, Syria holds a key strategic place for Russia’s positioning in global oil, gas, and arms markets. In addition to providing support to the Russian naval base in Tartus, Kremlin-backed energy, transportation, and construction companies have operated in mineral-rich areas across the country for decades. Moscow’s foreign investment expanded and contracted in three distinct waves over the last sixty years, hitting record peaks in the mid-1980s before the collapse of the Soviet Union, then increasing again from the mid-2000s up to the Arab Spring.88 From 1957 to the early 2000s, the Soviet Union initiated some eighty-five major infrastructure projects in the country, completing construction on a little more than sixty of them by 2005.89 Some of the largest included a string of hydropower electric stations along the Euphrates, oil fields in the northeast, and the Homs-Aleppo oil pipeline. Russia also helped lay thousands of miles of railway and power lines across the country. Although the collapse of the Soviet Union followed by the First Gulf War in 1991 saw a brief downturn of Moscow’s investment in Syria, Kremlin relations with Bashar al-Assad’s regime grew stronger in tandem with Putin’s rise and growing tensions between Washington and both Moscow and Damascus.90 Syria’s progressive isolation as a result of its occupation of Lebanon had a paradoxical effect. On the one hand, Assad’s erratic relations with its neighbor were cause for concern, but it also made Assad more dependent on external stakeholders like Russia. US sanctions against Assad in response to the 2005 assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri provided fresh entry points for Russia to gain more leverage in Syria’s faltering economy, primarily via energy and arms deals. From 2003 to 2010, Russia and Syria inked several cooperation agreements, including several weapons procurement deals with Rosboronexport worth hundreds of millions of dollars.91 Most importantly for Russia’s burgeoning post-Soviet private security industry, the rekindling of relations between the Kremlin and the Assad regime during this period also led to the establishment of the Syrian-Russian Business Council in 2008.92 In addition to

Russia’s ministries of defense, energy, and economic development, the council includes representatives from Russia’s largest state energy producers. This expansion of Russian strategic trade in arms and energy in the Middle East and Africa sparked the outgrowth of Russia’s PMSC industry in the 2000s.93 Russia’s dependence on energy and arms trade for hard currency and the decrepit state of its industrial infrastructure is well known and has long been its Achilles’ heel.94 The global proliferation of Russian PMSC contingents coincided closely with the tail end of the global financial crisis, a steep drop in oil prices, and the final stage of a years-long effort to modernize the Russian military in the wake of hard lessons learned from its 2008 incursion in Georgia. As during the Cold War, access to the Black Sea, Sea of Azov, and Caspian Sea—and consequently to major maritime routes to the Global South—closely linked Russian involvement in the Middle East with Russia’s core interests. Such access has long been a central concern of the Russian state since the time of Catherine the Great. The first Crimean War is a testament to that fact. Post-Cold War, Russian incursions in Chechnya, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia on the Black Sea coast also reflect those concerns. The 2011 Arab Spring and the 2013–14 Euromaidan uprisings in Ukraine represented a triple threat for the Kremlin with regard to its sea access. Putin saw echoes of the Color Revolutions and an ‘invisible American hand’ in both instances. The uprising against Viktor Yanukovych’s regime in Ukraine threatened to upend Russia’s longstanding access to important maritime and land routes for energy trade and arms transit. Regime change came first in Egypt then Libya and Ukraine, and the threat of it in Syria imperiled Moscow’s longstanding share of markets critical to the stability of the Russian economy. Social upheaval in each of these countries roiled energy markets at a time when Russia was still recovering from a precipitous drop in oil prices from US$145 to US$60 a barrel and below, almost overnight in 2008.95 At the same time, instability rocked Russia’s arms trade. The collapse of Gaddafi’s regime alone vaporized an estimated US$7 billion in Russian arms contracts.96 For the Kremlin, the arms trade was an important means for ensuring stability for imperiled authoritarian partner regimes in the region and reinsuring Russian influence in this time of upheaval in the region’s energy markets. As noted by Richard Connolly and Cecilie Senstad, Putin’s closest advisors have openly referred to Russia’s Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation as ‘the country’s second foreign policy agency.’97 The US$15-billion-a-year Russian defense industry is especially central to the Kremlin’s tried and true strategy of using military-technical cooperation agreements as a means of wielding influence abroad.98 By way of example, Syria frequently ranked among the top recipients of Soviet arms exports from 1980 to 1996.99 During much of the Putin era, Russia supplied close to half of Syria’s arms imports; a trend that was an important consideration before Moscow’s 2015 decision to aid Assad’s regime, and that will presumably continue to influence Moscow’s close relations with Damascus.100 Tracing the Roots of the Wagner Group

The story of the Wagner Group has largely been told as the story of one critical Russian oligarch, Yevgeny Prigozhin, and his role in connecting private, financially motivated PMSCs to Putin’s agenda through their personal friendship. Online references to Prigozhin and his links to the Wagner Group run into the tens of thousands, and the Wagner-Prigozhin mythos has garnered its own Wikipedia page.101 Wagner’s alleged links to Prigozhin prompted the US Treasury in 2017 to sanction Wagner and its titular commander Dmitry Utkin for lending material support to Russian separatists in Ukraine.102 This narrative of Prigozhin as the trusted Kremlin insider behind the Wagner Group may add up in some respects, but it also tends to obscure the deeper web of relationships and networks that extends far beyond Prighozin. Prighozin plays a role in the story of the Wagner Group and Russian PMSCs more broadly, but he is not the only powerbroker profiting from Russian PMSC operations. Rather, he is ensconced within the larger set of networks that define and gave rise to the PMSCs as well as the Russian national interests they often pursue via proxy warfare. This section examines this dynamic and the above questions by providing a genealogy of the rise and activity of the Wagner Group. The genealogy of the Wagner Group and affiliated PMSC contingents can be traced directly through the networks of strategic state-enterprises and siloviki103 security agencyconnected powerbrokers that have grown in influence under Putin. The Anti-Terror Orel Group was among Wagner’s progenitors. It was, in essence, a confederation of small cadres of military intelligence veterans combined with retired and reserve spetsnaz special operators. Anti-Terror Orel’s central link was to five men listed in Russian company registries as stakeholders in the Orel Airborne Forces and All Union Special Forces Association of Paratroopers: founders Igor Iliyin, Oleg Maslov, Alexander Filipinkov, and Pavel Ovsyannikov, and director Sergey Epishkin.104 As appears to be typical for many Russian PMSCs in the 1990s, the veterans organization linked to Anti-Terror Orel served as a nexus for several siloviki private security enterprises, several of which were, at one time or another, registered under Epishkin’s name and appear to reference a connection to FSB Alpha and other spetsnaz units, according to Russian company registry information.105 An archived version of the group’s website indicates that about half of the individuals affiliated with the Anti-Terror Orel confederation of PMSCs at one time served in the Airborne Troops (VDV), special operations forces of the 7th Squad of Special Forces (‘ROSICH’) and the 1st Special Purpose Unit of the Internal Forces or MVD (‘Vityaz’).106 Another smaller slice of the group consisted of GRU veterans, Vympel, Alpha, and Russian navy marines. The now defunct website also indicates that the Anti-Terror Orel constellation of affiliated detachments included the Patriot Group and ROSA, some members of which may have shifted to join Rusich,107 a group of Russian neo-Nazi spetsnaz veterans that would later play a significant role in the battles at Debaltseve and Ilovaisk in Donbas, according to human rights experts and military veterans’ groups based in Ukraine.108 Much like their Western counterparts at Executive Outcomes and Blackwater, Anti-Terror Orel Group leaders appear to have emulated the practice of registering and rebranding as different entities whenever controversies arose over their business model, or whenever fresh market opportunities were presented. This approach sprouted several other PMSC offshoots,

including Redut Antiterror and Tigr-Top Rent, which interestingly traced its lineage back to Alpha and Vympel subunits that famously led the Storm-333 special operations assault on the Taj-Bek Palace in Kabul, resulting in the assassination of Hafizullah Amin in Afghanistan and later forming the core intelligence and counterintelligence units active in the SovietAfghan war.109 It was during this period that the Anti-Terror Orel Group likely reconsolidated under the auspices of RusCorp, an ostensibly private Russian firm registered initially in Moscow in 2007,110 which like Anti-Terror Orel serviced state-run enterprises, such as Gazprom.111 In fact, according to an archived version of RusCorp’s defunct website, the PMSC firm was effectively set up as a holding company for the small confederation of PMSC contingents affiliated with the Anti-Terror Orel Training Center.112 Forward Operations: The ‘Syrian Express’ and the Birth of the Wagner Group Narrative The toppling during the Arab Spring of key Arab leaders the Kremlin had spent years cultivating threatened to reverse the progress Russia had made in expanding its share of the Middle East energy and arms market during Putin’s first few years in office.113 Violent unrest in Libya in early 2011 fueled deep fears in the Kremlin about the risk posed to major players like STG, Tatneft, and Rostec, which had billions invested in the country and the wider region. Those fears took form when Russia was forced to suddenly evacuate more than 300 Tatneft employees amid violent attacks across Libya in early 2011.114 Russian PMSCs subsequently surged into the region to secure Russian assets, provide personal protection to VIPs, and ensure the secure transfer of weapons. Instability in the region also presented an opportunity for Russian state firms, especially Rosboronexport, the export arm of Rostec that services the lion’s share of Russia’s foreign military-technical agreements. The United States moved to freeze Syria and Libya out of global markets and temporarily turned off the tap for military aid to Egypt, creating space for Russia to increase its influence. Pressure to quell instability in all three countries drove up demand for weapons and nudged them closer to the Kremlin’s sphere of influence. The first news reports about the Wagner Group surfaced not long after two predecessor PMSC outfits—the Moran Security Group and Slavonic Corp—were publicly linked to two incidents on the Syrian frontlines in 2013. Ostensibly owned by Vadim Gusev and managed by Boris Chikin and the firm’s director Sergei Kramskoi, Slavonic Corps was a Russianstaffed PMSC reportedly registered in Hong Kong.115 Gusev’s ties to Russia’s PMSC industry stretch back to the Anti-Terror Orel network, and Gusev and Chikin at one point had also worked for the Moran Security Group, another Russian PMSC contingent that had been accused of being involved in smuggling arms illegally in Nigeria.116 In spring 2013, around the same time as Russian and international news outlets picked up the story about the Moran Security Group’s troubles in Nigeria, recruitment ads for Slavonic Corps began appearing on Moscow-based online bulletin boards. It was through those ads that Gusev and Chikin successfully recruited 267 men to secure oil facilities near Palmyra on behalf of Syria’s ministry of energy, under the ostensible management of the newly formed Slavonic Corps, an

affiliate of Moran.117 The Slavonic Corps’s exploits in Syria and its connections to Moran went virtually unnoticed until October 2013, when ISIS claimed that it had killed more than 100 people in a battle near Homs, among them Russian contractors, including a Moran employee.118 When the Slavonic Corps contingent returned home to Russia, the FSB interrogated the men and ultimately charged Gusev and Yevgeny Sidorov (another Moran veteran and partner in the Slavonic Corps venture) with violating prohibitions in Russia’s criminal code against mercenary activity.119 The 2013 Palmyra incident involving Moran triggered a wave of press coverage and appeared to be the first known instance in which Russian PMSC operators were reportedly engaged in offensive operations in Syria. Yet, as more details surfaced about Slavonic Corps and Moran after the October 2013 dustup, it soon became clear that Russian PMSC operators linked to Moran had been operating in Syria for at least a year by then. A 2010 version of Moran’s website indicates that the PMSC had been operating near the At-Tanf border station in Syria near the Iraq border at least three years before the St. Petersburg-based Fontanka news site unearthed the ties between Moran employees Vadim Gusev, Chikin, and Sidorov with the Wagner Group’s titular head, Dmitry Utkin.120 In time, it surfaced that the central node in this complex network is Russia’s top arms purveryor, Rostec, and its foreign export arm, Rosboronexport. Dollar for dollar, the volume of Rostec arms exports to Syria ranks it among the biggest recipients in the Middle East region; a majority of Syria’s arms, in fact, can be sourced to Rosboronexport.121 At the outset of the uprisings in Syria in March 2011, established Black Sea transit lines proved crucial in this regard, serving initially as the primary route for weapons delivery and a key source of contract work for Russian PMSCs. Later, as sanctions against the Assad regime brought more public scrutiny to bear on Russian arms transfers to Syria, Baltic Sea routes also became essential, precipitating substantial shifts in the way Russian PMSCs operated. For Rostec, establishing covert supply chains from 2012 forward ensured safe and, most importantly, discreet delivery to one of its most valuable markets As first documented by C4ADS, most arms exported out of Russia have for decades been shipped out of the southeastern Ukrainian ports of Oktyabrsk and Nikolaev, almost exclusively managed by a network of interlinked firms with offices in Kyiv and Odessa just a short distance from the Crimean Peninsula.122 A few supply chain managers for Rosboronexport also operate out of the Baltic seaports of St. Petersburg, Riga, and Latvia; these include several Russian state-backed shipping and chartering companies, brokerage houses, and reinsurance firms that handle war risk management and logistics for Moran Security Group clients and partners.123 When ISIS began to take control of large swaths of territory in Syria in late 2012, Russian PMSC contingents evolved their mission to provide the logistical link for Russian special operators in Syria on the ground, and to train up local militias. The shift from more traditional protection to offensive operations mirrored developments in Russia’s efforts to mitigate risks posed by Assad regime reversals on the ground. Following a series of running battles near Palmyra that started in 2013, StroyTransGaz, with a strong assist from Russian PMSCs and affiliated local pro-Syrian militias, such as the al-Nimr or ‘Tiger’ Forces, also

acquired a substantial stake in Syria’s phosphate industry.124 Led by Russian-backed favorite, Brig. Gen. Suhail al-Hassan, and culled from a pro-Assad faction of the Air Force Intelligence Directorate, the Tiger Forces trained with and fought alongside Russian PMSC fighters, of which most claim StroyTransGaz as a key client for security services in Syria, according to local sources.125 Yet, Syrian forces loyal to Assad still struggled to reverse rebel and ISIS advances. It was around this time, not long after the Slavonic Corps debacle, that the Wagner Group reportedly appeared on the scene in Syria and Russian advisors along with the top tier of Assad’s military made plans to launch the Fourth Assault Corps, or 4th Legion. Near the end of 2014 after the Syrian military experienced several battlefield reversals, most notably in Palmyra, Russian advisors began to lobby Syrian military leaders to organize an assortment of pro-Assad militias into a singular division. In October 2015, General Ali Ayoub, Syria’s chief of army staff, announced the formation of the 4th Assault Corps.126 It was at about this same time that Dmitry Utkin’s Wagner Group reportedly replaced Slavonic Corps and took over the train and equip mission of local Syrian militias. Headquartered in Latakia, the 4th Assault Corps area of operations spanned parts of Hama, including for a time a base at Mesyaf and Aleppo. Initially, the 4th Corps included several military units in the Syrian government army, including the 87th Brigade tank regiment.127 Under the joint command of Russia and Iran, it also included al-Nimr (Tiger) Forces, National Defense Force (NDF) militias, and regiments of special forces.128 These 4th Corps units would figure heavily in battles for control of the cities of Aleppo and Hama after Russia’s military officially began operating in the country in September 2015.129 Despite reported support from the Wagner Group and other Russian contingents, the 4th Corps struggled. Major General Hassan Merhej replaced former Corps commander Major General Shawki Yusuf after 4th Corps units marked significant battlefield losses against opposition forces. Turmoil at the top and infighting at the lower levels between competing militias backed by Iran and Russia apparently further blunted the effectiveness of the 4th Corps, prompting Russian advisors to Assad only a few months later to propose a fresh alternative: the formation of a new division composed of a combination of Syrian regulars and pro-Assad militias wholly subsidized, trained, and advised by Russian regulars and PMSCs.130 Reports have variously estimated Wagner’s strength at somewhere between 2,500 to 5,000, but no full or accurate accounting has been made. With Wagner and other quasiparamilitaries, the GRU tried to sew a common thread between the motley array of militias, veterans’ groups, and criminal gangs who joined the fray with pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine.131 In Donbas, regulars, irregulars, and equipment began moving across the border sometime in May or June 2014.132 These contingents share clear ties with many of the Russian PMSC operatives who also showed up in Syria. Scores of Wagner Group fighters and an unknown number affiliated with the Moran Security Group and a few other wellknown Russian PMSC contingents were highly concentrated in Russian separatist battalions active in the contested areas of what is now known as the Donetsk People’s Republic and

Luhansk People’s Republic in the Donbas region of Ukraine. Interviews with Ukrainian veterans who claimed they were detained by Wagner operatives in Debaltseve and Ilovaisk in 2014 and 2015 reinforce reporting by local and international human rights organizations.133 Local human rights workers and Ukrainian officials also insist that Moran veterans fought in Donbas as well.134 Many of the fighters would come to play key roles in other critical events, including the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Donbas in July 2014.135 In Syria, repeated failed attempts to seize strategic territory—particularly in the oil-, gas-, and mineral-rich areas of Palmyra—led Russian commanders on the ground to pursue new avenues for training and equipping local forces independent of Iran. In late 2016, the Syrian army announced the formation of the 5th Assault Corps or ‘Storming Corps.’136 Composed of local volunteers, the 5th Assault Corps was almost exclusively trained and equipped by a mix of Russian PMSC contingents. Claims about Wagner’s direct involvement in the 5th Corps train and equip mission are difficult to verify, but a scan of the social media, blogs, and online bulletin boards of Russian so-called ‘soldiers of fortune,’ as well as the accounts of dozens of individuals who were killed in action and reportedly affiliated with Wagner, indicate that at least some Russian PMSCs were involved in the delivery and training local militias in the 5th Assault Corps area of operations in the use of heavy weapons, such as T72 tanks and SU-300 air defense batteries.137 Solving the Puzzle of Russian Proxy War Strategy The above details about Russian PMSC operations fill in many blanks in the puzzle of Russia’s proxy war strategy. But there still are a few pieces missing from the Wagner narrative. How do the historical origins, tactics, and broader strategic interests combine into a state proxy warfare strategy, and what are the strengths and weaknesses of that strategy? Viewing the activities of Russian PMSCs across the Greater Middle East and its periphery reveals much about their conduct. However, understanding the role of Russian PMSCs requires a framework of analysis. The best framework is one that understands Russian PMSCs as agents of a Russian proxy warfare strategy, pursuing ends that, as we have seen, share substantial continuities with prior Russian and Soviet strategies. However, this is not a framework of proxy warfare in which powerful states move their agents like chess pieces, or a framework in which Russian PMSCs are simply state actors in disguise. Instead, as is visible in the contours of other twenty-first-century proxy conflicts across the Greater Middle East, proxy warfare must increasingly be understood in terms of relationships embedded within complex networks of influence and power.138 These relationships and networks are essential to understanding both Russian PMSCs and the very Russian state that is using them as proxies. It is for these reasons that questions abound about the connections between Putin’s onetime official caterer Yevgeny Prigozhin and the involvement of companies he has been linked to with Wagner Group operations in Syria. At first glance, it is not entirely clear where Prigozhin fits into the Kremlin’s deployment of Russian PMSCs, nor how the Wagner Group connects to larger Russian aims. What do the labyrinthine legal and corporate twists and

turns add up to when it comes to the Wagner Group and Russian PMSCs? The very complexity of the system undergirding PMSC operations hints at their larger purpose in the scheme of proxy warfare. The majority state ownership of many of the Russian firms that do business with PMSC contingents—like the Moran Security Group, Slavonic Corps, the Wagner Group, and others —means the Russian state is the chief contracting party, and, therefore, is responsible for their conduct. In form, Moran, Slavonic Corps, Wagner, and others appear to hew closely to the normative and legally accepted definition of private military security contractors. The public face that many Russian PMSCs present is intimately tied to the maritime shipping industry and anti-piracy operations. This is not a coincidence; the Kremlin appears to have created a quasi-legal letters-of-marque regime that permits contracted PMSCs to secure safe passage for major state firms such as STG and Rosboronexport, thus giving PMSC operators wide latitude to apply the principle of collective self-defense. On paper, this would appear to allow Russian PMSCs license to interpret rules of engagement more loosely than if they were a strictly land-based force operating in a combat zone where the Russian military serves under a bilateral status-of-force agreement or military-technical agreement. Under international maritime law, letters of marque permit sovereign states to contract with private parties to protect sovereign property on the high seas from piracy. As noted by legal scholar Todd Emerson Hutchins, the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), gives ‘universal jurisdiction so that “every State may seize a pirate ship” on “the high seas, or in any other place outside the jurisdiction of any State,” but also includes complicit functions, like inciting and facilitating piratical activities, within the definition of piracy.’139 Russian PMSCs are cut considerable slack under the letters-of-marque regime Russia originally set up in the late 1990s to counter piracy threats. Cooperative international arrangements for collective defense of merchant vessels on the high seas also partially explain the close nexus with offshore business havens—such as Seychelles, Cyprus, Belize, and the British Virgin Islands—where regulatory frameworks for maritime trade are much looser. Contractual arrangements with Russian state enterprises and legal provisions for joint operations in situations of national emergency provide a path for Russian PMSCs to operate as privateers. Domestic legal prohibitions against mercenary activity, therefore, are a mere technicality that in practice are only enforced when individual players in this elaborate system fall afoul of the publicly unspoken Kremlin dictum of maintaining a code of silence around sensitive covert operations. The uniqueness of the special arrangement between state-run enterprises and Russian PMSCs suggests the informal networks that constitute power in Russia exert considerable sway over how PMSCs operate in the field. Moreover, the intersecting links between individuals affiliated with various contingents of Russian PMSCs and separatist militias, Russian military associations, veterans’ organizations, and self-proclaimed mercenary communities—both offline and online—reinforce the notion that the Kremlin covertly enables, endorses, and encourages their activities. It may very well be that many or even all Russian PMSCs operating in the Middle East and elsewhere meet the legal standard for a force for which Russia has overall control. Still, a not insubstantial amount of evidence

would need to be compiled from primary sources and witnesses to make the case that the Kremlin maintains effective control over these PMSCs in the classic top-down sense. That, however, is the point of the strategy. As it stands, Russia’s economy is already laboring under the burden of sanctions regimes due to its activities in Ukraine and Syria. With criminal and civil legal claims also pending against alleged Russian PMSC fighters involved in the downing of MH-17, the Kremlin can ill-afford more political or legal exposure.140 From the Kremlin’s perspective, the less that is known about the mechanics of Russian PMSC operations and their deep ties to Russia’s domestic economy, the better. Given how central deception has been to Russian military doctrine historically, it is important to consider how the idea of Wagner fits into the bigger picture of a strategy of coercion. On the one hand, the idea of the Wagner Group increases ambiguity around the nature of the relationship with the group’s sponsors. On the other, narratives about Wagner and Prigozhin may offer only one attractive but ultimately inaccurate alternative theory about how Russian PMSCs operate and fit into proxy strategies. The ambiguity created by the tension between these two theories of the Wagner case exemplifies Russia’s use of disinformation and deception to assert reflexive control over its adversaries by creating confusion around desired goals.141 Since a primary objective of proxy warfare is to enhance the ability to project power by expanding influence while lowering the risk of retaliation, it depends on the tactic of increasing ambiguity around the nature of the sponsor-proxy relationship. Heightened ambiguity can grant proxy sponsors significant, if sometimes short-lived, advantages, permitting ‘salami slicing’ tactics to go unchecked by rivals.142 By ‘hiding the real’ and ‘showing the false,’143 in the case of Wagner, the Kremlin gains three distinct but interrelated tactical advantages. First, as seen in the case of Ukraine and later Syria, misdirection around the patterns of deployment of thousands of Russian operatives meant the forces could take their oppenents by surprise, thus giving them an exponentially greater advantage. Second, the surprise mobilization of PMSCs in Crimea bought time for covert deployments to Ukraine and Syria, allowing Russia to gain territorial control rapidly and enhancing its military advantages. Third, at least initially, surprise and speed in both Ukraine and Syria stoked the narrative that Russia was prepared to change facts on the ground, giving it considerably more room to maneuver at the diplomatic level in the early stages of both conflicts. Despite the above advantages, Russia’s proxy warfare strategy is still one shaped and constrained by the complex networks shaping Russian interests and policy, but those networks too have their own advantages and disadvantages. In the twenty-first century, social media and the wider availability of open public information about everything from customs transactions to cross-border flights and shipments have repeatedly proven to be the Kremlin’s undoing. But, in the end it was the Wagner Group’s disastrous run-in with US forces in Syria that marked a pivotal shift in how the world and Washington especially viewed the potential dangers posed by Russia’s proxy war strategy. Consequently, the Kremlin has poured considerable resources into deploying disinformation about the activities of the Wagner Group and other PMSCs. Some of the

active measures taken involve misdirection while others more nefariously have involved silencing sources and murdering messengers who promote alternative versions of the storyline on PMSC operations.144 Information control is an intrinsic feature of escalation management, and sowing confusion is part and parcel of proxy strategies. The narratives that sponsors promote about their proxies are as important for power projection as they are for escalation management. The above observations lead to one final and critical implication for those looking to respond to Russia’s tactical innovations. The opaque structures of Russian PMSCs make it challenging to attribute actions to actors, but the tightly overlapped networks of Kremlin insiders and PMSCs are often hidden in plain sight. Globalization and Russia’s military modernization have transformed the way Russian PMSC operate, recruit, and manage operations. At the same time, the arrival of the digital age undercuts Russia’s ability to maintain plausible deniability. Growing global capacity to de-anonymize digital data exposes risks for the covert networks that bind PMSCs to their client constituents, a fact that should prompt a strategic rethink in US circles. Puncturing the narrative of plausible deniability and lifting the lid on the Kremlin’s secrecy and disinformation will be a critical part of any winning strategy.

9

THE ISLAMIC REVOLUTIONARY GUARD CORPS OF THE 2020S EVALUATING IRAN’S PROXY WARFARE STRATEGY

Alex Vatanka

On 2 January 2020, the United States assassinated General Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Qods Force, in Iraq, accusing him of playing a role in an alleged attack on American troops by Iran-backed Shia militias. The assassination was so unprecedented that many feared that any move afterward might lead to all-out war between the United States and Iran. Iran retaliated on 8 January 2020 with direct missile strikes on American forces in Iraq, although the strikes did not kill anyone.1 By one account, the Iranians had given the US military an 8-hour notice to clear the bases before the missiles hit. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of the Revolutionary Guards’ Aerospace Force, claimed that the warning had been given to the Americans because Tehran ‘did not intend to kill [people].’2 Tehran wanted both to show they had the capacity to strike at the United States but also to demonstrate that it had no intentions to see the military standoff escalate further. Despite the missile strike, Iran doubled down on the proxy war strategy that was Soleimani’s most significant contribution to Tehran’s efforts to deter America from expanding its influence in the Middle East. Over the course of the last decade, this approach to regional military operations came to be described by its proponents in Tehran as ‘forward defense.’ Put simply, forward defense holds that militarily confronting enemies outside of Iran’s borders is preferable to having to face them within Iran’s borders. Forward defense is the embodiment of Iran’s military lessons gained over the four decades since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. While Soleimani was one of the principal creators of forward defense, his death has not ended Iran’s use of this strategy. Iran’s supreme leader and commander in chief Ayatollah Ali Khamenei swiftly appointed Esmail Ghaani as head of the Qods Force, the branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) that operates outside of Iran’s borders. Khamenei was categorical that the Qods Force would continue its mission as intended by

Soleimani. As he put it, ‘The strategy of the Qods Force will be identical to that during the time of Martyr General Soleimani.’3 In a speech on 22 May 2020 set to coincide with Al Qods Day, which is an event created to express opposition to the State of Israel, Khamenei signaled his determination that the Qods Force would stay the course. In urging the expansion of ‘jihad inside Palestinian territories [Israel],’ he not only praised groups such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Hamas, but he vowed that Iran would stand by them on the path of ‘holy struggle.’4 In a rare move, state-run media set aside the usual stance of deniability and publicized the fact that Soleimani had spearheaded the transfer of Iranian weaponry to Palestinian militants.5 Such statements are a blatant rejection of American and Israeli demands that Tehran roll back its support for militant Islamist groups. In pursuing this strategy in the post-Arab Spring era, Iran has increasingly come to embrace aggressive means that involve transnational mobilization and the interlinking of proxy forces. This in turn has encouraged the United States and other Iranian rivals to perceive Iran’s strategy as an offensive and revisionist one. Soleimani’s assassination, increased tensions vis-à-vis the United States, and the fluidity of geopolitics of the Middle East have all brought into the open questions in Iran about the longterm costs, benefits, and risks of a forward defense strategy that relies on Tehran’s ability to continue to defy the growing pressures on its economy from US sanctions and the funding of proxy groups. In the same week that hardliners around Khamenei were touting Tehran’s commitment to militant revolutionary foreign policy, a prominent parliamentarian launched a rare public criticism of Tehran’s regional agenda. Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh,6 who had previously been head of the Iranian parliament’s committee on national security and foreign policy, asked for Iran to reassess its commitment to the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria. ‘[Iran] has probably given 20 to 30 billion dollars to Syria and must recover it. The money belonging to this nation [Iran] has been spent there,’ he said.7 The reference to funds invested in backing Assad was a clear attack on Tehran’s foreign policy priorities, or at least that was how Khamenei loyalists viewed it. Hossein Shariatmadari, the Khamenei-appointed editor of the Tehran newspaper Kayhan, denounced Falahatpisheh as doing Trump’s bidding by turning Iranian public opinion against Tehran’s foreign policy.8 The incident was a peek into Tehran’s opaque policy-making process and evidence of competing viewpoints with regard to the cost of Iran’s regional efforts and whether it is sustainable. The question raised by the Trump administration’s approach to Iran is whether Tehran’s proxy war strategy is truly built to last. The Trump administration turned the calculus of indirect confrontation with Iran on its head and began to engage in conflict more directly, evidently deciding that the United States either no longer needed the benefits or could no longer afford the risks that come with fighting Iran’s proxies in the shadows. The high-profile assassination of Soleimani was the most overt expression of that new policy. At the same time, Iran has increasingly adopted public, aggressive means in pursuit of its forward defense strategy. Iran’s ongoing ability and determination to mobilize, guide, and launch a host of militant

groups—painstakingly cultivated by Tehran for decades—across the Middle East is clear. Soleimani and other architects of Iran’s forward defense proxy war strategy would argue that the turn in American policy under Trump had been a long time coming, and that Iran and its allies were and are ready for the challenge. Yet, Tehran’s ability to mobilize an array of foreign militias under its flag is no small feat, and the contention that Iran can stay the course regardless of American counteractions is an untested theory, as is the hope of some US policymakers that US pressure can effectively rollback Iran’s footprint across the region. Evaluating where, when, and why Iran’s forward defense strategy has worked and where it is built on a sustainable foundation, and understanding where it has failed and lacks a sustainable foundation, will be central to determining the effectiveness of both US and Iranian crisis management. In the meantime, the uncertainty will likely bring with it periodic crises, like that surrounding the assassination of Soleimani, which appear to hold the potential for further escalation to more direct confrontations. Soleimani Ascendant: The Origins of Iran’s ‘Forward Defense’ Strategy The geopolitical feud between Iran and the United States dates back to 1979, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his militant Islamist supporters overthrew the Shah of Iran and soon after took control of the US embassy. Though the ouster of Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 planted the initial seeds of mistrust between the United States and the Iranian people, it was Khomeini’s rise to power that earned the United States its status of most hated nation status in Iran among anti-Shah forces. Following the hostage crisis at the US embassy in Tehran in November 1979, Washington responded in kind, casting the Khomeinists as the source of nearly all wrongdoing in the Middle East.9 For nearly half a century, the US-Iran conflict was largely characterized by mutual restraint. Neither Washington nor Tehran judged an open military conflict to be in their interests. Instead, a kind of crisis stability anchored in a proxy war paradigm of covert action shaped the normative bounds of American and Iranian strategy. Hit-and-run attacks on American targets by Hezbollah in Lebanon in the 1980s—and later by proxy elements allied with the Popular Mobilization Forces or the PMF in Iraq—punctuated by American-backed counterattacks in the form of cyber-strikes and targeted assassinations of nuclear scientists on the streets of Tehran have long been part of the backdrop. Each element of this tit-for-tat proxy war between Washington and Tehran rested on one simple element: plausible deniability.10 Iran’s proxy warfare strategy of using regional non-state militant groups paralleled Qassem Soleimani’s rise as a military commander during the 1990s, on the heels of the Iran-Iraq War. Born in 1957, Soleimani came from a poor family in the central province of Kerman. As a teenager he became an anti-Shah Islamist activist before the revolution of 1979, but he did not stand out at that time.11 The revolution began and prevailed in Tehran, but droves of young men—mostly from impoverished rural backgrounds—jumped on the bandwagon. Soleimani was one of them. While he had no formal military training, his chance to rise came

at the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–8). He enlisted as a volunteer with the Guards and quickly moved up through the ranks of the IRGC, the group of ragtag, armed young men empowered and mandated by Ayatollah Khomeini to defend the Islamic Republic against all domestic and foreign enemies. In late 1980, a few months after the war with Iraq had begun, the 23-year-old Soleimani was given the command of a volunteer force from his home province of Kerman in what became the 41st Sarallah Division.12 This newly formed division was deployed to Iran’s Kurdistan province, an area known for heavy ethnic Kurdish separatist militancy but also as a staging ground into Iraq. On the other side of the border was Iraqi Kurdistan, where from the days of the Shah Tehran had cultivated anti-Saddam Iraqi Kurds as allies against Baghdad.13 It is here that Soleimani experienced firsthand the utility of co-opting and deploying foreign militants as part of military strategizing.14 Ideological or religious reasons were, at best, secondary drivers at this point. Nonetheless, it is during the first years of the Iran-Iraq War, which began in September 1980, that the Qods Force—the expeditionary branch of the IRGC, although its mission would evolve over time —was born.15 Its actions were centered on cross-border operations along the Iran-Iraq battle lines, and on recruiting Iraqis.16 Mostafa Chamran, an Iranian Islamist revolutionary who had seen military training with Shia militants in Lebanon in the 1970s, was a key driver behind the adoption of asymmetric warfare tactics, and he became the Islamic Republic’s first defense minister.17 While Soleimani was not a key player in the formation of this new outfit, he would be a key participant in the application of the new approach, which mirrored the missions of special operations forces of countries like the United States, using tactics which included covert action and reconnaissance behind enemy lines.18 In time, what would make the Qods Force stand out was its use of Shia Islamist rallying cries and its recruitment among Shias outside of Iran. The Qods Force’s mission was not centered on exploiting religious or sectarian fervor at first. The Iraqi Kurds that Iranian commanders like Soleimani collaborated with were not Shia but secular Sunnis. Iranian support for them was an early signal of the Islamic Republic’s willingness to collaborate with an assortment of non-Shia or non-Islamist actors, as long as the partnership advanced Iran’s perceived geopolitical interests. In a decade’s time, Iran would be militarily supporting a range of Sunni groups deemed important to its national interests, including the Sunni Afghan Northern Alliance in Afghanistan to the Sunni Bosnians19 in the Yugoslav civil war to the Sunni Hamas in Gaza.20 As Zalmay Khalilzad put it in regard to Iran’s modus operandi in Afghanistan during the 1990s, being Shia ‘was not sufficient to gain Iranian support.’21 This was also evident in Iran’s support for Christian Armenia against Shia Muslim Azerbaijan in the war between the two countries in the early 1990s over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.22 Tehran always performed a careful cost-benefit analysis, and, as David Menashri argues, it ‘diligently sought out opportunities in areas, or in movements, that seemed ripe to respond’ to its ideological overtures.23 The Shia Islamist Iraqis, many of whom moved to Iran to fight Saddam Hussain’s regime under Ayatollah Khomeini’s spiritual and political leadership

during the Iran-Iraq War, were one such group. It was during the early 1980s that some of the most prominent present-day Iraqi militia leaders—men such as Hadi Ameri and Abu Mahdi Al Muhandis, who was killed alongside Soleimani in January—launched their collaboration with their sponsors in the IRGC.24 The Badr Corps, composed of Shia Iraqi Islamists who looked to Iran, began as a brigade and remained under tight IRGC control. This oversight angered Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim, the Iraqi Shia cleric who headed the political wing of the Badr movement.25 He complained to the then President Ali Khamenei and Speaker of the Majlis, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Still, the senior IRGC commanders backed by the political leadership in Tehran were determined to maintain strict Iranian control of the foreign forces they were arming and funding. The dispute over command and control was somehow resolved, and the relationship continued.26 Since the dispute, however, Iran has continued to have lingering doubts about its ability to effectively organize and control its foreign proxies as it sees fit. Soleimani held the post of commander of the 41st Sarallah Division throughout the IranIraq War. He was one of the youngest military commanders but never a specially celebrated one during the war, and his fame would only come years later, in the 2000s, as he began to cultivate a public image.27 The one factor that appears to have counted in his favor is that he developed a personal bond with the then President Ali Khamenei, who frequently visited the war front. The future supreme leader, who took over after Khomeini’s death in June 1989, never forgot that Soleimani had kept him in the highest esteem when many other IRGC commanders had viewed Khamenei with suspicion throughout his presidency (1981–9).28 Many analysts consider this close personal bond between Khamenei and Soleimani to have been pivotal to the rise and relative independence of the Qods Force during Soleimani’s command from 1998 until his death in 2020. Without Soleimani at the helm, questions were thus raised about whether the organization would maintain its stature within the power structures of the Islamic Republic. After the Iran-Iraq War, Soleimani was given the mission of dealing with rampant organized crime, including arms and drug trafficking coming out of Afghanistan, a country ravaged by civil war where a new extremist movement under the banner of the Taliban was on the rise. Tehran viewed the movement not only as anti-Iran and anti-Shia but as a creation of its regional rivals, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.29 In early 1998, as Iran was still recovering from the devastation wrought by the eight-year war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Soleimani was named head of the Qods Force.30 At the time, Soleimani was barely known to the Iranian public, but he was a high-profile figure among warring factions in neighboring Afghanistan, where he had served as Iran’s key military liaison to anti-Taliban forces in the Northern Alliance.31 Little analysis has been conducted in the English language about Soleimani’s efforts to aid and guide Northern Alliance forces, which were then under the leadership of Ahmad Shah Massoud, a Sunni and ethnic Tajik leader who was among the top opponents of the Taliban.32 What is known is that Soleimani had been in his new role for less than a year when Taliban forces captured the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i Sharif in August 1998 and promptly arrested nine diplomats

at the Iranian consulate. The Taliban forces, who by one account were acting on instructions from Pakistan’s ISI (Inter-Service Intelligence), killed all the Iranians except one who managed to escape.33 Tehran made a show out of its response, mobilizing tens of thousands of troops on the border ready to go into Afghanistan. Still, after lengthy deliberation, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) opted against a conventional military retaliation against the Taliban, in part because they feared being drawn into a quagmire.34 Instead, under the auspices of the Qods Force, Tehran increased financial and military support for its antiTaliban partners like Ahmad Shah Massoud.35 Tehran not only welcomed but actively sought to assist the US military campaign against the Taliban in 2001 following the terrorist attacks of 11 September.36 Soleimani’s close links with the Northern Alliance would prove critical and enduring for bolstering his assertions about the value of proxy relations in maintaining a strategy of forward defense, as well as a deterrent against potential aggression or overreach by adversaries. This kind of patronage also gave Iran leverage not just in the military theater but also on the political and diplomatic stages. Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has claimed that the December 2001 Bonn conference that led to Afghanistan’s first post-Taliban government could not have succeeded without Soleimani’s mediation and ability to pressure the various Afghan political groups that he had cultivated ties with throughout the 1990s.37 During the Afghan civil war of the 1990s, the Qods Force and its top commanders, including Soleimani but also Esmail Ghaani, proved to the political leadership in Tehran that the supplying of arms and funds to Afghan militants had not only given Iran a say in the battlefield but also had given Tehran a role as a principal powerbroker in that country. This gave Soleimani a great deal of personal confidence, which he soon put on public display. By 2008, Soleimani famously sent a message to the top US military official in Iraq: ‘General Petraeus, you should know that I, Qassem Soleimani, control the policy for Iran with respect to Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, and Afghanistan.’38 The War on Terror and the Arab Spring Years The US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and then Iraq in 2003 prompted a period of reorganization and consolidation of Iran’s military expeditionary forces under the Qods Force. Not only did Soleimani have direct access to Khamenei, but the leadership in Tehran had never had more reason to invest in forward defense. In early 2002, the Bush administration named Iran, along with Iraq and North Korea, as part of an ‘Axis of Evil.’ It was not unreasonable for the Iranians to think they might be next in a broader US military campaign. Keeping the Americans bogged down elsewhere in the region presented an attractive strategy for Tehran. Despite the risk of angering Washington, the strategy was worthwhile if it meant preventing or stalling a possible US attack on the Iranian homeland. The newly reenergized Qods Force reflected hard lessons learned from several different phases of strategic realignment. From supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon beginning in the 1980s to backing the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan in the 1990s, as well as various

groups in Iraq and Yemen in the 2000s, Soleimani’s way of war led to mixed results. Still, each case allowed Qods Force commanders to adapt and refine their proxy war strategy, as well as modulate their response to increasing American pressure in the form of covert counterattacks and sanctions. Meanwhile, Soleimani elevated the degree of freedom of operation provided to Qods Force commanders. As part of the Qods Force organizational structure, each region of operation was given to an individual commander. This ‘One Country, One File, One Commander’ approach was Soleimani’s brainchild and gave individual Qods Force commanders extraordinary freedom to design and implement policy; but it also made them responsible for the outcome, according to Morad Veisi, a journalist with Radio Farda—the Iranian branch of the United States’ Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty—and an expert on the IRGC.39 In the most delicate theaters, where the Qods Force required maximum policy control, its officers have often been the ones Tehran has dispatched as its top diplomatic envoys. In the case of Iraq, all three of Iran’s ambassadors to Baghdad since 2003 have come from the Qods Force.40 While Iran’s consolidation of a forward defense strategy was driven by overarching regional dynamics, including a growing perception of a US threat and the rise of new opportunities and challenges with the Arab Spring, its character varied across different national contexts. This was so despite growing public references to transnational mobilization and connections between groups. Hezbollah in Lebanon is the best example of Iran’s forward defense concept.41 This should not be surprising. Iran’s own IRGC began as a militia in the aftermath of the Iranian revolution in 1979, and, forty-one years later, it is the most formidable political-militaryeconomic actor in the country. This IRGC has diligently worked to replicate its success domestically and turn its foreign proxies into powerbrokers in their respective home countries. In the case of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the IRGC and its Qods Force foreign branch did not only ideologically indoctrinate and arm the group, but it selected and groomed the group’s leaders, including Hassan Nasrallah, its present leader, and Imad Mughniyeh, the group’s top military planner who was assassinated in a joint American-Israeli operation in 2008.42 Unlike many of the other groups that Tehran has backed since 1979, Hezbollah not only shares the Shia Islamist ideological model adopted in Tehran but provides Iran with a platform from which to militarily exert pressure on its top regional nemesis, Israel. From Tehran’s perspective, Hezbollah represents the best the forward defense model can offer: an effective tool of national interest combined with a close and enduring relationship strengthened by both material and ideological ties. Iran’s military interventions in Syria since the outbreak of the Arab Spring in 2011 demonstrate that ideological conformity is not a prerequisite for Tehran’s support. Hezbollah may be a particularly successful case of forward defense, but it is far from the only model for the strategy, which often relies on proxies whose ideological ties to Iran are far weaker than those of Hezbollah. The Syrian case also illustrates the limits and risks of Iran’s pursuit of proxy warfare reliant upon relationships that are less enduring and ideologically in tune. The Islamic Republic has nothing in common in terms of creed with the secular Baʿathist

regime of Bashar al-Assad.43 Despite this, Iran intervened militarily on behalf of Assad in close partnership with Hezbollah. Iran’s Syrian intervention demonstrated its versatility. It also showed Iran’s ability to compartmentalize its regional ambitions and work with foreign partners while awkwardly attempting to publicly cast the mission in Islamist clothing. Iran’s key objective was to save a geopolitical ally with a secular system while minimizing costs to Iran itself.44 Notably, Iran’s primary foreign cohort in the mission in Syria has been Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation, hardly a vanguard of Islamism.45 The biggest departure in Syria, when compared to the situation in Iraq, was the need for Iran to bring in non-locals—such as Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis—to fight under Iranian leadership to keep the Assad regime from collapse.46 Unlike in Shia-majority Iraq, where the indoctrination of a generation of pro-Islamic Republic sympathizers had been under way before Saddam’s fall, Syria’s sectarian realities meant that the manpower shortage was a problem for Tehran. This also differentiated Syria from Lebanon, where Iran could rely upon a close ideological ally in Hezbollah. The Qods Force proved agile in circumventing this impediment. In doing so, it sharpened the essence of what forward defense means in practical terms in the post-Arab Spring Middle East by drawing upon transnational networks to resolve the challenges of proxy warfare in a particular context. The manifestation of forward defense in Iraq and in Syria, since 2003 and 2012 respectively, highlights two basic facts. First, Iran has demonstrated agility in defining and implementing security policy in the region. Second, Iran’s activities in Iraq and Syria reveal a consensus among Iranian policymakers that the Iranian public’s appetite for forward defense is finite. Tehran did not engage in large-scale recruitment of Iranians to be dispatched to Syria. The few thousand Iranians sent to Syria, ostensibly as military advisors, were overwhelmingly drawn from volunteers in the ranks of the IRGC and not from the conscripted Iranian army.47 Iran thus depended upon its ability to appeal to and recruit among non-Iranian Shia in the region in order to mobilize the transnational networks.48 While national interest was the primary motivator for Iran’s defense of Syria, the limits imposed by Iranian society required Tehran to put an emphasis upon sectarian and religious appeals in order to accomplish those goals. The mobilization of non-Iranian forces was a double-edged sword. It helped resolve Iran’s manpower problems. But in strengthening appeals to transnational ideological claims, Iran provided its regional rivals with a convincing argument that Tehran was indoctrinating, funding, and arming a new generation of Shia militants and hence fueling a regional ShiaSunni sectarian divide. Iran, a non-Arab and Shia majority country with aspirations of leading the Islamic world, has always been highly sensitive to the charge of acting as a Shia sectarian power, and it has invested heavily in countering this accusation. However, the priority of keeping Assad in power superseded Tehran’s wish to maintain its credibility in the eyes of the Sunni street.49 As a result, Iran’s approach contributed to mobilizing opposition to Iranian policy while stoking fears that Iran was seeking more revisionist aims. The IRGC bosses were undeterred and unapologetic. In August 2012, as Tehran’s military

intervention in Syria became increasingly public, then IRGC Deputy Commander Brigadier General Hossein Salami said, ‘our doctrines are defensive at the level of (grand) strategy, but our strategies and tactics are offensive.’50 IRGC commanders proudly defended the ability to practice ‘deep-attack doctrine.’51 In April 2019, Khamenei appointed Salami to become the head of the IRGC—and Soleimani’s nominal boss—even as Soleimani retained his direct and much publicized access to the supreme leader.52 Meanwhile, Khamenei’s support for forward defense became increasingly overt. ‘We mustn’t be satisfied with our region. By remaining within our borders, we shouldn’t neglect the threats over our borders. A broad overseas vision, which is the IRGC’s responsibility, is our strategic depth and it is of the utmost importance,’ he told the IRGC bosses.53 Iran’s role in the Yemeni civil war starting in 2014 demonstrates both the limitations of forward defense war and how Tehran has been selective and careful in applying the strategy. It is commonplace to read that Tehran is the sponsor of the Yemeni Houthi rebels fighting the UN-recognized Yemeni government. In reality, when the last round of conflict began in Yemen in 2014, few Iranians were familiar with the term ‘Houthis’ or ‘Ansar-Allah,’ the official name of the group. The lack of historic ties between Tehran and the Houthi movement and an exaggerated sense of the importance of sectarian bonds between the two only underscore that their relationship has mostly been a marriage of convenience.54 Neither Soleimani nor any other senior IRGC commander ever made a public appearance in Yemen. This stands in contrast to their prominent public visits to Lebanon, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.55 Tehran has not made extensive efforts to spread its religious ideology among the Houthis, who are mostly followers of the Zaidi sect of Islam.56 The export of Khomeinism to the Houthis of Yemen has happened, but only in small doses as compared to Iraq or Lebanon. Yemen is, from Tehran’s perspective, too far-flung, too fractured, and too unripe to be a good host for Iran’s forward defense doctrine.57 Iran has compared the Houthis to Hezbollah in Lebanon.58 If the latter could be a spear aimed at Israel, the Houthis could be Tehran’s pawn against the Saudis. Ali Shirazi, Supreme Leader Khamenei’s representative to the Qods Force, expressed such a view to the Iranian press in January 2015 and on other occasions.59 But Yemen was never a core priority for Tehran, and the Houthis were never as submissive to Tehran as Hezbollah or the pro-Iran Shia Iraqi groups. Instead, the dynamic in the Iran-Houthi partnership has depended overwhelmingly on the policy decisions of third-party actors, most notably Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States.60 For example, since late 2019, when the Houthis began the latest round of peace talks with the Saudis and the Americans in Oman, the Iranians were effectively sidelined. The Houthi-Saudi peace talks began shortly after Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei received a senior Houthi delegation in August.61 Either Tehran was urging the Houthis to sue for peace or it had little influence over their strategic decisions (or both). Even in Washington a new message began to be disseminated that downplayed the closeness of Tehran and the Houthis.62 Nevertheless, the Houthis continue to provide Iran with a possible staging ground from Yemen should Tehran opt to pursue a more militant posture against Riyadh, which could

potentially include using Houthi-controlled Yemeni territory as a launchpad for Iraniansupplied missile strikes. The case of Iran’s relations with the Houthis shows that, when examining the extent and appeal of the Iranian proxy model of forward defense, it is critical to look for the depth in relations as an indicator of Tehran’s ability to consolidate its regional alliance against the United States and its allies under the banner of the ‘Axis of Resistance.’ Is ‘Forward Defense’ a Sustainable Military Doctrine? Iran’s forward defense doctrine draws on a long history, including a critical period of consolidation over the 2000s and 2010s. However, it is far from clear if the doctrine will prove sustainable throughout the 2020s, especially if the United States continues to issue direct challenges to Iranian proxy actions as part of its ongoing strategy. To be sustainable over the long term, Iranian proxy strategy will also have to manage the potential for escalation, as well as the costs of the regional conflicts and tensions it has contributed to. For Iran’s regional rivals, the Islamic Republic’s forward defense is considered a case of an ideological commitment rather than an Iranian national security imperative. States such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and, to a lesser extent, Turkey, are determined to stop Iran in its tracks even as they each are pursuing their own versions of geopolitical forward defense from Yemen to Syria to Libya. As part of this cycle, these states have invested many billions of dollars in the ongoing competition for influence in the region.63 The resultant proxy warfare arms races pose a challenge to Iran’s strategy, which has sought to minimize costs to the Iranian people. So far, Iran’s forward defense appears largely to have been implemented on a tight budget. Iran is not the biggest military spender in the Middle East today.64 But Tehran also has far less cash on hand due to American sanctions, which, in 2019, Iran’s then president Hassan Rouhani claimed to have cost Iran US$200 billion.65 The issue of Iran’s ability to fund its proxy allies, and its reliance in cases like Syria on stopgap measures that can encourage escalation on the part of its rivals, poses a threat to the sustainability of the forward defense model. However, it is not an imminent risk to Iran’s ability to pursue the strategy. As Tehran has demonstrated over the years, it is able to prioritize. Not every Arab proxy group holds the same value to Iran. Aside from an ability to prioritize if needed and redefine forward defense depending on circumstances, the Iranian regime as a whole—including the IRGC and its foreign branch the Qods Force—has demonstrated that they are rational actors that engage in a systematic cost-benefit analysis when contemplating military action. However, acting rationally does not equate flawless execution. The Iranian military strategy bears the hallmark of trial and error and has proven itself to be prone to mishaps. The Islamic Republic likes to portray itself as a martyrdom-seeking state, which rises above earthly calculations and material gains and whose supporters do not fear death. But, in reality, Iran’s military strategy remains cautious, its leadership engaging in cost-benefit analysis as anyone would before taking action on a given issue. Moreover, while the Islamist message has helped Tehran mobilize support in certain

pockets in the Arab world—and has provided a vehicle for expanding its regional influence, Iraq being the best example—excessive attachment to a sectarian agenda can create its own problems for Tehran. The Islamist ruling elite in Tehran is aware of the perils of Iran becoming an entrenched Shia power in an Islamic world where Shia are a minority and Iran’s Islamist credentials are dwindling. Tehran does not want to feed the narrative that Iran is a Shia sectarian power bent on expanding its influence in Sunni-majority Arab countries. Meanwhile, as the Islamic Republic faces a deep crisis of legitimacy at home, it is difficult to see how Tehran can stay the course without risking political blowback from an Iranian public that yearns for nation-building at home and an end to costly foreign projects. This anger is nothing new, but Soleimani’s assassination—and Washington’s determination to push back against Iran’s regional efforts—might give enough reason for the political and military elite in Tehran to rethink both the concept and sustainability of the forward defense doctrine. Despite these challenges, the IRGC appears to view its proxy network, built over four decades, as a sustainable counterweight to the United States that can withstand the pressure. Uncertainty regarding the sustainability of Iran’s proxy strategy is likely to prompt a series of crises in which the US-Iran conflict moves toward direct confrontation as the two sides play a game of chicken. Amid the repeated crises, it is important to watch the extent to which Iran plays up ideological rhetoric to sustain both transnational and domestic mobilization. Whether or not the mobilization methods are successful in prolonging the sustainability of Iran’s strategy, they will shape the IRGC of the 2020s, just as previous actions shaped today’s IRGC. Those changes bear close monitoring by policymakers and anyone interested in the future of the Greater Middle East.

10

THE MONARCHS’ PAWNS? GULF STATE PROXY WARFARE 2011–TODAY

Alexandra Stark

As the protest movements of the Arab Spring challenged governments across the Middle East and North Africa, the Gulf monarchies of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Qatar emerged as key sponsors of proxy warfare across the region. These states’ efforts to shape the politics of other countries reveal profound shifts in the character of proxy warfare in the Middle East since 2011. The Gulf monarchies’ interventions reshaped conflicts from Libya to Yemen and the Horn of Africa to Syria, competing not only against their regional rival Iran but also amongst themselves for political influence and economic access. Their interventions illustrate the complex and dynamic nature of the multipolar proxy war environment, where conflicts between the United States and Russia, and the United States and Iran, are layered over multiple axes of regional and sub-state competition. However, since 2011, all three Gulf monarchies have shifted their approach to proxy warfare. Their initial aims of reshaping the regional balance of power in their own favor—by supporting revisionist proxy actors in arenas like Libya and Syria while working to shore up allies like Bahrain—ran into the challenges that sponsors of proxies often face. As a result, as well as owing to their perceptions of the United States’ policy orientation in the region, the Gulf monarchies adopted more conservative goals in their use of proxy warfare, aiming to protect their interests and manage threats to the status quo across the region rather than reshape it. In addition to this shift, diplomatic divisions among the three monarchies intensified due to differences in their proxy war strategies and their perceptions of the Arab Spring. These divisions hold the potential to spark further conflict in areas where the interests of proxy sponsors collide. The shift to status quo maintenance-driven strategies did not end Gulf state sponsorship of proxy forces. Instead, it led to ongoing warfare in the name of crisis management, and in many cases the virtual absence of any efforts to end wars through

negotiations, political settlements, or provision of reconstruction aid and other forms of assistance. From 2011 through about 2014, the Arab Gulf monarchies saw the instability wrought by the Arab Spring as an opportunity to revise the existing regional balance of power in their favor by replacing opponents with friendly regimes, as in Libya and Syria (with the notable exception of Bahrain, where a regional coalition intervened to bolster the regime). By about 2014, the Gulf monarchies no longer believed they could win a decisive victory in the region’s conflicts. At the same time, the proximate costs of regional instability resulting from these unresolved conflicts became too costly. These three regimes’ proxy strategies therefore largely shifted to a crisis containment mode. While they continued to engage in proxy conflicts, notably launching an intervention in Yemen’s civil war in March 2015, the Gulf monarchies’ proxy strategies were increasingly oriented toward upholding the status quo rather than overturning existing regimes. In the absence of US pressure on regional actors to resolve regional disputes and investment in demobilization and the creation of alternative livelihood opportunities, proxy wars will continue where the leadership of the Arab Gulf monarchies perceive a conflict party as being a threat to their regional interests, or when crises spark new conflicts. Despite the shift toward status quo maintenance, splits among the three monarchies over their threat perceptions and willingness to support different kinds of proxy forces persist and could fuel further conflict. Qatar, in particular, has supported Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated and other Islamist proxies. Conversely, Saudi Arabia and the UAE see these groups as dangerous to their own regional interests, and have supported Salafists, more ‘moderate’ groups, autocratic regimes, and others who oppose Muslim Brotherhood affiliates. This split continues to shape conflicts in which the three monarchies are involved. The most important step that US policymakers can take to increase stability in the Middle East—a core US strategic goal—is to end civil wars and other forms of sub-state conflict, and therefore close off opportunities for regional intervention. Sustained diplomatic attention and investment in development will be necessary, if not wholly sufficient, to end these deeply complex and intractable conflicts. Gulf Monarchies, the Arab Spring and the Lure of Proxy War To varying degrees, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar were relatively insulated from the Arab Spring’s destabilizing effects. Due to their monopoly on domestic security services and vast hydrocarbon wealth, they were able to use combinations of violent repression, welfare spending, and sectarian appeals to stave off more widespread protest movements.1 The Gulf monarchies’ relative stability amid the Arab Spring in turn enabled them to develop proxy relationships with armed groups in states that were experiencing the greatest upheaval. All three of these Gulf monarchies saw the early years of the Arab Spring as an opportunity to assert their regional ambitions, an approach this chapter terms ‘revisionist.’ For Saudi Arabia, this meant reasserting what it saw as its rightful role at the head of the Gulf

Cooperation Council (GCC), the association of Arab Gulf countries created under Saudi leadership in Riyadh in 1981, and replacing a potentially threatening regime in Syria.2 However, of the three, Saudi Arabia took the most cautious approach due to concerns that revolution could spread within the Arabian Peninsula, potentially challenging the absolute monarchy of the Al Saud royal family.3 For the UAE and Qatar, both founded in 1971, the Arab Spring provided an opportunity to assert their own ambitions to regional leadership. Prior to the Arab Spring, both states had pursued hedging strategies, offsetting the risks of associating solely with one powerful state (first Britain and later the United States) by balancing among multiple regional powers.4 Both invested heavily in military cooperation with the United States from the 1990s, purchasing US-manufactured weapons systems, hosting US military bases, and sometimes even engaging in coalition interventions alongside the United States and NATO. The UAE earned the nickname ‘little Sparta’ from US generals who admired the capabilities of UAE pilots in Afghanistan.5 While the UAE tended to hew more closely to Saudi Arabia’s policies and Qatar tended to strike out further on its own, the Arab Spring offered both small states the opportunity to assert regional leadership. One of the first opportunities for the Gulf states to alter the regional balance of power came in the early months of 2011, when the Obama administration made clear its willingness to intervene in Libya. Muammar Gaddafi had previously clashed with the leadership of the Gulf monarchies, in particular Saudi Arabia, over their relationship with the United States, among other issues. Gaddafi’s intelligence chiefs reportedly ordered a covert plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud in 2003,6 and at an Arab League summit in 2099 Gaddafi announced to King Abdullah in front of the rest of the Arab leaders, ‘I have been waiting for six years to tell you that you are the liar. You were made by Britain and protected by the United States.’7 The 2011 Libyan uprising and the signal that the United States would back intervention offered the Gulf states the opportunity to replace a longtime erratic opponent. Meanwhile, through summer and autumn 2011, and into 2012, the Assad regime’s violent repression led Syria’s peaceful protest movement to disintegrate into civil war. The Syrian civil war represented another opportunity for Saudi Arabia and the UAE—and to a lesser extent Qatar—to replace the Assad regime, an important strategic partner of their regional rival Iran. Overthrowing the Assad regime also held out the further promise of eliminating the ‘land bridge’ that served as a supply route from Iran to its proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon. The notable exception to the Gulf states’ revisionist approach was in Bahrain, where the GCC, led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, deployed troops to stabilize the regime and suppress Bahrain’s nascent protest movement. The intervention demonstrated Saudi Arabia and the other monarchies’ fears that revolution elsewhere in the Middle East could come home to roost in the GCC. The Saudi leadership in particular hoped not just to suppress opposition in Bahrain but also to send a message to their own restive Shia population in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province.8 However, while it is difficult to pinpoint a precise turning point, by about 2014 the combined influence of four factors led these three Gulf monarchies to change their

calculations and adopt proxy warfare strategies aimed more consistently at maintaining the political status quo of the region, and managing crises that threatened their own spheres of interest, rather than revising the regional balance of power. First, by 2014 it had become increasingly clear that proxy warfare strategies were riskier than the Gulf monarchies had believed. Rather than achieving quick victories in Libya and Syria, the monarchies found themselves in complex quagmires with dwindling hope for an outright military victory. Second, the Obama administration signaled that it would not support further military revisionism in the wake of the Libya intervention. The administration’s decision to not use direct force against the Assad regime in Syria in August 2013 made this stance clear. Formal negotiations leading to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Iran nuclear deal, began in November 2013, with formal signing of the agreement taking place in July 2015. The negotiations and eventual agreement further stoked Gulf state fears that the United States was retreating from the region altogether. Third, the divergent goals of the Gulf monarchies in many of the same arenas increasingly came into conflict. This strategic divergence was at the root of the diplomatic dispute between Qatar and the other GCC states, led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, that first burst into the open in March 2014, flaring up again in 2017. As a result, the Arab Gulf monarchies increasingly saw themselves in competition not only with their traditional regional opponent Iran but also with one another, creating a far more complex web of competitive relationships that increased their perceptions of risk. Finally, Iran and ISIS both benefited from the post-Arab Spring instability, increasing the threat they posed to the Gulf monarchies. Iran doubled down on its support for the Assad regime in Syria and deployed its own proxy Shia militias there to support the regime’s forces, while in the spring and summer of 2014, ISIS was able to win a significant swath of territory extending from Mosul to Raqqa. Both Iran’s increased presence in the Levant—where Syria formed an essential part of Iran’s ‘land bridge’ linking it to Hezbollah9—and ISIS’ territorial victories posed a significant threat from the perspective of the Arab Gulf monarchies. As a result of these four factors, the Gulf monarchies’ proxy strategies became increasingly oriented toward preserving the status quo. Rather than seeing ongoing conflicts in the region as a strategic opportunity, the monarchies began to view some of the actors involved in these conflicts as potential threats. Their proxy strategies, in turn, came to focus on crisis management, or maintaining rather than revising the regional balance of power. This led the Gulf monarchies to participate in the US-led anti-ISIS coalition intervention in order to intervene against an insurgent group they saw as an Iranian proxy in Yemen, as well as to deepen their competition in Libya. However, this transition did not eliminate Gulf opportunistic aims entirely, whether in Libya or as reflected in competition in the Horn of Africa. After the ten-year anniversary of the Arab Spring protests, this shift in the Gulf monarchies’ proxy strategies will play a central role in defining the security landscape in the Middle East. The Gulf monarchies are unlikely to pursue further regional revisionism on the scale of their early Arab Spring interventions, at least in the near-term. Instead, we should

expect them to wage proxy wars more often where rivals—whether Iran, Islamist groups, or other Gulf monarchies—encroach in places they perceive to be in their own immediate sphere of interest. Proxy wars across the Greater Middle East have spilled across borders, threatening the stability of neighboring states and providing potent breeding grounds for organizations like ISIS and al-Qaeda. They have also generated humanitarian crises, contributing to massive levels of human displacement that has significant impacts on the domestic politics of countries where refugees arrive, as well as international security implications. US policy in the region should focus on using America’s considerable leverage over these three Gulf countries—all US security partners—to end their interventions in conflicts in Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere. The United States should also use its diplomatic tools to promote political settlements in these conflicts and among the Gulf states. As long as these wars continue, they provide avenues for adversarial actors to intervene and gain a foothold, not to mention the staggering humanitarian costs of these conflicts. The rest of this chapter is divided into four sections. The first section examines the strategic interests of each of these three Gulf monarchies in the early post-Arab Spring period, from 2011 through 2014, and goes on to look at how these interests shaped their proxy interventions in Bahrain, Libya, and Syria. The second section examines the four factors that led the Gulf states to change their strategic assessments, and the third section examines the interventions that followed that turning point in Yemen. Finally, the conclusion discusses what the Gulf states’ shifting approach to staging interventions means for US policy in the Middle East. Early Arab Spring Strategic Concerns and Possibilities: 2011 to Mid-2014 From 2011 through approximately mid-2014, all three Gulf monarchies largely took an opportunistic approach to the instability wrought by the Arab Spring. They saw weakness and conflict in Libya, and later Syria, as an opportunity to revise the regional balance of power by replacing opponents with allies or friendly regimes. Notably however, of the three Gulf states, Qatar was by far the most optimistic, while both Riyadh and Abu Dhabi took a more conservative approach, especially regarding instability on the Arabian Peninsula itself. In Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE deployed forces to quash a grassroots protest movement and prop up a neighboring Sunni monarchy. All three Arab Gulf monarchies were largely insulated from the destabilizing effects of the Arab Spring. Due to their monopoly on domestic security services, as well as their prodigious oil and gas wealth, these countries were able to use violent repression, increased welfare spending, and the deployment of sectarian narratives to stave off more widespread protest movements. Thanks to their relative insulation, the monarchies perceived the Arab Spring as an opportunity to take advantage of instability in other parts of the Middle East and North Africa by using proxy warfare to reshape the Greater Middle East to favor their interests. Of the three states, Saudi Arabia perceived the Arab Spring as most threatening due to its

revolutionary nature, while Qatar viewed the Arab Spring as more of an opportunity, with the UAE sitting between the two in its perceptions. Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia initially saw the transnational Arab Spring movement as cause for concern, perceiving potential instability on the peninsula itself as particularly threatening.10 This concern about instability, and the Saudi regime’s anti-revolutionary posture, meant that Saudi strategy was the closest to the present-day status quo maintenance of the three Gulf monarchies during the early post-Arab Spring period. Riyadh also saw itself as both coordinator and leader of the GCC since its founding in 1981. Riyadh therefore felt responsible for taking the lead in countering the effects of the Arab Spring on the Arabian Peninsula, particularly where protests could threaten the GCC regimes themselves. Saudi Arabia itself saw some domestic opposition organizing and protest in response to the initial wave of the Arab Spring. In February 2011, a number of leading Saudi intellectuals with different ideological backgrounds, including Islamist leadership and a human rights lawyer, signed a petition calling for freedom of speech, independent association, and an elected national assembly, among other rights; another petition articulating the political and economic demands of Saudi youth drew over 10,000 signatures.11 Calls surfaced on Facebook for a Day of Rage on 11 March that paralleled organizing across the region.12 But Saudi Arabia quickly shut such efforts down through a combination of violent repression, increased welfare spending, and sectarian narratives designed to paint reformers as Shia ‘terrorists.’ The monarchy announced major new spending packages in response to the protests, including a US$93 billion aid package, an increase in state subsidies, and the introduction of employment benefits.13 The National Guard was deployed across the country to prevent protests. Protests in Qatif were violently quelled, and the monarchy painted its opponents in a sectarian light, claiming that the opposition was part of Iran’s conspiracy to destabilize Saudi Arabia from within.14 Saudi Arabia asserted its authority to lead the region’s response to the Arab Spring. In part, this meant preventing the spread of protest movements close to home on the Arabian Peninsula and against allies like Egypt.15 However, it would also open space for Saudi Arabia to pursue opportunist policies with regard to its major regional rival, Iran, and other states that challenged its vision of regional order, like Libya. United Arab Emirates Like Saudi Arabia, the UAE initially took a cautious approach to the Arab Spring. The de facto leader of the UAE, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed (MbZ), viewed the rise of Muslim Brotherhood parties in Tunisia and Egypt as threatening to the security of the Emirati regime, and he initiated a domestic crackdown that targeted the small Muslim Brotherhood movement within the UAE.16 The Emirati Brotherhood affiliate, Islah, ‘voice[d] concerns about political freedoms more broadly, thereby leading to restrictions from the regime,’

according to Courtney Freer, an expert on the politics of Gulf states.17 The Emirates was concerned by the possibility that Islah would draw on themes of economic disparity and lack of economic opportunities in parts of the Emirates, topics that had resonated in places like Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria. In particular, the Emirates feared that Islah would shine a light on economic disparities between the wealthiest emirates, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, which accounted for about 90 percent of the UAE’s GDP, and the more rural, less wealthy emirates, which had significantly lower GDP per capita and higher unemployment.18 According to a US embassy diplomatic cable, Emirati political scientist Ebtisam Al Ketbi warned in the mid-2000s, ‘backward economic conditions and extremism in certain parts of the UAE could present a potent threat.’19 The Emirati leadership had other reasons to resent the Brotherhood’s domestic influence. The movement’s advocacy ‘for the implementation of conservative social policies [is] a source of embarrassment for rulers, who hope to project an image of a modern and largely secular society,’ Freer writes.20 Islah had the potential to contest the regime’s claims to legitimacy.21 Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed has long seen the Brotherhood as a threat to the Emirati regime: in 2004, he reportedly told a US delegation that ‘we are having a culture war with the Muslim Brotherhood in this country.’22 In 2012, the UAE’s Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed called the Muslim Brotherhood ‘an organization which encroaches upon the sovereignty and integrity of nations’ while calling for a coordinated crackdown on the Brotherhood across the Gulf.23 From this perspective, the instability that followed the Arab Spring appeared to have empowered Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups across the region. Nevertheless, the UAE did not experience significant domestic mobilization at home.24 Where the UAE perceived even the potential for mobilization, it cracked down, and in 2012 ninety-four people with suspected ties to the Brotherhood, known as ‘the UAE 94,’ were arrested.25 The leadership of Abu Dhabi also announced US$2 billion in housing loans for Emiratis.26 Qatar Compared to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Qatar viewed the Arab Spring as posing fewer threats and more opportunities, a perception that would promote its adoption of revisionist aims. Qatar had long sought for itself a more significant role in the region, and the Arab Spring provided an opportunity to garner greater influence. Starting in the late 1990s, Qatar’s leadership began to invest resources in expanding Doha’s regional profile. It led mediation efforts in Lebanon, Darfur, and Yemen, and promoted an alternative vision of Islamic and Arab identity different from that of the other Gulf monarchies, a touchstone of many Middle Eastern states’ efforts to achieve regional power status. Doha also invested in soft-power initiatives, including hosting campuses of American universities in Education City as well as international sports events like the 2022 FIFA World Cup.27 These efforts to build a network of external relationships in the region were part of the

regime’s strategy of linking Qatar’s economy and security to more powerful states like the United States.28 Of the three monarchies, Qatar was the least concerned with the destabilizing potential of the Arab Spring. While Qatar positioned itself firmly under the US security umbrella, its leaders had also pursued a policy of balancing between the two largest regional powers, Saudi Arabia and Iran, since the 1990s. This ‘strategic hedging’ approach led Qatar to develop relationships with non-state Islamist organizations, including the Muslim Brotherhood, and to maintain cautiously cordial relations with Iran.29 Qatar also did not see Muslim Brotherhood affiliates as a direct threat to domestic stability, in part because its small population and unitary state system allowed its rulers to develop a strong welfare state with less internal inequality (at least among official citizens), and in part because the Qatari regime has invested over the past several decades in building relationships with Brotherhood-affiliates, both domestically and abroad.30 Doha welcomed Muslim Brotherhood exiles like Yusuf al-Qaradawi and gave them a platform in exchange for the understanding that they would not weigh in on Qatar’s domestic politics.31 These relationships helped insulate Qatar from Arab Spring-related instability. In contrast to the Emirati Brotherhood, the Qatari Muslim Brotherhood movement ‘has favored the ideological and social elements of its platform over pursuing structural or institutionalized power,’ according to Freer, thereby posing less of a direct threat to the monarchy’s political authority.32 As part of Doha’s strategic hedging approach to the region, Qatari Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani also invested in creating a role for Qatar as a key diplomatic mediator in the region from the mid-1990s. This foreign policy reorientation was facilitated by exploiting the country’s natural gas reserves, leading to a rapid accumulation of wealth that could be reinvested. Qatar maintained a cordial relationship with Iran in part because of the shared North Field/South Pars gas field.33 Whereas Saudi Arabia and the UAE initially held concern regarding the risks of the Arab Spring, Qatar was the most willing to lean into the protests’ potential for revising the regional balance. In the early months of the Arab Spring, Qatar took advantage of its existing network of relationships and the good will they generated. Qatar’s state-aligned media company Al Jazeera provided extensive coverage of the Arab Spring protests in places like Egypt’s Tahrir Square, thereby playing an important role in broadening the Arab Spring’s reach. Notably, however, while Al Jazeera extensively covered protests in places where Doha supported the opposition, including Egypt, Libya, and Syria, it failed to give similar attention to protests in Bahrain, where Qatar tacitly supported the Saudi-led efforts to quash protests.34 Gulf Interventions: 2011 to 2014 In the early years following the Arab Spring protests, the Gulf monarchies intervened in Bahrain, Libya, and Syria. In two of these three interventions, the monarchies embraced an opportunist and revisionist strategy. However, the character of their strategies differed depending on their threat perceptions.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE intervened directly in Bahrain to quash protests and maintain the status quo. Compared with subsequent interventions in Libya and Syria, the intervention in Bahrain was the most status quo-oriented of the GCC states’ interventions during the early years of the Arab Spring. Qatar went along with the intervention in Bahrain without offering full-throated support. Bahrain (2011): Maintaining the StatusQuo While the Gulf monarchies’ approach to the early Arab Spring tended toward opportunism, the intervention in Bahrain stands out as an exception where status quo maintenance dominated. For Saudi Arabia, the protest movement in Bahrain, led by Bahrain’s Shiadominated opposition movement, hit too close to home in threatening the stability of an ally, neighbor, and fellow Sunni monarchy. The Saudi government’s relationship with its domestic Shia population, especially in its oil-rich Eastern Province, has been securitized since the Iranian revolution in 1979.35 The Iranian government’s revolutionary-oriented foreign policy drove the Saudi government to perceive any organization by its Shia population as a potential threat to the survival of the regime, linked to Iran as well as Shia movements elsewhere. Protests in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province in mid-February 2011 thus heightened concerns that protestors in Bahrain would encourage opposition movements within Saudi Arabia.36 Saudi Arabia also shared the Bahraini monarchy’s unproven view that the protests were encouraged by Iran to help it gain a foothold on the Arabian Peninsula. A Saudi official told a reporter at the time that ‘there is no doubt Iran is involved’ in the Bahrain protest movement, without providing evidence for this claim.37 On 14 March 2011, Saudi Arabia and the UAE sent 2,000 of their own security forces under the aegis of the GCC’s joint Peninsula Shield Force to Manama, alongside a Kuwaiti naval contingent, to quell the protests and shore up the government of Bahrain’s King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa. Like Saudi Arabia, the UAE was concerned about the potential fall of a Sunni monarchy on the peninsula to opposition protests.38 UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash said in a statement about the Emirates’ contribution, ‘the security and stability in the region requires all of us to stand united in one rank so as to safeguard our national gains and prevent any strife.’39 The Bahrain intervention held such importance for the Emirati leadership that, after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed public criticism of the intervention, the UAE reportedly threatened to withdraw from the NATO-led coalition in Libya unless Clinton issued a statement pulling back on criticism of the intervention. The statement was not only issued but was also vetted by Emirati officials before being put forth as an official communique.40 While Qatar supported protest movements elsewhere in the region in early 2011, it found the prospect of the fall of a fellow monarchy close to home was concerning. Qatar supported the intervention with ‘a symbolic troop detachment,’ according to scholar Toby Matthiesen.41 The Saudi government had already violently put down street protests in Saudi Arabia

itself, with police opening fire on protestors in Qatif, wounding at least three.42 The Peninsula Shield Force was intended as an additional anti-revolutionary message to Saudi Arabia’s own Shia population in the Eastern Province that the regime would continue to exert violent repression in response to any public protest or opposition organizing.43 It was also a message to the region that Saudi Arabia would be a counterrevolutionary force wherever its interests were threatened. A Saudi official noted at the outset of the intervention that ‘this is the initial phase. Bahrain will get whatever assistance it needs. It’s open-ended.’44 Libya The NATO-led intervention in Libya demonstrated the Gulf monarchies’ opportunistic, revisionist aims in the wider region. Qatar and the UAE played more active roles while Saudi Arabia took a more conservative approach. On 19 March 2011, a NATO-led coalition that also included Qatar, the UAE, Jordan, and Sweden implemented a no-fly zone in Libya in response to a violent crackdown on nationwide protests by Libya’s Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.45 Both Qatar and the UAE saw intervention in Libya as an opportunity to replace Gaddafi, an erratic actor, with a more sympathetic government, and to expand their influence in the region.46 According to Frederic Wehrey, an analyst of Libya’s civil war, both states saw Gaddafi’s fall as an opportunity ‘to project influence beyond their borders, to refashion the shifting political landscape to their will.’47 Qatar’s foreign minister Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani played a key role in getting the Arab League to vote unanimously in favor of the NATO-led intervention.48 Qatar contributed six Mirage fighter jets that flew sorties as part of the no-fly zone mission,49 while the UAE contributed six F-16 Fighting Falcons and six Mirages to the operation.50 Their support also provided NATO with political cover. During the NATO-led intervention, Qatar and the UAE also provided support and training to Libyan opposition militia groups on the ground, deploying special forces in Libya to aid these efforts. Qatar supplied fighting groups with Belgian FN rifles and French Milan antitank missiles, as well as small-arms shipments that amounted to 20,000 tons of weapons. Qatari Special Forces played an important role in the August Battle of Tripoli, when Libyan rebel forces captured Libya’s capital from the Gaddafi regime.51 The sight of Qatar’s flag flying side-by-side with the free Libya flag over the ruins of Gaddafi’s compound in October 2011 came to symbolize Qatar’s contributions to the Libyan rebels.52 Likewise, the UAE transferred weapons to Libyan militias, and its Special Forces participated in the rebel advance on Tripoli.53 Qatar tended to support militia commanders with Islamist ties like Ismail al-Salabi of the Rafallah al-Sahati Companies and Abdelhakim Belhadj, commander of the Tripoli Brigade, while the UAE leaned toward regionally—and tribally—oriented militias.54 While playing a less active role in Libya than either Qatar or the UAE, Saudi Arabia supported the NATO-led no-fly zone in Libya. After hours of closed-door deliberations

among the twenty-one foreign ministers, the Arab League called for a no-fly zone in March 2011 at the same time as it officially recognized the rebel movement as Libya’s official government.55 Because NATO had announced that Arab support was a precondition for the no-fly zone, the support of Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arab League had added significance.56 The seemingly quick victory in Libya encouraged the flourishing sense of optimism among the Gulf countries that they could take advantage of the instability generated by the Arab Spring to realign the regional balance in their favor. In an early 2012 interview, then Qatari Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim asserted that the change wrought by the Arab Spring ‘is positive in my opinion. And the medium and long-range will be possible … I’m not worried from [sic] the change. I think it will be healthy change for the people and for all of us.’57 This optimism was reflected on the ground: a reporter described a ‘hero’s welcome’ for fighters returning to Benghazi in October 2011 after fighting the remnants of the regime in its last holdout in Sirte.58 However, Qatar and the UAE failed to translate their military victory into influence in the post-Gaddafi political landscape. The National Transitional Council (NTC), the alliance of rebel forces that overthrew Gaddafi’s regime, struggled to exert political authority in the post-Gaddafi state and got caught in factional fighting as more than 300 militias continued to operate.59 International sponsors quickly got caught up in the crossfire and recriminations: in November 2011, Ali Tarhouni, deputy chief of the NTC’s executive committee, publicly criticized Qatar’s ongoing role in Libya, saying, ‘they have brought armaments, and they have given them to people that we don’t know—I think paid money to just about anybody. They intervened in committees that have control over security issues.’ NTC chairman Mustapha Abdul-Jalil, whose faction had received support from the UAE, also criticized Qatar’s failure to consult with the NTC.60 In July 2012, Qatar’s preferred political party AlWatan—an Islamist party established by Abdelhakim Belhadj, the leader of an anti-Gaddafi rebel militia—only won one seat in constituent assembly elections.61 By that time, however, the optimism shared by the Gulf monarchies—and expressed perhaps most sharply by bin Jassim in his early 2012 interview—had already translated into opportunistic intervention in another country: Syria. Syria In the earliest phases of the Syrian conflict, the Gulf Arab states—led by Saudi Arabia and Qatar—pursued a diplomatic approach, working through the League of Arab States to bring about a negotiated settlement and post-Assad transition process through the summer of 2011.62 Such a strategy could be seen as status quo maintenance. However, by January 2012, it had become clear that this strategy would not suffice to resolve the crisis.63 Despite the three monarchies sharing incentives for pursuing leadership change in Syria, disagreements over who should lead a post-Assad government led to strategies of intervention that were at odds with each other.

Qatar, then chair of the Arab League, was still riding the optimism of the Libyan intervention, and it leveraged its role to diplomatically isolate Assad’s regime and host conferences to support the opposition.64 Qatar was energized by a ‘sense of triumphalism’ after Gaddafi’s fall and hoped to just as quickly replace the Assad regime.65 The Emir of Qatar called for an armed intervention in Syria in early 2012.66 The other Arab Gulf monarchies also believed they could quickly and easily achieve results in Syria similar to those of the Libya intervention. Replacing the Iran-aligned Assad regime would extend the Gulf monarchies’ influence in the region while dealing a significant blow to Iran’s regional ambitions. Journalist Kim Ghattas writes, ‘the Saudis wanted Assad gone so they could contain Iran’s ambitions in Syria. In private, Saudi officials began to describe Assad as an occupier, a man with no legitimacy who was oppressing the majority with help from outside forces.’67 Saudi Arabia had already tried to diplomatically pull Syria away from Iran in 2009–10. For the Gulf monarchies, removing Assad via armed proxies would give them a greater foothold again in the sub-region: ‘when the uprising first began, Gulf leaders felt that the time was ripe to finally pull Syria into their orbit,’ writes journalist Hassan Hassan.68 The Assad regime was the only Arab state allied with Iran in the region, and a vital partner in Iran’s ‘axis of resistance.’ Iran’s leadership committed ‘significant resources to shoring up Assad’ as a result, according to Iran scholar Ariane Tabatabai.69 An analysis by Iranian politician Amir Mohebbian in October 2011 illustrated Iran’s perspective: ‘Westerners considered the Syrian opposition as an opportunity to limit Hezbollah and cut relations between Iran and Syria, and they tried to … destroy Iran’s supportive bridge to Hezbollah through the toppling of Bashar Assad, thus putting Hezbollah under pressure.’70 Hezbollah itself provides a critical ‘strategic asset that extends Iranian influence to the Mediterranean,’ as Jeffrey Feltman, former State Department assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, said.71 Saudi Arabia’s leadership was assertive when it came to Syria: Saudi King Abdullah was the first senior leader in the Arab world to openly condemn the Assad regime’s repression of protestors, and the first to publicly call for the arming of the Syrian opposition.72 In a February 2012 speech described by the New York Times as unusually blunt, King Abdullah condemned Russia and China’s UN Security Council vetoes of a resolution on Syria.73 The UAE, like Saudi Arabia, saw the violence in Syria as an opportunity to oust Assad, although the Emirates played a less prominent role in Syria than it did in Libya. The Emirates joined the rest of the GCC in closing its Syrian embassy in 2012 and declaring support for the Syrian people while denouncing the regime’s violence against protestors.74 The UAE joined international coalitions opposing the Assad regime, including the Friends of Syria which first met in February 2012,75 and played host to anti-Assad Syrian businessmen expatriates living abroad.76 The UAE also provided support via alleged CIA programs to some Syrian militas affiliated with the Free Syrian Army (FSA), including the Southern Front coalition. It also supported the Syrian Elite Forces (SEF), established in 2016.77 Saudi Arabia and Qatar cultivated relationships with competing political factions within

the Syrian National Council (SNC), the coordinating body for the Syrian opposition based in Istanbul, Turkey. In mid-2012, Qatar also began shipping light weapons acquired in Libya to the Syrian opposition via Turkey, where they were distributed by Qatari and Turkish intelligence officials.78 While the largest factions received support from both Qatar and Saudi Arabia, outside states facilitated support to a diverse array of factions within the opposition so that no one faction was able to solidify control. Instead, Syrian opposition groups competed with each other for external support, further driving factionalization.79 In Syria, two axes of competition gradually emerged amongst proxy sponsors: Qatar provided support to Muslim Brotherhood affiliates and other Islamist groups;80 in contrast, Saudi Arabia and the UAE supported proxies that opposed Muslim Brotherhood affiliates. The Saudis wanted the Assad regime gone, but, according to Hassan, they backed insurgent groups that were either moderate and backed by Western actors or else ‘Salafi-leaning forces, not seen as politically radical because their teachings call for loyalty to Muslim rulers.’81 These axes of competition repeatedly undermined efforts to unify and create cohesion amongst the Syrian political and military opposition. While the SNC was intended to coordinate with insurgent groups on the ground, it was in reality removed from them. As a result, in January 2013, Western states pressed for the formation of the Supreme Military Command (SMC) under General Salim Idris to coordinate the military opposition. Both Saudi Arabia and Qatar publicly supported the formation of the SMC. However, in practice, both competed to appoint their preferred officials to leadership roles, even as they bypassed the SMC altogether to provide support to their preferred Syrian rebel factions. This competition undermined the SMC’s legitimacy and eroded its connections to forces on the ground.82 Despite this factionalization, hope remained that the policy could be salvaged. The United States allegedly launched a classified weapons and training program in 2013, led by the CIA and supported by Gulf intelligence services, called Timber Sycamore. The effort was in large part motivated by a desire to minimize the risk of uncoordinated Gulf support for Syrian rebels, although it ultimately did not succeed at this, and successive coordination efforts also failed.83 By the end of 2013, the White House had approved amending Timber Sycamore to provide lethal assistance. This program worked through two operations rooms in Turkey, the Müs¸terek Operasyon Merkezi (MOM), and in Jordan, the Military Operations Command (MOC). These command centers were staffed by representatives from the United States as well as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Turkey, Jordan, and France. According to journalist Rania Abouzeid’s account, ‘The CIA chose, vetted, and trained select Syrian armed groups, while the MOM/MOC provided them with money and weapons, including—for the first time —U.S.-made Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided (TOW) antitank missiles from Saudi stockpiles.’84 However, the operations rooms suffered from the same dysfunction, with patrons sidestepping the coordinating mechanisms to continue supporting their preferred factions.85 The proliferation of political and military coordinating bodies was itself symptomatic of the underlying problem—that the state sponsors of Syrian proxies had fundamentally different

strategic objectives. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar disagreed on who should come after Assad. These strategic divisions led to ‘a highly competitive bidding war for arms by fighters … [that] accelerated their radicalization’ in order to win external support, according to journalists Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan.86 As more extreme forces attracted greater external support, they also became more effective on the ground, drawing individual fighters and units away from less extreme factions. While Western policymakers sought to provide support for moderate rebels while eschewing extremist or terrorist-affiliated groups, in reality, according to Syria scholar Christopher Phillips, ‘many militias were fluid in their composition and professed ideology, made easier by their local and personalized nature.’87 By 2012, the symbolism and rhetoric of Syrian rebel brigades had shifted away from secular nationalism and toward Islamist extremism. Qatar began to establish tenuous associations with increasingly extreme groups: Ahrar al-Sham reportedly received support from Qatar and Turkey, and there were reports of increased contact with Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaeda affiliate, over the course of 2013.88 Saudi Arabia and the UAE initially focused their support on non-Islamist elements of the FSA, a military organization established in July 2011 by officers who had defected from the Syrian military.89 By 2012, however, Saudi Arabia had sidelined these defectors altogether and instead helped form the Istanbul Room to distribute its support. However, when supplies did arrive via the Istanbul Room, they ‘were inconsistent and insufficient, prompting fighters to look elsewhere. Rebels found private sponsors, bought weapons from inside Syria, smuggled them from abroad, manufactured their own, or joined non-FSA Islamist groups that generally had stronger support.’90 In an effort to push Qatar aside, Saudi Arabia reportedly took over the ‘military file’ and became the main external sponsor of the FSA in May 2013.91 As the FSA faltered, due in part to internal divisions, ‘the Saudis shifted some of their backing to more overtly sectarian Salafi fighting groups, supporting the formation of the Islamic Front’ or al-Jabhat al-Islamiya—an alliance of Islamist groups including Jaysh alIslam, al-Tawhid Brigade, and Ahrar al-Sham—in 2013.92 Riyadh also pushed the United States to intervene on behalf of more moderate rebel forces and to provide them with arms and training.93 These initial tensions between the Gulf states and the factionalization of the conflict would contribute to the emergence of a turning point in Gulf state approaches to proxy warfare. However, in the early stage, optimism regarding the potential for revision managed to live on —even if on life support—whether that took the form of reorganizations of Gulf state sponsorship or calls for greater direct involvement from the United States. Inflection Point: 2014 Four factors led to a change in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar’s strategic approach to proxy warfare and regional competition by mid- to late 2014.

Libya and Syria Turn Ugly: The Unforeseen Consequences of ProxyWars The failure of their original strategy in Libya and Syria laid the groundwork for a shift in the Gulf monarchies’ proxy strategy. In both conflicts, hopes for rapid victory gave way to ongoing quagmires with little hope for success, paving the way for the Gulf Arab governments to revisit their initial calculations of the utility of proxy intervention. In Libya, the fragmented militia groups on the ground failed to coalesce into a coherent state. The killing of US Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans at the Benghazi consulate in September 2012, in an attack carried out by Ansar al-Sharia, highlighted Libya’s discord. In the run-up to elections—Libya’s first in more than forty years —in the summer of 2012,Libyans and Western observers argued about whether elections should even go forward before militias had been demobilized and reintegrated.94 According to New York Times reporting, ‘regional rivalries spilled out in armed assaults on polling places … Libya went to the polls with its cities still under the control of fractious militias, reeling from bloody trial feuds, and with armed protesters across the east determined to thwart the election for fear of domination by the country’s western region.’95 Likewise, while Syria’s insurgency had scored a number of tactical victories, the fragmented nature of the opposition had complicated the conflict exponentially. Approximately 6,000 different armed groups and military councils formed a continuously evolving network of more than 1,000 unique groupings on the ground.96 Fragmentation and fighting among rebel groups hindered their efforts to fight effectively and to take and hold territory. The armed opposition’s internal challenges were compounded by Iran’s intervention to shore up the regime. From 2011, Iran had provided assistance and advice to Assad’s government. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) led efforts within Syria to organize local militias. In 2013, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, intervened in Syria. Hezbollah assisted in the Battle of al-Qusayr near the border with Lebanon, leading to the Syrian regime’s first major victory of the conflict. Hezbollah then advanced deeper into Syria, helping to secure territory from northern Lebanon through Zabadani in the south.97 Explaining Hezbollah’s intervention in a later speech, Hassan Nasrallah, secretary-general of Hezbollah, explained that it was important to protect ‘a front [the Axis of Resistance] that the world wants to destroy … targeted by an American, Israeli, takfiri project.’98 Iran also deployed several thousand of its own regular and IRGC forces to Syria, and organized weapons and training for about 25,000 Shia fighters from Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.99 The Gulf states began to explore diplomatic options to normalize relations with the Assad regime in late 2018, when the UAE reopened its embassy in central Damascus. A statement from the UAE’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs noted that ‘the move underscores the UAE government’s keenness to restore relations between the two brotherly countries to their normal course.’100 Declining US Engagement and Refusal to Back Revisionism in the Region Any hopes that the United States might intervene in Syria as a counterweight to Iranian

support had been dashed by 2014. The Obama administration’s refusal to carry out air strikes in 2013 convinced Gulf governments that the United States would not provide backing for further revisionist actions in the Middle East. US military backing had encouraged the three Gulf monarchies, whose stability and security had been an explicit geostrategic interest for the United States ever since the Carter Doctrine of 1980, to behave more adventurously, secure in the knowledge that the United States would step in to support them if they ran into trouble. The Obama administration’s initial reaction to the Arab Spring had already raised Gulf states’ concerns that the United States would not guarantee their security. President Obama’s public calls for Egyptian President Mubarak to step down in February 2011 signaled to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi that something in the relationship was amiss. Saudi and Emirati leaders had hoped that the Obama administration would take a more conservative line toward a regime they considered a key regional ally. Mubarak’s fall was ‘a wake-up call for the Gulf monarchies that traditional Western support could no longer be taken for granted’ and that they would need to be more proactive in managing regional security.101 In mid-2013, the Syrian opposition and Gulf governments believed that the United States might yet step in to break the stalemate on the ground. ‘Some combination of a Western enforced no-fly zone or direct Western attacks against regime targets became the central goal of’ the Syrian opposition, who increasingly considered Western intervention to be ‘the only way to break the stalemate,’ according to Syria scholar Samer Abboud.102 President Obama’s August 2012 ‘red line’ statement led Syrian opposition groups and Arab Gulf countries to believe that the United States would intervene. Indeed, these countries reportedly assured their Syrian proxies that the November 2012 elections were preventing the United States from intervening immediately, but they could expect a US intervention soon afterwards.103 NATO’s intervention in Libya also gave credence to this expectation. As a Syrian rebel told a reporter in the summer of 2011, ‘It’s similar to Benghazi. We need a no-fly zone.’104 After the Obama administration’s decision not to launch air strikes in 2013, Arab Gulf sponsors became more willing to back more radical groups, even when they met with disapproval from Washington. Rebel fragmentation and radicalization became a vicious cycle as militias sought to outbid each other for external support and to keep fighters from defecting to better-funded, more highly visible groups. The search for external sources of support led to increased radicalization (whether real or performative) among militia groups as their leadership saw that ‘the more sensational their acts, the more support they would gain irrespective of their strategic importance.’105 External actors, including Qatar and Turkey, were willing to back more radical insurgent groups even early on. For Saudi Arabia, which may have preferred to back more status quooriented militias, the need to compete led them to back more radical groups as well. In the fall of 2013, for example, Saudi intelligence brokered a merger between Liwa al-Islam and forty-two other Islamist militias to form the Salafist Jaysh al-Islam, a major policy departure from Saudi Arabia’s prior support for the more moderate Syrian Opposition Coalition (SOC).106 This shift suggests that the decision had at least some effect on the Gulf monarchies’ strategies in Syria.

Furthermore, US policymakers’ engagement with Iran, leading to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) negotiations, caused a breach in the Arab Gulf monarchies’ relationship with the United States. When details of the interim nuclear framework first leaked in November 2013, it triggered a hostile reaction from Gulf Arab leadership, especially from Riyadh, which feared that an agreement that ended international sanctions would embolden Iran’s activities in the region.107 When the final deal was announced, a Saudi diplomat described it as ‘extremely dangerous,’ arguing that ‘if sanctions are lifted, Iran will try even harder to redesign the region.’108 The Saudis also worried that the deal could signal the beginning of a détente between the United States and Iran, or even that the United States was willing to quietly accept the existence of an Iranian sphere of influence.109 As General James Mattis, former US Central Command (CENTCOM) commander, commented to a reporter, in Syria ‘[The Emiratis] are trying to keep us tight. Their biggest concern isn’t Iran. It’s American disengagement.’110 The apparent US drawdown led the Arab monarchies to feel that they were on their own in terms of providing security; they would not necessarily receive assistance if their adventurism abroad went awry. This encouraged the monarchies’ leadership to shift its focus to managing only the more urgent threats and crises. Taken together, the Obama administration’s calls for Mubarak to step down and the negotiation of the JCPOA, as well as the administration’s apparent efforts to keep the United States from stepping up its operations in the region, led Saudi and Emirati leaders to feel that the United States was disengaging from the region, leaving them to push back against Iran on their own. In a 2018 interview, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman expressed the Saudi leadership’s view of Iran as a central security threat: ‘I can tell you that the Iranians, they’re the cause of problems in the Middle East.’111 Additionally, instead of attending the May 2015 GCC Summit at Camp David in person, King Salman sent delegates in his place, a snub toward the Obama administration.112 Intra-Gulf Tensions Come to the Fore Growing division among the Gulf states was another driver of the shift. The GCC countries were not on the same page regarding their strategic aims, a fact that became abundantly clear once arguments typically kept behind closed doors erupted into an open diplomatic dispute in 2014.113 In both Libya and Syria, a shared general aim of overturning the regime gave way to competition between the Saudi-UAE and Qatar-Turkey axes, as described in the previous section. The intra-GCC tension manifested soon after the Arab Spring uprisings in Egypt, where President Hosni Mubarak, an ally of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, was replaced by Muslim Brotherhood-supported President Mohamed Morsi in 2012. Morsi’s election victory ‘tilted the regional balance of power toward Qatar’s Islamic and activist networks,’ as Marc Lynch, a Middle East scholar, put it.114 Qatar invested substantially in Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood government, providing an estimated US$8 billion in aid.115 Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were troubled by the fall of Egyptian President Mubarak and by

the rising political fortunes of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, whose calls for elections and accountability to domestic populations were anathema to Saudi and UAE leadership. With the largest population in the Arab world, Saudi Arabia and the UAE also viewed Egypt as critical to an effective Sunni coalition to counter Iran.116 In July 2013, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi led a coup that removed Morsi’s government. Within twenty-four hours, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait pledged US$12 billion in financial assistance and energy supplies to Sisi’s new government.117 Between June 2013 and 2015, these three countries provided Egypt with more than US$29 billion in cash deposits to the central bank as well as oil shipments and investments.118 The visible competition in Egypt was matched by submerged fault lines within the GCC over Libya, Syria, and the future of political Islam in the region at large. As a demonstration of their deep-seated resentment toward Qatar’s regional policies, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain withdrew their ambassadors from Doha in March 2014, initiating an intra-GCC crisis.119 The diplomatic break was quickly followed by several demands, including that Qatar stop supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and curtail Al Jazeera’s oppositional coverage of the Sisi regime.120 After nine months of negotiations, the GCC ambassadors returned in November 2014, but the underlying divisions were far from resolved.121 Growing Threats to the Peninsula from Iran and ISIS Finally, a renewed threat from Iran and ISIS encouraged Gulf governments to focus on status quo preservation. The increasingly fragmented nature of the Syrian and Libyan conflicts gave both Iran and ISIS the opportunity to make significant gains. In the summer of 2014, ISIS’ dramatic military gains across Iraq and eastern and northern Syria, as well as government advances in Aleppo, put the Syrian opposition in an increasingly dire position. In September 2014, a Carter Center analysis noted that Though the opposition has shown itself capable of making consistent gains in southern Syria and in the central Idlib and Hama governorates, these limited advances, particularly in the north, will be difficult to maintain if the Islamic State succeeds in cutting vital supply routes from Turkey, and the government maintains control of the skies.122 In early 2014, ISIS was extending its influence from Syria back into Libya, where many of its foreign fighters had come from.123 In Libya, the local ISIS affiliate captured the city of Sirte in early 2015.124 Since then, a US campaign of air strikes and special operations personnel based in Misrata fought the remaining ISIS cells that had fled Sirte and reconstituted.125 The Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE, saw ISIS as a security threat.126 In May 2014, the Saudi government uncovered several organized cells that allegedly had links to ISIS. Then, in May 2015, ISIS affiliate Wilayat Najd conducted suicide bombings in Shia mosques in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, heightening these fears.127 Writing on state-

affiliated media site Al Arabiya, Abdulrahman al-Rashed, an editor with a close relationship to the Saudi regime, said that Saudi Arabia had ‘two rivals [in Syria] which we cannot take sides with: Assad and Maliki’s sectarian governments on one side, and ISIS and its terrorist affiliates on the other.’128 Likewise, the UAE saw ISIS as a threat, with prominent Emirati political scientist Abdulkhaleq Abdulla arguing in 2014, ‘We should be at the forefront of fighting ISIS. Our values are at stake.’129 In September 2014, the Houthis seized the Yemeni capital of Sanaa on Saudi Arabia’s southern border, sparking another round of regional proxy conflict. Saudi Arabia had a recent history of enmity with the Houthis, having fought them briefly across the border in 2009– 10.130 But from the Saudi and Emirati perspective, the Houthi advance was also Iran’s success. Antony Blinken, then US deputy secretary of state, stated that when he traveled to Riyadh to meet with Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) at the beginning of the coalition intervention, MbS explained that ‘his goal was to eradicate all Iranian influence in Yemen.’131 Iran was not shy about embracing this frame. After the Houthi coup in Sanaa in September 2014, Iranian member of Parliament Ali Reza Zakani said that Sanaa was the fourth Arab capital to fall under Iranian influence, in addition to ‘the three Arab capitals who are already a subsidiary of the Iranian Islamic revolution,’ by which he meant Baghdad, Beirut, and Damascus.132 Saudi and Emirati officials saw this statement as an expression of Iran’s intention to use its proxy relationship with the Houthis to expand their influence in the Gulf. Now, instead of the Arab Spring creating opportunities far from the peninsula, its fallout was opening new Iranian fronts on the peninsula itself that required management. Post-Arab Spring Crisis Containment: Late 2014–Present After mid-2014, the Gulf monarchies’ proxy strategies became increasingly status quooriented. Where Gulf monarchies sought to partner with proxies, they did so in order to contain crises and revert civil war conflicts to the status quo rather than seize opportunities to expand their influence. The Gulf monarchies’ actions as part of Operation Inherent Resolve (the anti-ISIS coalition), and in Yemen and Libya, illustrate the shift in approach. However, ongoing competition in the Horn of Africa—and in parts of the Yemen war—suggests that in certain contexts, opportunistic aims continue to drive proxy competition. Operation Inherent Resolve Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar joined the US-led international coalition against ISIS in the fall of 2014 under the banner of Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR), joining more than sixty coalition members. Both the UAE and Saudi Arabia contributed to aircraft-to-strike operations in Syria, while Qatar provided in-country basing and overflight authorization for US forces as well as transport aircraft. All three also contributed to the training and advising mission.133 While Saudi Arabia deployed F-15 aircraft to Turkey to contribute to the coalition, in practice, it carried out relatively few strike missions. Of the three countries, the UAE made the most significant contribution to CJTF-

OIR, with UAE fighters flying more missions in the anti-ISIS air strikes than any other coalition member besides the United States, and Emirati F-16 Fighting Falcons often accompanying US aircraft on their missions.134 This discrepancy was due to significant differences in the capabilities of the Emirati and Saudi air forces, as the coalition intervention in Yemen would soon demonstrate.135 The goal of reversing Iran’s presence in Syria had also declined in relative importance for the United States. In Iraq, the counter-ISIS coalition was in effect cooperating with Iranian proxies. Meanwhile in Syria, despite some initial hope that the Syrian opposition would form an on-the-ground partner force, the coalition relied upon the primarily Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).136 From the beginning of the Syrian rebellion, Syria’s Kurds embraced a strategy of détente with the Assad regime rather than direct confrontation.137 As the United States withdrew its forces from parts of northeast Syria, the SDF looked to the Assad regime for protection from Turkey.138 Likewise, the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria saw Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar all revert toward a status quo-orientation, conducting air strikes against ISIS, which were by then one of the most powerful opposition groups in Syria. As noted above, with the destruction of ISIS’ caliphate and Assad’s gains, Gulf states began to seek normalization with the Assad regime, illustrating the change from revisionist hopes of their earlier interventions in Syria. Saudi Arabia and the UAE in Yemen Following the Houthi takeover of Yemen’s capital Sanaa in September 2014, Yemeni President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s government fled to the southern port city of Aden. At the invitation of Hadi’s government, on 26 March 2015, Saudi Arabia and a coalition of nine Arab states—with logistical support from the United States, the United Kingdom, and France —launched an intervention.139 This considerable military effort was nonetheless aimed at preserving the status quo, a weak yet relatively pro-Saudi regime governing Yemen’s territory and insulating the Arabian Peninsula from Iranian influence. While deemed ‘the Saudi-led coalition,’ the intervening coalition was led in practice by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, with a de facto division of labor: Saudi Arabia led the air campaign in the north while the UAE led the ground offensive in the south. Both Saudi Arabia and the UAE contributed to efforts to train and equip local militias, although these efforts were dominated by the UAE in the south.140 The intervention included a sustained campaign of air strikes, the blockade of air and sea routes into Yemen, and the deployment of special forces, led by the UAE but with contributions from other coalition members.141 Saudi Arabia had long viewed Yemen as falling directly within its sphere of influence and as a high security priority, and it therefore perceived Iran’s support for the Houthis as a threat.142 MbS, who is understood to be the architect of the Yemen intervention, told American reporter Jeffrey Goldberg that ‘I believe the Iranian supreme leader makes Hitler look good … The supreme leader is trying to conquer the world … We are pushing back on these Iranian moves. We’ve done this in Africa, Asia, in Malaysia, in Sudan, Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon.’143 Likewise, UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan stated

in 2015 that ‘Iran is not carrying out this activity only in Yemen, it is conducting the same activity in Lebanon, in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and in Pakistan … there is a systematic action that has been going on for years on the idea of exporting the (Iranian) revolution.’144 He added, ‘It is not possible to accept any strategic threat to Gulf Arab states.’145 Emirati officials also feared that the conflict in Yemen would allow Muslim Brotherhoodaffiliated groups, namely the Islah political party, to gain influence in Yemen.146 Islah, the Islamist coalition opposition party in Yemen that included Muslim Brotherhood elements, played an outsized role in Yemen’s politics after 2011, and Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated elements were poised to gain political power in southern Yemen.147 However, the UAE’s strategy in Yemen also included opportunistic elements. The Emirates sought to expand its military and economic access to the Horn of Africa and the Bab al-Mandab strait, a vital link in global trade routes. Control over the port of Aden in southern Yemen, as well as much of Yemen’s Red Sea coast, would significantly expand the Emirates’ access to and control of these routes.148 In July 2015, the coalition launched Operation Golden Arrow to retake Aden from Houthi forces.149 The joint Hadi-Southern Resistance offensive, which quickly recaptured Aden and advanced north to link with other anti-Houthi forces, was accompanied by Emirati and Saudi Special Forces.150 The UAE also provided economic aid to Aden and the surrounding area, in addition to its investments in equipping and training southern militias, including the predominantly secular Southern Transition Council (STC) as well as Salafist militias.151 These militias, which numbered some 12,000 fighters, alongside Emirati Special Forces took the lead in clearing al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) fighters from areas in the south, including the port city of Mukalla and the Masila oilfields in 2016.152 The UAE deployed about 1,500 special operations troops and other forces to Yemen at the beginning of the conflict, and by September 2015 that number had increased to about 4,000.153 However, after a missile strike in the Yemeni governorate of Marib in September 2015 killed more than fifty Emirati troops, Abu Dhabi drew down some of its own troops, replacing them with foreign contractors operating under the UAE flag.154 The UAE also deployed forces to several bases in East Africa to facilitate the UAE’s operations in Yemen. The UAE deployed forces to Djibouti for this purpose, but, following a dispute with Djibouti’s government in mid-2015, began using facilities in Eritrea instead.155 The UAE also expanded its relationship with Somalia, opening a new training center where Emirati Special Forces train Somali commandos in counterterrorism operations.156 This relationship was further complicated by the 2017 diplomatic crisis with Qatar, as the Emirates stoked conflict with Somali President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed (Farmajo), whom they considered too close to Qatar, by supporting rival political factions.157 The divergence between Saudi and Emirati proxy strategies in Yemen became more apparent over time. On 7 August 2019, fighting broke out in Aden between the Southern Transition Council (STC) and forces supporting Hadi, which are backed by Saudi Arabia. In part due to this divergence, as well as fatigue over the ongoing stalemate, the UAE began to draw down its troops in Yemen in the summer of 2019.158 While Saudi Arabia continued air

strikes in northern Yemen, Saudi leadership also engaged in talks with the Houthis, in the December 2018 Stockholm Agreement, and in indirect peace talks via Oman in late 2019. The Biden administration’s renewed commitment to diplomacy in Yemen spurred additional talks in 2021. The Emirati withdrawal and Riyadh’s willingness to negotiate pointed to the limits of Gulf revisionism in the region, and an acknowledgment that they would not be able to fully restore the status quo through the use of military force on the peninsula, let alone opportunistically revise the regional order in their favor via proxy warfare. Qatar in Yemen Despite its difference with Saudi Arabia and the UAE over the perceived threat of the Houthis’ gains, Qatar’s approach to Yemen remained status quo-oriented. Doha’s participation was designed to diminish the intra-GCC diplomatic crisis by acceding to Saudi leadership on regional security issues.159 As such, the Qatari strategy in Yemen emphasized objectives of crisis management in an effort to restore and support a stable status quo for Gulf security. Qatar participated in the Saudi-led coalition intervention from March 2015 until it was expelled from the coalition in June 2017 following the resurgence of the intra-GCC dispute. Qatari pilots participated in air strikes early on in the intervention, and Al Jazeera reported that Qatar sent 1,000 ground troops along with 200 armored vehicles and 30 Apache helicopters in early autumn 2015.160 Libya The UN-backed government based in Tripoli struggled to extend its political authority. Because the government had no army of its own, it ‘depended on the goodwill of the capital’s militias, some of whom tried to topple it. Disagreements among the representatives on the council led to gridlock,’ Wehrey notes.161 In May 2014, the second civil war in Libya since 2011 began when Khalifa Haftar, once part of the coterie of military officers around Gaddafi and later exiled for decades to the United States, launched an offensive to take back Benghazi from Islamist militias, vowing to impose military rule instead.162 In response, Islamist militias, including Ansar al-Sharia, formed a coalition called Libya Dawn to counter Haftar’s forces. After establishing a parallel government administration in Libya’s eastern city of Tobruk, Haftar’s forces pivoted to take on the Tripoli-based UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA). Separately, GNA-affiliated forces reclaimed the city of Sirte in 2016, after a yearlong battle.163 Haftar quickly received support from the UAE, post-coup Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, France, and Russia, which sent its Wagner Group mercenaries to assist Haftar’s forces.164 In 2016, the UAE set up an air base in eastern Libya to support Haftar’s operations. And in 2019, just days before he launched another offensive, Saudi Arabia promised Haftar ‘tens of millions of dollars to help pay for the operation.’165 Haftar welcomed the support of Salafist fighters who hold the Islamists he is fighting as common enemies. In spite of this odd configuration of allegiances, the UAE supported Haftar

because of his strongly anti-Islamist stance, which aligned with their own. A former US diplomat reportedly said of the UAE’s presence in Libya that ‘they are looking to stagemanage and cleave out the parties they don’t like.’166 Emirati-supplied military hardware aided the advances of Libyan National Army (LNA) forces on the ground, while Emirati and French air strikes provided air support to advancing ground forces.167 The GNA was defended by an array of Libyan militias, as well as Turkish military advisors and 2,000 Syrian militiamen sent by Turkey to Libya in early 2020.168 Qatar continued to provide support to GNA-affiliated militias like the Benghazi Defense Brigades—founded by Ismail al-Salabi, who had strong ties with Doha—in 2016, and Misrata’s Mahjub Brigade, whose commanders were part of a delegation that met with Emir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani in Doha, in 2017.169 For all three Gulf monarchies, intervention in Libya post-2014 can be read as a crisis management exercise, despite the fact that they supported opposing sides. Abu Dhabi supported Haftar in order to push back against Islamist militias that had increasingly engulfed the country in an ongoing conflict, while Doha provided support to the internationally recognized government. This is not to say there were no opportunistic elements to the Gulf states’ proxy strategies in Libya. However, the rhetoric of stability is paramount, suggesting that their strategic thinking was dominated by the goal of managing an existing Libyan crisis. Competition in the Horn of Africa Compared to the wars in Yemen and Libya, the Gulf monarchies’ competition in Africa was still driven, in part, by a desire to secure new spheres of influence. Prompted by a political vacuum in the Horn of Africa and the Gulf monarchies’ designs on the Red Sea basin, the Gulf monarchies have been expanding their competition into the Horn since 2015. The Gulf monarchies’ proxy strategies were similar to their approaches elsewhere: Saudi Arabia and the UAE sought stability by supporting autocratic governments, some of which had violently suppressed pro-democracy movements, while Qatar and Turkey were more inclined to support popular uprisings that could empower actors that they found common cause with, especially Muslim Brotherhood affiliates and other Islamist organizations.170 The intra-GCC rivalries that exploded in 2017 fueled competition in the Horn of Africa, particularly in Somalia, which has, according to journalists Ronen Bergman and David Kirkpatrick, ‘emerged as a central battleground’ in the competition between Abu Dhabi and Doha.171 Both the UAE and Qatar provided weapons and training to the Somali factions they favored, fueling violence and instability in an already-failed state.172 For the Abu Dhabi-Riyadh axis, the Horn of Africa is also an arena where Iran’s expanded influence must be reversed. As one Saudi analyst told International Crisis Group researchers, ‘We needed to ensure that both flanks of Bab al-Mandab were secure. We wouldn’t want to end one war only to find that we have another conflict [to roll back Iran] on the other side.’173 Saudi Arabia conditioned its aid to Sudan and Eritrea in exchange for promises to expel Iran’s presence.

Gulf competition in the Horn of Africa also centered on economic opportunity, with countries in this region offering underdeveloped ports and energy and consumer markets that appear poised for rapid growth.174 Economic investment in the Horn offered the Gulf monarchies the opportunity to partner with China, which was planning Belt and Road Initiative projects in East Africa. This was, from the view of the Gulf monarchies, an important opportunity to strengthen their relationships with Beijing. Additionally, security access to ports along the Bab al-Mandab strait, the narrowest point between the Arabian Peninsula and Africa and a potential bottleneck for international trade, is a strategic aim particularly favored by the UAE. The UAE’s economic investments in particular ‘are not neutral economic projects. Rather … they are important mechanisms for the expansion of both Emirati capital and power.’175 The opportunities in the Horn of Africa therefore provide a warning against assuming that the Gulf states’ setbacks in Syria and Libya will prevent future conflicts or escalations.

Proxy wars aren’t just for great powers anymore. Whereas during the Cold War the primary strategic sponsors of proxy warfare were the United States and the Soviet Union, today the three Gulf Arab monarchies, two of which were not even independent until 1971, have played a core role in sponsoring proxy warfare in the Middle East.176 The Gulf states’ opportunistic approach to proxy warfare in the early years of the Arab Spring played an important role in initiating and escalating conflicts, as the Gulf states sought to reorder the region to their advantage. At the same time, the growing number of sponsors, exemplified by the Gulf states’ actions, created multiple layers of complexity that challenged efforts to stabilize the region. Not only did the Gulf states represent a pole of sponsorship, but they competed amongst themselves, driving factionalization and the growth of a multiplicity of competing proxies even where they appeared to share the same goals. The consequences of the Gulf states’ sponsorship of proxy warfare implicate the United States. The United States cannot inoculate itself from the resulting problems of instability, terrorism, and a level of social polarization that may be past the point of no return, nor can it hope to contain them in the region on its own. The United States also cannot dismiss the moral implications of humanitarian disasters in these places, especially in contexts such as Yemen, where US logistical and diplomatic support has facilitated the Saudi-led coalition’s intervention. The Gulf states have not been able to achieve their strategic objectives via proxy war, and, even as they pull back toward more status quo aims, intractable conflicts in Syria, Libya, and Yemen continue. At the same time, all three of these Gulf states are important security partners of the United States, from which they receive a great deal of military support, thus giving US policymakers some leverage over their behavior. The United States therefore can and should take proactive measures to wind down the use of proxies and support good-faith negotiation efforts to end proxy wars in order to mitigate these global threats. Sustained state weakness and a lack of governing institutions in these places makes it difficult to sustain military counterterrorism gains. Significantly, the wars have also

exacerbated humanitarian catastrophes and spurred the wide-scale movement of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and refugees. In Libya, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated in 2018 that 1.3 million people required humanitarian assistance. Up to 90 percent of refugees crossing the Mediterranean Sea to Europe departed from Libya’s shores, and human trafficking remains prevalent due to a sustained lack of institutional capacity.177 In Syria, an estimated 5.7 million registered refugees fled the country as of April 2019,178 in addition to 6.2 million IDPs. Yemen’s civil war has seen the largest cholera outbreak in epidemiologically recorded history.179 The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimated in 2020 that 24.3 million people were in need of humanitarian assistance, and 3.6 million have been displaced.180 There have been more than 90,000 battle-related fatalities in Yemen since 2015.181 Across the Red Sea in the Horn of Africa, Gulf support for proxy actors has also fueled fighting in Somalia. Proxy wars have directly harmed these societies’ resilience to large-scale health crises like COVID-19. Most worrisome, these impacts are only the consequences that are visible today. Proxy wars will have unpredictable, long-term consequences for the politics and societies of these states. Wehrey notes that the war in Libya fueled ‘a toxic polarization and fraying of the social bonds. … the damage may be irreparable.’182 Academic research suggests that civil wars are more likely to occur in states that have recently experienced political instability, institutional weakness, poor governance, and poverty: in other words, conflict begets conflict.183 If the outlook in the Middle East today looks dire, the region’s future will look increasingly worse without international efforts to end these proxy wars. For US policymakers, understanding the proxy wars of today—and the future—requires a deeper understanding of the regional dynamics of competition amongst state and non-state actors, as well as the strategic perceptions and decision-making of regional powers. The best thing that US policymakers can do to increase stability in the Middle East would be to end the conflicts that provide regional states with opportunities for intervention. Policymakers’ efforts to end civil wars via mediation can have an important effect.184 The United States also has leverage with these three Gulf security partners that it can exert in order to prevent intervention and encourage negotiation.185 However, US disengagement from proxy warfare and conflict is not enough to end these wars. Even with signals regarding the United States’ unwillingness to play a major role, the Gulf states continue to compete in Libya and, increasingly, the Horn of Africa. Sustained diplomatic attention and development funding will be needed to end these deeply complex and intractable conflicts. Such efforts will be relatively small investments compared to the price of proxy war.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to all the contributors to this book. At New America, thanks to Anne-Marie Slaughter, Awista Ayub, Paul Butler, Kevin Carey, Cecilia Muñoz, Emily Schneider, Peter Singer, Sharon Burke, Heather Hurlburt, Shaena Korby, Barry Howard, Cathy Bryan, Dana Ju, Ariam Mohamed, Joanne Zalatoris, Alison Yost, Tanya Manning, Jewel Stafford, Angela Spidalette, and Jason Stewart. Thanks to Michael Crow, the president of Arizona State University (ASU), and to Jim O’Brien, ASU senior vice president and chief of staff. It has been a pleasure to launch— under their guidance and that of Anne-Marie Slaughter—the Center on the Future of War, which is now in its eighth year. Thanks also at ASU to Pardis Mahdavi, Magda Hinojosa, Pat Kenney, Stefanie Lindquist, Jeffrey Kubiak, Thomas Just, and H.R. McMaster. And also thanks to our partners in our annual Future Security Forum, Carol Evans of the Army War College, and Ike Wilson of the Joint Special Operation University. Thanks also to Chris Woods, Dmytro Chupryna, and Oliver Imhof of Airwars, and to Ammar Kahf and Navvar Saban at the Omran Center for Strategic Studies. Thanks also to Sergey Suhankin, Noah Pensak, and Colin Frank for their research support. Thanks to Hussein al-Nasser, Ahmad alFaraj, Huzeyfa al-Osman, and Muhammad Osman, and six other researchers who cannot be named, who conducted extensive research in Syria that informed parts of this project. Thanks also to the foundations and program officers who have supported our work, especially Hillary Wiesner and Nehal Amer at Carnegie, Marin Strmecki of the Smith Richardson Foundation, and Lisa Magarrell at Open Society Foundations. Thanks also to the supporters of New America’s International Security Program: Tom Freston, Bob Niehaus, Aaron Stopak, and the George Wasserman Family Foundation. And special thanks to Michael Dwyer of Hurst for publishing this book and to Alice Clarke and Daisy Leitch for helping to shepherd us through the publication process.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. The term ‘ungoverned spaces’ is widely referenced but remains contested. In part, this is because it is applied to divergent contexts presenting distinct challenges to formal governance, whether by states or other entities, such as rebel groups. The concept is relevant for understanding proxy war because the legitimacy of many proxies is bound to their ability to provide social assistance, justice, and other traditional state functions. The essays in this collection do not adhere to a particular stance on the proper definition of ‘ungoverned spaces.’ Rather, they are unified in highlighting the impact of failed governance on the lives of people around the world and the role of non-state groups, including proxy forces, in providing mechanisms of governance that play a key role in the outcomes of certain conflicts. For a far from exhaustive list of relevant work examining fragmented and collapsed governance’s importance in proxy war dynamics, see: Michael A. Innes, Streets Without Joy: A Political History of Sanctuary and War, 1959–2009 (London: Hurst, 2021); Wolfram Lacher, Libya’s Fragmentation: Structure and Process in Violent Conflict (London: I.B. Tauris, 2020); Thanassis Cambanis et al., Hybrid Actors: Armed Groups and State Fragmentation in the Middle East, A Century Foundation Book (New York: The Century Foundation Press, 2019); Ariel I. Ahram, Proxy Warriors: The Rise and Fall of State-Sponsored Militias (Stanford, CA: Stanford Security Studies, 2011). 2. See, for some examples: Lawrence Freedman, The Future of War: A History, 1st edition (New York: Public Affairs, 2017); Hew Strachan, Sibylle Scheipers, and Oxford Leverhulme Programme on the Changing Character of War, eds., The Changing Character of War (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Isabelle Duyvesteyn and Jan Ångstrom, eds., Rethinking the Nature of War, Cass Contemporary Security Studies Series (London; New York: Frank Cass, 2005). 3. See, for some examples: Eli Berman, David A. Lake, and Julia Macdonald, eds., Proxy Wars: Suppressing Violence Through Local Agents (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019); Tyrone L. Groh, Proxy War: The Least Bad Option (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019); Andreas Krieg and Jean-Marc Rickli, Surrogate Warfare: The Transformation of War in the Twenty-First Century (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2019); Geraint Hughes, My Enemy’s Enemy: Proxy Warfare in International Politics (Brighton, UK; Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 2014); Ariel I. Ahram, Proxy Warriors. CHAPTER 1. TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY PROXY WARFARE 1. ‘Proxy War,’ Google Books Ngram Viewer, accessed 1 November 2021, https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph? content=proxy+war&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3. 2. Andrew Mumford, Proxy Warfare: War and Conflict in the Modern World (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2013), 1. 3. C. Anthony Pfaff, ‘Strategic insights: Proxy war norms,’ Strategic Studies Institute (blog), 18 December 2017, https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/index.cfm/articles/Proxy-War-Norms/2017/12/18; C. Anthony Pfaff, ‘Proxy war ethics,’ Journal of National Security Law and Policy 9, no. 2 (28 August 2017), http://jnslp.com/2017/08/28/proxy-war-ethics/.

4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

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11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

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See, for example, Tyrone L. Groh, Proxy War: The Least Bad Option (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019) and Andreas Krieg and Jean-Marc Rickli, Surrogate Warfare: The Transformation of War in the 21st Century (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2019). Geraint Hughes, My Enemy’s Enemy: Proxy Warfare in International Politics (Brighton, UK; Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, 2014), 15. Jeffrey Goldberg, ‘The Obama doctrine,’ The Atlantic, April 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obama-doctrine/471525/. A few of the most significant archives to emerge out of the end of the Cold War include the Mitrokhin Archive at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Studies, https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/collection/52/mitrokhinarchive, and other featured document archives at https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/; the National Security Archive at George Washington University, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/; the official document archives of the US State Department’s Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments; and the Historical Office of the Secretary of Defense, https://history.defense.gov/. Daniel Byman, Deadly Connections: States That Sponsor Terrorism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Daniel Byman and Sarah E. Kreps, ‘Agents of destruction? Applying principal-agent analysis to state-sponsored terrorism,’ International Studies Perspectives 11, no. 1 (February 2010): 1–18, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.15283585.2009.00389.x; Daniel Byman, ‘Why engage in proxy war? A state’s perspective,’ Brookings Institution (blog), 21 May 2018, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2018/05/21/why-engage-in-proxy-war-a-statesperspective/. Idean Salehyan, David Siroky, and Reed M. Wood, ‘External rebel sponsorship and civilian abuse: A principal-agent analysis of wartime atrocities,’ International Organization 68, no. 3 (2014): 633–61, https://doi.org/10.1017/S002081831400006X; Idean Salehyan, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, and David E. Cunningham, ‘Explaining external support for insurgent groups,’ International Organization 65, no. 4 (October 2011): 709–44, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818311000233; and Idean Salehyan, ‘The delegation of war to rebel organizations,’ Journal of Conflict Resolution 54, no. 3 (2010), https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/27820997.pdf? refreqid=excelsior%3Aacad61e647f197824920884cf004ee48. One such critique of the study of state sponsorship of terrorism as a field of proxy warfare is found in Jeffrey M. Bale, ‘Terrorists as state “proxies”: Separating fact from fiction’ in Making Sense of Proxy Wars: States, Surrogates & the Use of Force, ed. Michael A. Innes (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2012). On politicization in the study of proxy warfare see Hughes, My Enemy’s Enemy, 16. Ariel I. Ahram, Proxy Warriors: The Rise and Fall of State-Sponsored Militias (Stanford, CA: Stanford Security Studies, 2011), 7. Afshon Ostovar, Vanguard of the Imam: Religion, Politics, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2018). Ahram, Proxy Warriors, 8. A far from exhaustive list of standout, contemporary, book-length reportage and analysis includes Peter L. Bergen, The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict Between America and al-Qaeda (New York: Free Press, 2011); Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin, 2005) and Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan (New York: Penguin, 2018); Fawaz A. Gerges, The Far Enemy: Why Jihad Went Global (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009) and ISIS: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2016); Anand Gopal, No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban and the War Through Afghan Eyes (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014); Gregory D. Johnsen, The Last Refuge: Yemen, al-Qaeda, and America’s War in Arabia (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012); Tim Judah, In Wartime: Stories From Ukraine (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2016); Christopher Phillips, The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016); George Packer, The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005); and Joby Warwick, Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS (New York: Anchor Books, 2015). Erica Gaston and András Derzsi-Horváth, ‘Iraq after ISIL: An analysis of local, hybrid, and sub-state security forces,’ Global Public Policy Institute (website), 27 December 2017, https://www.gppi.net/2017/12/27/iraq-after-isil-an-analysisof-local-hybrid-and-sub-state-security-forces; Erica Gaston and András Derzsi-Horváth, ‘It’s too early to pop champagne in Baghdad: The micro-politics of territorial control in Iraq,’ War on the Rocks (website), 24 October 2017, https://warontherocks.com/2017/10/its-too-early-to-pop-champagne-in-baghdad-the-micro-politics-of-territorial-controlin-iraq/.

17. For extensive analysis on the role of militias in war-making and state-making in Afghanistan, see Michael Bhatia and Mark Sedra, Afghanistan, Arms and Conflict: Armed Groups, Disarmament and Security in a Post-War Society (New York: Routledge, 2008); and Antonio Giustozzi, War, Politics and Society in Afghanistan, 1978–1992 (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2000). 18. Steve Coll, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan (New York: Penguin Press, 2018); and Stephen Tankel, Storming the World Stage: The Story of Lashkar-e-Taiba (London: C. Hurst, 2011), http://qut.eblib.com.au/patron/FullRecord.aspx?p=1780087. 19. The work of the investigative news websites Bellingcat, Airwars, the Conflict Armament Research Group, Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, and C4ADS stand out as exceptional in producing high-impact conflict analysis that taps into open-source digital forensic research methodologies. 20. One valuable effort that illustrates the difficulty of documenting conflict in Libya and the limited state of existing knowledge is the tracking of air strikes by multiple nations and factions by Airwars and New America, using local news sources and social media reports. 21. For a useful review of multiple uses of the term ‘proxy war’ and advances in the scholarly literature, see Vladimir Rauta, ‘“Proxy War”—A Reconceptualization,’ Civil Wars 23, no. 1 (2021). 22. Notable book-length treatments of proxy warfare and related topics reviewed for this chapter include Ahram, Proxy Warriors; Byman, Deadly Connections; Hughes, My Enemy’s Enemy; Michael A. Innes, ed., Making Sense of Proxy Wars; Walter C. Ladwig, The Forgotten Front: Patron-Client Relationships in Counterinsurgency (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017); and Mumford, Proxy Warfare. 23. Idean Salehyan, Rebels Without Borders: Transnational Insurgencies in World Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 8. 24. One such critique is found in Rashid Khalidi, Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2009). 25. Some notable books on the Russian and Iranian experiences with proxy warfare include Rodric Braithewaite, Afghantsy: Russians in Afghanistan, 1978–1989 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Artemy M. Kalinovsky, A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal From Afghanistan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); and Afshon Ostavar, Vanguard of the Imam: Religion, Politics and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). On the general lack of analysis of non-American experiences of proxy warfare, see Christopher Andrew’s discussion of the relative underanalysis of Soviet covert operations in most Cold War histories in Christopher M. Andrew and Vasilij N. Mitrochin, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (New York: Basic Books, 2005); and Christopher Andrew, The Secret World: A History of Intelligence, the Henry l. Stimson Lectures Series (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018). 26. Hughes, My Enemy’s Enemy, 5. 27. Karl Walling, ‘Thucydides on policy, strategy, and war termination,’ Naval War College Review 66, no. 4 (Autumn 2013), https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi? referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1412&context=nwc-review. 28. Barry Buzan and Lene Hansen, The Evolution of International Security Studies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 66–73. 29. Stephen D. Biddle, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 30. Mumford, Proxy Warfare, 1; and Andrew Mumford, ‘Proxy warfare and the future of conflict,’ The RUSI Journal 158, no. 2 (April 2013): 40–6, https://doi.org/10.1080/03071847.2013.787733. 31. Hughes, My Enemy’s Enemy, 1–2. 32. Mumford, Proxy Warfare, 17. 33. Pfaff, ‘Proxy war ethics,’ 311. 34. Pfaff, ‘Proxy war ethics,’ 310. 35. Innes, Making Sense of Proxy Wars, xv. 36. Pfaff, ‘Proxy war ethics,’ 312. 37. On the expanding spectrum of actors and the need to account for this expansion with regard to cooperative relationships in the terrorism space and more generally, see, respectively, Assaf Moghadam, Nexus of Global Jihad: Understanding Cooperation Among Terrorist Actors, Columbia Studies in Terrorism and Irregular Warfare (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017); and Anne-Marie Slaughter, The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a

38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

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45. 46.

47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56.

57. 58.

Networked World, the Henry L. Stimson Lectures Series (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). Byman, Hughes, Innes, Ladwig, and Mumford all frame proxy warfare as fundamentally shaped and defined by principal-agent relations. It is worth noting that some earlier Cold War visions of proxy warfare saw any conflict between client states of the superpowers as a proxy war in the sense that such wars themselves constituted proxies for the Cold War clash, regardless of the existence of a principal-agent formulation. For a discussion of this vision and its problems, see Bar-Siman-Tov, ‘The strategy of war by proxy.’ Ladwig, The Forgotten Front, 4–5. Pfaff, ‘Proxy war ethics’; Pfaff, ‘Strategic insights: Proxy war norms.’ Frances Z. Brown and Mara Karlin, ‘Friends with benefits: What the reliance on local partners means for U.S. strategy,’ Foreign Affairs, 8 May 2018, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2018-05-08/friends-benefits. Lakhdar Brahimi, ‘State building in crisis and post-conflict countries,’ speech at 7th Global Forum on Reinventing Government, June 2007, http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/un/unpan026896.pdf. For a comprehensive synopsis on US support for security forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, see, for instance, A Force in Fragments: Reconstituting the Afghan National Army, Asia Report No. 190 (Brussels, Belgium: International Crisis Group, 12 May 2010), https://d2071andvip0wj.cloudfront.net/190-a-force-in-fragments-reconstituting-the-afghannational-army.pdf. Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars provides perhaps the most authoritative account of this early phase of Afghanistan’s prolonged proxy war. On Pakistani, Russian, and Iranian action in Afghanistan in more recent years, see Coll, Directorate S; Carlotta Gall, The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001–2014 (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014); Carlotta Gall, ‘In Afghanistan, U.S. exits, and Iran comes in,’ New York Times, 5 August 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/05/world/asia/iran-afghanistan-taliban.html; Alireza Nader, Ali G. Scotten, Ahmad Idrees Rahmani, Robert Stewart, and Leila Mahnad, Iran’s Influence in Afghanistan: Implications for the U.S. Drawdown (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2014); and Sune Engel Rasmussen, ‘Russia accused of supplying Taliban as power shifts create strange bedfellows,’ The Guardian, 22 October 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/22/russia-supplying-taliban-afghanistan. Gaston and Derzsi-Horváth, ‘Iraq after ISIL’; and Ostovar, Vanguard of the Imam. On the United States’ use of militias in Iraq see, for example, Omar Al Nidawi and Michael Knights, ‘Militias in Iraq’s security forces: Historical context and U.S. options,’ Policy Watch 2935, Washington Institute (website), 22 February 2018, https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/militias-in-iraqs-security-forces-historical-context-andu.s.-options. For background on ‘Sons of Iraq’ see Greg Bruno, ‘Finding a place for the “Sons of Iraq,”’ Council on Foreign Relations (blog), 23 April 2008, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/finding-place-sons-iraq. For background on the ALP, see The Future of the Afghan Local Police, Asia Report No. 268 (Brussels, Belgium: International Crisis Group, 4 June 2015), https://www.crisisgroup.org/asia/south-asia/afghanistan/future-afghan-localpolice. For a discussion of such factors in the case of Iraqi support for Palestinian groups as proxies, see Ahram, Proxy Warriors, 70. Email correspondence, 26 October 2018. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, James D. Morrow, Randolph M. Siverson, and Alastair Smith, ‘Testing novel implications from the selectorate theory of war,’ World Politics 56, no. 3 (April 2004): 363–88, https://doi.org/10.1353/wp.2004.0017. Military Technical Agreement, http://www.bits.de/public/documents/US_Terrorist_Attacks/MTA-AFGHFinal.pdf. Interview with a senior US military official, Washington, DC, 9 October 2018. Ladwig, The Forgotten Front, 26–41. Christopher D. Kolenda, Rachel Reid, Chris Rogers, and Marte Retzius, The Strategic Costs of Civilian Harm: Applying Lessons From Afghanistan to Current and Future Conflicts (New York: Open Society Foundations, June 2016), https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/strategic-costs-civilian-harm-20160603.pdf. For one discussion of how external sponsorship can shield groups from popular backlash and thus encourage more violence, see Jeremy M. Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence, Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Ladwig, The Forgotten Front, 26–41. Ladwig, 26–7.

59. On the issue of Iran’s contested relationship with al-Qaeda see Assaf Moghadam, ‘Marriage of convenience: The evolution of Iran and Al-Qa’ida’s tactical cooperation,’ CTC Sentinel 10, no. 4 (April 2017), https://ctc.usma.edu/marriage-of-convenience-the-evolution-of-iran-and-al-qaidas-tactical-cooperation/; and Nelly Lahoud, Al-Qa’ida’s Contested Relationship With Iran: The View From Abbottabad (Washington, DC: New America, September 2018), https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/reports/al-qaidas-contested-relationship-iran/. 60. On the debates regarding Syria’s effort to legalize or formalize the role of some Iranian-backed forces and the question of the legality of the Saudi coalition’s efforts in Yemen, see Borzou Daragahi, ‘Iran wants to stay in Syria forever,’ Foreign Policy, 1 June 2018, https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/06/01/iran-wants-to-stay-in-syria-forever/; Kareem Fahim, ‘U.N. probe details fallout of proxy war in Yemen between Saudi Coalition and Iran,’ Washington Post, 11 January 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/un-probe-details-fallout-of-proxy-war-in-yemen-between-saudi-coalition-andiran-/2018/01/11/3e3f9302-f644-11e7-9af7-a50bc3300042_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.7d307794c128; Asa Fitch and Sune Rasmussen, ‘Iran signs deal with Syria to deepen military cooperation,’ Wall Street Journal, 27 August 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/iran-signs-deal-with-syria-to-deepen-military-cooperation-1535376454; Yaroslav Trofimov, ‘U.A.E. takes lead in leaderless Southern Yemen,’ Wall Street Journal, 30 August 2015, https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-a-e-takes-lead-in-leaderless-southern-yemen-1440967029; and Nathalie Weizmann, ‘International law on the Saudi-led military operations in Yemen,’ Just Security (blog), 27 March 2015, https://www.justsecurity.org/21524/international-law-saudi-operation-storm-resolve-yemen/. 61. On the question of legal authorities, their change over time, and the relevance to policy with regard to militias in Iraq see Renad Mansour, ‘More than militias: Iraq’s popular mobilization forces are here to stay,’ War on the Rocks (website), 3 April 2018, https://warontherocks.com/2018/04/more-than-militias-iraqs-popular-mobilization-forces-are-here-to-stay/. 62. The UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNOHCHR) has documented a number of civilian casualties involving US and NATO airstrikes based on faulty intelligence over the years; annual reports issued by UNOHCHR’s office in Kabul provide the most definitive and detailed accounts. See https://unama.unmissions.org/protection-of-civilians-reports. 63. Matthieu Aikins, ‘Doctors with enemies: Did Afghan forces target the M.S.F Hospital?’ New York Times, 17 May 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/22/magazine/doctors-with-enemies-did-afghan-forces-target-the-msf-hospital.html. 64. Azmat Khan and Anand Gopal, ‘The uncounted,’ New York Times Magazine, 16 November 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/11/16/magazine/uncounted-civilian-casualties-iraq-airstrikes.html. 65. Helen Hu, ‘McChrystal issues directive on civilian casualties,’ Stars and Stripes, 7 July 2009, https://www.stripes.com/news/mcchrystal-issues-directive-on-civilian-casualties-1.93114. 66. For example, see ‘McChrystal says minimizing casualties crucial for success,’ CNN, 2 June 2009, http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/06/02/mcchrystal.senate.hearing/index.html. 67. Adam Taylor, ‘What we know about the shadowy Russian mercenary firm behind an attack on U.S. troops in Syria,’ Washington Post, 23 February 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/02/23/what-we-knowabout-the-shadowy-russian-mercenary-firm-behind-the-attack-on-u-s-troops-in-syria/?utm_term=.128dd78ea91f. 68. Legal disputes over attribution of the attack on MH17 are as yet unresolved and are likely persist for many years. For more on the challenges of accountability, see Marike de Hoon, Julie Fraser, and Brianne McGonigle Leyh, eds., Legal Remedies for Downing Flight MH17 (Washington, DC: Public International Law Policy Group, January 2009), https://www.vu.nl/nl/Images/Legal_Remedies_for_Downing_Flight_MH17_tcm289-747125.pdf. 69. Scholar Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, in his books The Logic of Political Survival and The Dictator’s Handbook, explains that selectorate theory is premised on the idea that political leaders are motivated primarily by the desire to maintain power. In de Mesquita’s formulation, the size of winning coalitions, the people most essential to ensuring political victory, determines the strategies of leaders of autocracies and democracies and whether political leaders are more inclined to take risky decisions such as going to war. See Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, ed., The Logic of Political Survival (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005); and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2012). 70. Ladwig, The Forgotten Front, 53–4. 71. Anand Gopal’s No Good Men Among the Living and Joshua Partlow’s A Kingdom of Their Own: The Karzai Family and the Afghan Disaster provide two of the more vivid accounts of the Karzai era. 72. David Crist, The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict With Iran (New York: Penguin Books, 2013). 73. Frederic M. Wehrey, ed., Saudi-Iranian Relations Since the Fall of Saddam: Rivalry, Cooperation, and Implications for U.S. Policy (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2009).

74. Joseph Alpher, Periphery: Israel’s Search for Middle East Allies (Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015); Dalia Dassa Kaye, Alireza Nader, and Parisa Roshan, Israel and Iran: A Dangerous Rivalry (Santa Monica, CA: RAND National Defense Research Institute, 2011); and Trita Parsi, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). 75. Wehrey, Saudi-Iranian Relations Since the Fall of Saddam. 76. Ostovar, Vanguard of the Imam. 77. Crist, The Twilight War; and Andrew Rathmell, Theodore Karasik, and David C. Gompert, ‘A new Persian Gulf security system’ (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2003), https://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP248.html; and Wehrey, Saudi-Iranian Relations Since the Fall of Saddam. 78. Byman, A High Price; Augustus R. Norton, Hezbollah: A Short History, Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); and Ostovar, Vanguard of the Imam. 79. Barak Barfi, ‘The real reason why Iran backs Syria,’ The National Interest, 24 January 2016, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-real-reason-why-iran-backs-syria-14999; and Daniel Byman, ‘Syria and Iran: What’s behind the enduring alliance,’ Brookings Institution (blog), 19 July 2006, https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/syria-and-iran-whats-behind-the-enduring-alliance/; Iran’s Priorities in a Turbulent Middle East, Middle East Report No. 184 (Brussels, Belgium: International Crisis Group, 13 April 2018), https://d2071andvip0wj.cloudfront.net/184-iran-s-priorities-in-a-turbulent-middle-east_1.pdf; and Parsi, Treacherous Alliance. 80. Matthew Levitt, Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon’s Party of God (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013). 81. Alpher, Periphery; Bergman and Hope, Rise and Kill First; Byman, ‘Syria and Iran: What’s behind the enduring alliance’; and Kaye, Nader, and Roshan, Israel and Iran. 82. Kaye, Nader, and Roshan, Israel and Iran; and Parsi, Treacherous Alliance. 83. Ronen Bergman and Ronnie Hope, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations (New York: Random House, 2018); Kenneth Katzman, ‘Iran’s foreign and defense policies’ (Congressional Research Service, 9 October 2018), https://fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/R44017.pdf; Kaye, Nader, and Roshan, Israel and Iran; and Parsi, Treacherous Alliance. 84. Steven A. Hildreth, ‘Iran’s ballistic missile programs: An overview,’ Congressional Research Service, 4 February 2009, https://fas.org/sgp/crs/nuke/RS22758.pdf. 85. Javed Ali, ‘Chemical weapons and the Iran-Iraq War: A case study in noncompliance,’ Nonproliferation Review, Spring 2001, https://www.nonproliferation.org/wp-content/uploads/npr/81ali.pdf; and Sharon Otterman, ‘IRAQ: Iraq’s prewar military capabilities,’ Council on Foreign Relations (blog), 3 February 2005, https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/iraqiraqs-prewar-military-capabilities. 86. Interview with Bruce Flatin, former US political counselor, US Embassy Kabul; and Association for Diplomatic Studies & Training (website), ‘The assassination of Ambassador Spike Dubs—Kabul, 1979,’ https://adst.org/2013/01/theassassination-of-ambassador-spike-dubs-kabul-1979/. 87. Christian Friedrich Ostermann, ‘New evidence on the war in Afghanistan,’ Cold War International History Project Bulletin, issue 14/15 (2003): 139: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/CWIHPBulletin14-15_p2_0.pdf. 88. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars. 89. Talking About Talks: Toward a Political Settlement in Afghanistan, Asia Report No. 2221 (Brussels, Belgium: International Crisis Group, 26 March 2012), 5, https://d2071andvip0wj.cloudfront.net/221-talking-about-talks-toward-apolitical-settlement-in-afghanistan.pdf. 90. Artemy M. Kalinovsky, A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal From Afghanistan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011); and Pavel Baev, Russian Energy Policy and Military Power: Putin’s Quest for Greatness (New York: Routledge, 2009), 18–20. 91. Baev, Russian Energy Policy and Military Power. 92. Kalinovsky, A Long Goodbye. 93. Kalinovsky. 94. Andrew and Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way. 95. Talking About Talks: Toward a Political Settlement in Afghanistan. 96. Peter L. Bergen, The Osama Bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of Al-Qaeda’s Leader (New York: Free Press, 2006);

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and Coll, Ghost Wars. Wehrey, Saudi-Iranian Relations Since the Fall of Saddam. Nader et al., Iran’s Influence in Afghanistan; Alireza Nader and Joya Laha, Iran’s Balancing Act in Afghanistan (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2011), https://www.rand.org/pubs/occasional_papers/OP322.html. Coll, Ghost Wars. Michael O’Hanlon, A Retrospective on the So-Called Revolution in Military Affairs (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2018), https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/FP_20180829_defense_advances_pt1.pdf. ‘Report of proliferation-related acquisition in 1997’ (CIA, n.d.), https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/archived-reports1/acq1997.xhtml#Syria. Khalidi, Sowing Crisis. Baev, Russian Energy Policy and Military Power, 369. On the lasting impact of the incident on US policy, even as America has reengaged more heavily in Somalia, see, for example, Mark Moyar, ‘How American special operators gradually returned to Somalia,’ The Atlantic, 14 May 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/05/somalia-navy-seals/526023/. Bergman and Hope, Rise and Kill First. See, for instance, Oona Hathaway et al., ‘The power to detain: Detention of terrorism suspects after 9/11,’ Yale International Law Journal 38, no. 1 (2013), https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjil/vol38/iss1/4/. Sean McFate, The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). Andrew Monaghan, ‘“An enemy at the gates” or “from victory to victory”? Russian foreign policy,’ International Affairs 84, no. 4 (July 2008): 717–33, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2346.2008.00734.x. Vladimir Putin, transcript of ‘Speech and the following discussion at the Munich conference on security policy,’ 10 February 2007, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/24034. Monaghan, ‘“An enemy at the gates”’ or “from victory to victory”?’ David Hollis, ‘Cyberwar case study Georgia 2008,’ Small Wars Journal, 6 January 2011, http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/journal/docs-temp/639-hollis.pdf. Hollis. For one discussion of this transformation, see Marc Lynch, The New Arab Wars: Uprisings and Anarchy in the Middle East (New York: Public Affairs, 2016). Daniel Byman, ‘Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have a disastrous Yemen strategy,’ Lawfare, 16 July 2018, https://www.lawfareblog.com/saudi-arabia-and-united-arab-emirates-have-disastrous-yemen-strategy; and Ethan Bronner and Michael Slackman, ‘Saudi troops enter Bahrain to help put down unrest,’ New York Times, 14 March 2003, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/world/middleeast/15bahrain.html. Iran’s Priorities in a Turbulent Middle East. Peter Bergen and Alyssa Sims, ‘Airstrikes and civilian casualties in Libya: Since the 2011 NATO intervention,’ New America, 20 June 2018, https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/reports/airstrikes-and-civilian-casualtieslibya/; and Frederic M. Wehrey, The Burning Shores: Inside the Battle for the New Libya (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018). Catrina Steward, ‘Russia accuses Nato of “expanding” UN Libya resolution,’ The Independent, 5 July 2011, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/russia-accuses-nato-of-expanding-un-libya-resolution-2306996.html. David Sterman and Nate Rosenblatt, All Jihad Is Local: Volume II: ISIS in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula (Washington, DC: New America, 5 April 2018), https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/policy-papers/alljihad-local-volume-ii/; and Charles R. Lister, The Syrian Jihad: Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Evolution of an Insurgency (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). R. Kim Cragin, ‘Semi-proxy wars and U.S. counterterrorism strategy,’ Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 38, no. 5 (4 May 2015): 311–27, https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2015.1018024. Barak Ravid, ‘The Israel-Iran cold war is getting hotter,’ Axios, 10 May 2018, https://www.axios.com/the-israel-irancold-war-is-getting-hotter-85cae81c-5b9e-4b30-a317-91e297ddda81.html; Max Fisher, ‘How the Iranian-Saudi proxy struggle tore apart the Middle East,’ New York Times, 19 November 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/world/middleeast/iran-saudi-proxy-war.html; and Ariel Cohen, ‘Russia is roaring back to the Middle East while America is asleep,’ The National Interest, 23 November 2017,

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https://nationalinterest.org/feature/russia-roaring-back-the-middle-east-while-america-asleep-23323. Florence Gaub, ‘Arab wars: Calculating the costs,’ European Union Institute for Security Studies, October 2017, https://www.iss.europa.eu/sites/default/files/EUISSFiles/Brief%2025%20Arab%20wars.pdf. Euan McKirdy, ‘UNHCR report: More displaced now than after WWII,’ CNN, 20 June 2016, https://www.cnn.com/2016/06/20/world/unhcr-displaced-peoples-report/index.html. Joseph Felter and Brian Fishman, Iranian Strategy in Iraq: Politics and ‘Other Means’ (West Point, NY: Combatting Terrorism Center, 13 October 2008), https://ctc.usma.edu/app/uploads/2010/06/Iranian-Strategy-in-Iraq.pdf. Phil Stewart, ‘In first, U.S. presents its evidence of Iran weaponry from Yemen,’ Reuters, 14 December 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-iran-arms/in-first-u-s-presents-its-evidence-of-iran-weaponry-from-yemenidUSKBN1E82J6. Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo, ‘U.S. relies heavily on Saudi money to support Syrian rebels,’ New York Times, 3 January 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/world/middleeast/us-relies-heavily-on-saudi-money-to-supportsyrian-rebels.html. Jackson Doering, ‘Washington’s militia problem in Syria is an Iran problem,’ Policy Watch 2932, Washington Institute (website), 19 February 2018, http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/washingtons-militia-problem-insyria-is-an-iran-problem. Charles Lister, ‘Testimony: Syria after the missile strikes: Policy options,’ testimony to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, 27 April 2017, http://www.mei.edu/content/article/testimony-syria-after-missile-strikes-policy-options; and Sergey Sukhankin, ‘“Continuing war by other means”: The case of Wagner, Russia’s premier private military company in the Middle East,’ Jamestown Foundation (website), 13 July 2018, https://jamestown.org/program/continuing-war-byother-means-the-case-of-wagner-russias-premier-private-military-company-in-the-middle-east/. ‘Arming Iraq’s Kurds: Fighting IS, inviting conflict’ (International Crisis Group, 12 May 2015), https://d2071andvip0wj.cloudfront.net/158-arming-iraq-s-kurds-fighting-is-inviting-conflict.pdf. Karim Mezran and Elissa Miller, ‘Libya: From intervention to proxy war,’ issue brief, Atlantic Council, July 2017, http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/images/publications/Libya_From_Intervention_to_Proxy_War_web_712.pdf. US Department of Defense, ‘Department of Defense press briefing by Pentagon Chief Spokesperson Dana W. White and Joint Staff Director Lt. Gen. Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. in the Pentagon Briefing Room,’ transcript of press briefing, 14 April 2018, https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript-View/Article/1493749/department-of-defense-pressbriefing-by-pentagon-chief-spokesperson-dana-w-whit/. Pavel Felgenhauer, ‘Death of military contractors illuminates Russia’s war by proxy in Syria,’ Jamestown Foundation (website), 15 February 2018, https://jamestown.org/program/death-military-contractors-illuminates-russias-war-proxysyria/. Felgenhauer. Ben Connable, Jason H. Campbell, and Dan Madden, Stretching and Exploiting Thresholds for High-Order War: How Russia, China, and Iran Are Eroding American Influence Using Time-Tested Measures Short of War, research report, RR-1003-A (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2016). Sukhankin, ‘Continuing war by other means.’ Byman and Kreps, ‘Agents of destruction?’ Mumford, Proxy Warfare, 7. Sukhankin, ‘Continuing war by other means.’ See, for instance, Robert Levgold, ‘Managing the new Cold War,’ Foreign Affairs, July/August 2014; Samuel Charap and Jeremy Shapiro, ‘How to avoid a new Cold War,’ Brookings (website), 25 September 2014, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-to-avoid-a-new-cold-war/; and Lawrence Freedmen, ‘Putin’s new Cold War,’ New Statesman, 14 March 2018, https://www.newstatesman.com/2018/03/putin-s-new-cold-war. Innes, Making Sense of Proxy Wars, xiii. Khalidi, Sowing Crisis. Frederick Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer, ‘Shell companies helping Assad’s war,’ Seudeutsche Zeitung, n.d., https://panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de/articles/570fc0c6a1bb8d3c3495bb47/. Brooke Harrington, Capital Without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). Eli Lake, ‘Inside the hunt for Assad’s billions,’ The Daily Beast, 17 August 2012, https://www.thedailybeast.com/inside-

the-hunt-for-assads-billions. 144. Frederick Obermaier and Bastian Obermayer, ‘Shell companies helping Assad’s war’; Anthony Shadid, ‘Syrian businessman becomes magnet for anger and dissent,’ New York Times, 30 April 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/world/asia/01makhlouf.html; ‘U.S. imposes sanctions on Syrians, entities linked to government,’ Reuters, 16 May 2017. 145. Byman and Kreps. CHAPTER 2. SYRIA 2011–19 1. 2. 3. 4.

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‘Transcript: Secretary of Defense Mark Esper on “Face the Nation,” October 13, 2019,’ CBS Face the Nation, 13 October 2019. Johnson et al., ‘U.S. prepares to withdraw from northern Syria before Turkish operation,’ NBC, 7 October 2019. ‘Statement from the Press Secretary,’ (The White House, 6 October 2019), https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefingsstatements/statement-press-secretary-85/. @realDonaldJTrump, ‘ … Almost 3 years, but it is time for us to get out of these ridiculous endless wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home. WE WILL FIGHT WHERE IT IS TO OUR BENEFIT, AND ONLY FIGHT TO WIN. Turkey, Europe, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Russia and the Kurds will now have to....’ Twitter, 7 October 2019. Katie Bo Williams, ‘Outgoing Syria envoy admits hiding US troop numbers; praises Trump’s Mideast record,’ Defense One, 12 November 2020. Ilan Goldenberg, Nicholas Heras, Kayleigh Thomas, and Jennie Matuschak, ‘Countering Iran in the gray zone: What the United States should learn from Israel’s operations in Syria,’ Center for a New American Security,14 April 2020. ‘Interim national security strategic guidance,’ White House, March 2021. Erika Solomon, ‘The rise and fall of a US-backed rebel commander in Syria,’ Financial Times, 9 February 2017. Ghias Aljundi, ‘Local governance inside Syria: Challenges, opportunities and recommendations,’ Institute for War & Peace Studies, 2014. Aljundi. The authors worked at Caerus Associates, a research and design firm which conducted field research in Syria from 2012 to 2015, collecting data on economic conditions, population attitudes, and local atmospherics, as well as information gathered through interviews and social media archives. Caerus reporting, November 2012–January 2013. The local council of Saraqeb was a notable exception to this finding. Saraqeb is situated at the intersection of two of northern Syria’s largest highways. Yet residents continued to govern themselves despite the presence of many armed groups. For how they did this, see: Anand Gopal, ‘Syria’s last bastion of freedom,’ The New Yorker, 3 December 2018. These regions were governed by preexisting municipal structures which were not as clearly organized as an ad hoc municipal government in opposition. In minority Kurdish and Druze communities, the municipal governments made more deliberate accommodations with the Syrian regime. See, for example, this dispatch from 2012: Phil Sands, ‘Syria’s Druze community: A silent minority in no rush to take sides,’ The National, 22 February 2012. ‘U.S. government assistance to Syria,’ US Department of State, 9 May 2013; Richard Youngs, ‘Bolstering Europe’s localist approach to Syria,’ Carnegie Europe, 4 April 2018. Frances Z. Brown, ‘Dilemmas of stabilization assistance: The case of Syria,’ Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, October 2018, 1. Brown, 1. Brown, 35. Brown. Daniel Moritz-Rabson, ‘In wartime Syria, local councils and civil institutions fill a gap,’ PBS Newshour, 31 July 2016. ‘To live in revolutionary time: Building local councils in Syria,’ It’s Going Down, 19 May 2017. This section draws upon the authors’ previous research in ‘Mapping the conflict in Aleppo, Syria,’ Caerus Associates, February 2014. Out of safety concerns, we used the term ‘Islamic Brigades’ as a proxy for all fundamentalist insurgents. In order to achieve this, the method we adopted to protect survey respondents was to contrast ‘Islamic Brigades’ with ‘local militias.’ This helped respondents choose from fighters who were either from Aleppo (nearly all militias), or those who

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were not (mainly IS, since they were the brigade taking over territory in Aleppo city at the time). The surveys were conducted by referral sampling of 560 residents who resided in all 56 neighborhoods in Aleppo. These residents were surveyed once a month for four months. For more on the sampling methodology, please see the authors’ previous research in ‘Mapping the conflict in Aleppo, Syria,’ Caerus Associates, February 2014. Safety was determined by asking subjective questions like ‘How safe is your neighborhood?’ We also asked more objective questions, such as ‘How often do you let your children out of the home?’ or ‘About how many times do you travel outside of your neighborhood each week?’ and ‘How frequent are crimes such as stealing or kidnapping in your neighborhood?’ Restrictive checkpoints were quantified by counting the proportion of residents being stopped as they passed the checkpoint. The most restrictive checkpoints are defined as being places where over half of residents are stopped as they pass through the checkpoint. Liwa al-Tawhid’s local legitimacy flowed from its leader, Abdul Qadr al-Saleh, who was from a village north of Aleppo. The theory that underpins this set of behaviors, which we designate the ‘theory of competitive control,’ is described in detail in David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 114. Rania Abouzeid, No Turning Back: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018), 107. Author’s interview with Qutaiba Idlibi, 23 May 2019. Ibid. The first name for the group was the ‘Jebel al-Zawiya Martyrs Brigade,’ which was so named when it was a small group based in a mountainous region in Idlib. As Maarouf received more funding in 2012, he renamed the group the ‘Syrian Martyrs Brigade.’ See Cody Roche, ‘Syrian opposition factions in the Syrian civil war,’ Bellingcat (blog), 13 August 2016. Author’s interview with Qutaiba Idlibi, 23 May 2019. Author’s interview with Qutaiba Idlibi, 23 May 2019; Author’s interview with Zaina Erhaim, 3 January 2020; Rania Abouzeid, ‘Syria’s secular and Islamist rebels: Who are the Saudis and the Qataris arming?’ Time, 18 September 2012. Liz Sly, ‘The rise and ugly fall of a moderate Syrian rebel offers lessons for the West,’ Washington Post, 5 January 2015. Tom Bowman, ‘CIA is quietly ramping up aid to Syrian rebels, sources say,’ NPR, 23 April 2014; Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo, ‘U.S. relies heavily on Saudi money to support Syrian rebels,’ New York Times, 23 January 2016. Liz Sly, ‘U.S.-backed Syria rebels routed by fighters linked to Al-Qaeda,’ Washington Post, 2 November 2014. The information deficiency problem is often covered as a separate issue within the broader principal-agent problem in the ‘adverse selection effect,’ which describes when patrons ‘do not have adequate information about the competence or reliability of agents’ before establishing a relationship with them. Idean Salehyan, ‘The delegation of war to rebel organizations,’ Journal of Conflict Resolution 54, no. 3 (2010): 495. However, our reading of the adverse selection effect is that it is not adequately expressed inside a principal-agent relationship. Framing the problem as within the principalagent relationship seems to work backward in describing why sponsor-proxy relationships failed, but is not a strong enough framework to explain why a given patron selected that proxy as opposed to others, or how the patron’s reading of the battlefield shaped its interest in finding proxies to begin with. On principal-agent problems, see Robert W. Rauchhaus, ‘Principal-agent problems in humanitarian intervention: Moral hazards, adverse selection, and the commitment dilemma,’ International Studies Quarterly 53, no. 4 (December 2009): 871–84. One account of the formation of armed groups at the beginning of Syria’s revolution describes them as ‘certainly not anyone’s first choice, nor … the application of a ready-made ideology of militant action. Rather, the military component emerged primarily as a by-product of the regime’s militarized confrontations with the popular protests from the outset. As this reaction grew, it gradually began to draw justification from ideologies already available to Syrians, including the idea of “jihad.” But the strongest and most legitimate justifications have always been self-defence and the protection of civilians from regime brutality.’ Yassin Al-Haj Saleh, Impossible Revolution (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2017), 78. One early and prominent insurgent group who started as protectors of Syrian protestors was the Farouq Group. Abouzeid, No Turning Back, 37, 74. These payments highlighted the differences between opportunistic rebel groups, in which new members join for payoffs, and activist rebel groups, in which members are bound by solidarity around an in-group. At first, rebel groups like Maarouf’s were activist, but they changed to an opportunistic group once they received foreign funding. This made them

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less resilient over the long run than fundamentalist groups (i.e., al-Qaeda-affiliated insurgents), who we would categorize as ‘activist.’ The chapter does not delve into these distinctions, as it is not the focus, but acknowledges this dimension of analysis is useful in understanding the reasons some insurgents survived in Syria’s war and some did not. For these distinctions and examples in other conflicts, see Jeremy M. Weinstein, Inside Rebellion: The Politics of Insurgent Violence, Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Author’s interview with an active US Syrian expatriate fundraiser. Author’s interview with Haid Haid, 21 May 2019. Ibid. Erika Solomon, ‘Rural fighters pour into Syria’s Aleppo for battle,’ Reuters, 29 July 2012. Anonymous author’s interview, Spring 2019. The details of another foreign-backed offensive in Syria (this one in Damascus in 2013) were leaked by Edward Snowden. They are described by Murtaza Hussain, ‘NSA document says Saudi prince directly ordered coordinated attack by Syrian rebels on Damascus,’ The Intercept, 24 October 2017. Bowman, ‘CIA is quietly ramping up aid to Syrian rebels, sources say’; Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo, ‘U.S. relies heavily on Saudi money to support Syrian rebels.’ Erika Solomon, ‘The rise and fall of a US-backed rebel commander in Syria.’ Ibid. Author’s interview with Qutaiba Idlibi, 23 May 2019. Jamie Dettmer, ‘Western, Gulf weapons supplied to Syria rebels leaked to Islamic State,’ Voice of America, 13 December 2017. This chapter takes as a starting point that if the conflict in question was truly important, the patron would use its own forces to prosecute it directly. Therefore, the ‘High Priority’ and ‘Low Priority’ designations are not relative to all security priorities, but rather to security priorities that the sponsor is willing to delegate to a foreign force. This is in keeping with the strategy of ‘by, with, and through’ described by Katz, ‘Imperfect proxies: The pros and perils of partnering with non-state actors for CT,’ Center for Strategic & International Studies, 29 January 2019. Fred Hof, ambassador in 2012 for the Syria transition, explained the interagency confusion with the US mission in Syria: ‘Our view in the State Department was, fine, if this is the judgment the president comes to, that Assad should step aside, then what we should really have in place is an interagency strategy to make it happen.’ Hof regretted that the White House did not develop that strategy, on the assumption that “this guy [Assad] is toast.”’ Source: Charles Glass, ‘Tell me how this ends: America’s muddled involvement with Syria,’ Harper’s, February 2019. Andrew J. Tabler, Jeffrey White, and Simon Henderson, ‘Field reports on the Syrian opposition,’ Washington Institute,12 March 2013. Aron Lund, ‘How Assad’s enemies gave up on the Syrian opposition,’ The Century Foundation, 17 October 2017. Faysal Itani and Nate Rosenblatt, ‘US policy in Syria: A seven-year Reckoning,’ Atlantic Council, 10 September 2018. James F. Jeffrey and Nathan Sales, ‘Special envoy for the global coalition to defeat ISIS Ambassador James F. Jeffrey and Counterterrorism Coordinator Ambassador Nathan A. Sales,’ US Department of State, 1 August 2019; Lara Seligman, ‘Britain, France agree to send additional troops to Syria,’ Foreign Policy, 9 July 2019. ‘Statement by the President on ISIL,’ White House Office of the Press Secretary, 10 September 2014. Rukmini Callimachi, ‘ISIS Caliphate crumbles as last village in Syria falls,’ New York Times, 23 March 2019. ‘Statement by the President on ISIL.’ Aron Lund, ‘Origins of the Syrian Democratic Forces: A primer,’ Syria Deeply, 22 January 2016. @RealDonaldTrump, ‘We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.’ Twitter, 19 December 2018. Callimachi, ‘ISIS Caliphate crumbles as last village in Syria falls.’ The ‘calibrated withdrawal’ comment is drawn from a US policy expert speaking at a roundtable hosted by the Atlantic Council, Foreign Policy Research Institute, and Konrad-Adenauer Stiftung: Aaron Stein and Emily Burchfield, ‘The future of northeast Syria’ (Atlantic Council/Foreign Policy Research Institute, August 2019). The ‘indefinite endgame’ position was explained in an article in the Atlantic: Colin P. Clarke and Ariane Tabatabai, ‘America’s indefinite endgame in Syria,’ The Atlantic, 16 October 2018. Brett McGurk, ‘Hard truths in Syria,’ Foreign Affairs, June 2019. Jared Szuba, ‘It took almost a year, but a simple shift in US stance led to Turkey’s assault against Syria’s Kurds,’ Defense Post, 1 November 2019.

68. Author’s interviews with a Syrian Kurdish journalist and a former US government official working on the Syria portfolio. Also, see Szuba. 69. Author’s interview with coalition SOF commander, April 2019. 70. Jeffrey was not out on his own making these comments to the SDF; others in the administration supported this policy, as mentioned. However, the position was undercut by President Trump’s announced support for Turkey’s safe zone plan on 6 October 2019. 71. Aaron Stein, ‘The SDF’s post-American future,’ Foreign Affairs, 31 August 2018. 72. Mazloum Abdi, ‘If we have to choose between compromise and genocide, we will choose our people,’ Foreign Policy, 13 October 2019. 73. Hard copy of a letter, dated 7 October 2019, by Heimin Kobane, Chief of Staff to General Mazloum Kobane, in the author’s possession. 74. @RTErdogan, ‘The Turkish Armed Forces, together with the Syrian National Army, just launched #OperationPeaceSpring against PKK/YPG and Daesh terrorists in northern Syria. Our mission is to prevent the creation of a terror corridor across our southern border, and to bring peace to the area.’ Twitter, 9 October 2019. 75. For the 50,000-partner estimate, see: ‘US commander says Syrian Arab coalition is now majority group within SDF,’ Rudaw, 3 March 2017. For the 70,000-partner estimate, see: Elizabeth Tsurkov, ‘The seeds of Trump’s abandonment of Syrian Kurds were sown by Obama,’ Haaretz, 10 October 2019. 76. The PYD (‘Partiya Yekîtiya Demokrat,’ the ‘Democratic Union Party’), a Syrian Kurdish political party representing the YPG (‘Yekîneyên Parastina Gel,’ the ‘People’s Protection Units’), a Syrian Kurdish militia that a US State Department cable in 2007 called the ‘PKK’s political affiliate in Syria.’ ‘Syrian government represses pro-PKK rallies,’ Embassy Damascus, 8 November 2007, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/07DAMASCUS1094_a.html; The YPJ (‘Yekîneyên Parastina Jin,’ the ‘Women’s Protection Units’) is the women’s version of the YPG. 77. Greg Botelho, ‘Turkish leader: U.S. responsible for “sea of blood” for supporting Syrian Kurds,’ CNN, 10 February 2016. 78. Aron Lund, ‘Syria’s Kurds at the center of America’s anti-jihadi strategy,’ Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2 December 2015. 79. Ash Carter, ‘Media availability with Secretary Carter in Erbil, Iraq,’ US Department of Defense, 17 December 2015). 80. Daniel Wilkofsky and Khalid Fatah, ‘Northern Syria’s anti-Islamic State coalition has an Arab problem,’ War on the Rocks, 18 September 2017. 81. ‘US commander says Syrian Arab coalition is now majority group within SDF.’ 82. Aron Lund, ‘Syria’s Kurds at the center of America’s anti-jihadi strategy,’ Carnegie Middle East Center (blog), 2 December 2015. 83. Barak Barfi, ‘Ascent of the PYD and SDF,’ Research Note, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, April 2016. 84. ‘US commander says Syrian Arab coalition is now majority group within SDF.’ 85. Amy Austin Holmes, ‘SDF’s Arab majority rank Turkey as the biggest threat to NE Syria,’ Wilson Center, 2019. 86. ‘Daily press briefing by the Press Secretary Josh Earnest 10/30/15,’ White House Office of the Press Secretary, 30 October 2015. 87. Barfi, ‘Ascent of the PYD and SDF.’ 88. Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Liz Sly, ‘First images emerge of U.S. special operations forces in the fight to retake Raqqa,’ Washington Post, 26 May 2016; John Ismay, ‘U.S. says 2,000 troops are in Syria, a fourfold increase,’ New York Times, 6 December 2017. 89. As the counter-IS coalition’s website explains, ‘there is a role for every country to play in degrading and defeating ISIS.’ See ‘About us—the global coalition to defeat ISIS,’ US Department of State, accessed 2 December 2019. 90. For examples of readouts from ministerial level meetings of the counter-IS coalition, please see: ‘The global coalition to defeat ISIS,’ US Department of State, accessed 2 December 2019. 91. Russia, Iran, and the Syrian government of course remained concerned about US activity within Syria being a violation of Syrian sovereignty, but they largely left the counter-IS effort alone. However, in early 2020—in the wake of the fallout of the October crisis in the United States’ proxy strategy—Russia and Syria began to probe US forces with Syria, aiming to reclaim all of its territory. 92. This is not to say that it solved them entirely. For example, in order to placate Turkey, US advisors resisted giving heavy weapons such as mortars and anti-armor missiles to the SDF. As a result, the force remained largely a light infantry force

93. 94. 95. 96.

that relied on US airstrikes (rather than its own artillery or bunker-busting munitions) to defeat IS forces in urban combat. In the battle of Raqqa, and in other engagements, this reliance on airstrikes was tantamount to using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut, and resulted in significant property damage that might otherwise have been avoided. George F. Kennan, Memoirs 1925–1950 (Atlantic-Little, Brown, & Co., 1967), 183–4. Kennan, 183–4. Katz, ‘Imperfect proxies,’ 8. Ibid.

CHAPTER 3. SOCIAL NETWORKS, CLASS, AND THE SYRIAN PROXY WAR 1.

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5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

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Dara Conduit, The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108758321; Naomí Ramírez Díaz, Thes Muslim Brotherhood in Syria: The Democratic Option of Islamism, Routledge/St. Andrews Syrian Studies Series 1 (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018); Raphaël Lefèvre, Ashes of Hama: The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Dominique Soguel, ‘How Saudi aid made a construction worker a top Syrian rebel commander,’ Christian Science Monitor, 6 May 2014. Lefèvre, Ashes of Hama. Bichara Khader, La Question Agraire Dans Le Monde Arabe: Le Cas de La Syrie (Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium: CIACO, 1984); Norman N. Lewis, Nomads and Settlers in Syria and Jordan, 1800–1980, digitally printed version, Cambridge Middle East Library 9 (Cambridge, UK; London; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Lefèvre, Ashes of Hama. Hanna Batatu, ‘Syria’s Muslim brethren,’ MERIP Reports (Middle East Research and Information Project, December 1982); Lawson, ‘Social bases for the Hama revolt.’ Author interviews with Brotherhood-linked figures, 2018, 2019. Author interviews with high-ranking Liwa al-Tawhid leaders, 2020. See, for example, Quintan Wiktorowicz, ‘Anatomy of the Salafi movement,’ Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 29, no. 3 (May 2006): 207–39. Author interview with Manbij revolutionary Abu Abdullah al-Salafi and other Salafist-linked figures, 2019, 2020. Henri Lauzière, The Making of Salafism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century, Religion, Culture, and Public Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). Moussalli, Ahmad, ‘Hassan Al-Banna’ in The Oxford Handbook of Islam and Politics, John L. Esposito and Emad Eldin Shahin, eds. (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Stéphane Lacroix and George Holoch, Awakening Islam: The Politics of Religious Dissent in Contemporary Saudi Arabia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Stéphane Lacroix, ‘Al-Albani’s revolutionary approach to hadith,’ ISIM Review 21, no. 1 (2008): 6–7. Lauzière, The Making of Salafism. Thomas Pierret, ‘Salafis at war in Syria: Logics of fragmentation and realignment,’ in Salafism After the Arab Awakening: Contending with People’s Power (London: Hurst, 2016). See: Zoltan Pall, ‘Salafi dynamics in Kuwait: Politics, fragmentation and change,’ in Salafism After the Arab Awakening; Lacroix and Holoch, Awakening Islam. Author interview with Abu Anas, May 2018. Ibid. Meijer, Roel, ‘Politicizing Al-Jarh Wa-l-Ta’di: Rabi b. Hadi Al-Madkhali and the transnational battle for religious authority,’ in The Transmission and Dynamics of the Textual Sources of Islam: Essays in Honour of Harald Motzki, Nicolet Boekhoff van der Voort et al., eds., Islamic History and Civilization 89 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2011), 380– 1. Thomas Pierret, ‘Brothers in alms: Salafi financiers and the Syrian insurgency,’ Carnegie Middle East Center (blog), 18 May 2018. Aron Lund, ‘Into the tunnels: The rise and fall of Syria’s rebel enclave in the eastern Ghouta,’ The Century Foundation (21 December 2016), 9. Joas Wagemakers, A Quietist Jihadi: The Ideology and Influence of Abu Muhammad Al-Maqdisi (Cambridge, UK; New

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30.

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34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

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York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Charles R. Lister, The Syrian Jihad: Al-Qaeda, the Islamic State and the Evolution of an Insurgency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 32; Huzayfa Osman interview with Zacharia Qarisli, May 2018. Line Khatib, Islamic Revivalism in Syria: The Rise and Fall of Ba’thist Secularism, 1. Issued in paperback, Routledge Studies in Political Islam 7 (London: Routledge, 2014). Bilal Y. Saab, ‘Al-Qaʿida’s presence and influence in Lebanon,’ CTC Sentinel 1, no. 12 (November 2008), https://www.ctc.usma.edu/al-qaidas-presence-and-influence-in-lebanon/; Line Khatib, ‘The pre-2011 roots of Syria’s Islamist militants,’ Middle East Journal 72, no. 2 (Spring 2018). ‘[Tr. Abu Muhammad Al-Jolani. Commander of Jabhat Fatah Al-Sham] ,’ Al Jazeera, 26 July 2015; ‘[Tr. Who is “ISIS commander” Aimad Yassin] ,’ Al Mudun, 22 September 2016. Brian Fishman et al., Bombers, Bank Accounts and Bleedout, Combating Terrorism Center, 2008, 74. Lacroix, Awakening Islam. Courtney Freer, ‘From co-optation to crackdown,’ in The Qatar Crisis, Project on Middle East Political Science, 2017; Stéphane Lacroix, ‘Saudi Arabia’s Muslim Brotherhood predicament,’ in The Qatar Crisis, Project on Middle East Political Science, 2017. Randeep Ramesh, ‘The long-running family rivalries behind the Qatar crisis,’ The Guardian, 21 July 2017; Jamie Dettmer, ‘U.S. ally Qatar shelters jihadi moneymen,’ The Daily Beast, 14 April 2017; ‘[Tr. Get to know the Al-Ghufran tribe that complains that “Qatar withdrew citizenship from its members”] ,”’ BBC Arabic, 9 March 2018. ‘Qatar coup plot may thwart U.S. war plans,’ Stratfor, 25 October 2002; ‘Doha denies: Claims of a coup attempt in Qatar,’ Al-Dostour (republishing original Reuters piece), 30 October 2002; ‘Qatar denies news of a coup attempt,’ Albawaba (republishing of original Reuters piece), 30 October 2002; Dettmer, ‘U.S. ally Qatar shelters jihadi moneymen’; Michael R. Gordon and Eric Schmitt, ‘AFTEREFFECTS: BASES; U.S. will move air operations to Qatar base,’ New York Times, 28 April 2003. Robert Mendick, ‘Al-Qaeda terror financier worked for Qatari government,’ The Telegraph, 12 October 2014; Jay Solomon and Nour Malas, ‘Qatar’s ties to militants strain alliance,’ Wall Street Journal, 23 February 2015. Andrew Hammond, ‘Qatar’s leadership transition: Like father, like son,’ European Council on Foreign Relations, 11 February 2014; David B. Roberts, ‘Qatar, the Ikhwan, and transnational relations in the Gulf,’ in The Qatar Crisis, Project on Middle East Political Science, 2017, 56. Jane Kinninmont, ‘Kuwait’s parliament: An experiment in semi-democracy’ (London: Chatham House, August 2012), https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/public/Research/Middle%20East/0812bp_kinninmont.pdf. ‘Prisoners of the past Kuwaiti Bidun and the burden of statelessness,’ Human Rights Watch, 13 June 2011; Shafeeq Ghabra, ‘Kuwait: At the crossroads of change or political stagnation,’ Middle East Institute (blog), 20 May 2014. Zoltan Pall, ‘Kuwaiti Salafism and its growing influence in the Levant,’ Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 7 May 2014. Author interview with Osama al-Hossein, activist from Saraqib, Idlib, August 2017. Author interviews with multiple activists and rebels in Saraqib, Taftanaz, and Jebel al-Zawiya, 2012–17. Author interview with al-Sheikh, 2012; interview with other members of his faction, Suqur al-Sham, 2017. ‘ ,’ Al-Akhbar, 17 January 2014; ‘Tentative jihad: Syria’s fundamentalist opposition,’ Middle East & North Africa Report, International Crisis Group, 12 October 2012. Pall, ‘Kuwaiti Salafism and its growing influence in the Levant.’ ‘Use of social media by terrorist fundraisers & financiers,’ Camstoll Group, 2016, 5. Elizabeth Dickinson, ‘Playing with fire: Why private gulf financing for Syria’s extremist rebels risks igniting sectarian conflict at home,’ Analysis Paper, Saban Center at Brookings 6 December 2013, 6. The quote within this quotation is from an interview Dickinson conducted with a ‘logistics team member.’ Author interviews in Sharjeh (2012); Taftanaz (2012); and Saraqib (2017). Ahrar Al-Sham Film,Al Jazeera Arabic, 2016. ‘[Tr. New “AHS” leader: From “Al-Qa’ida” to “the New Brotherhood”] ,”’ Al-Mudun, 30 November2016. Aron Lund, ‘Syria’s Salafi insurgents: The rise of the Syrian Islamic front,’ The Swedish Institute of International Affairs, March 2013, 30; Thomas Pierret, ‘Salafis at war in Syria: Logics of fragmentation and realignment,’ 18–19;

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Dickinson, ‘Playing with fire,’ 13. C.J. Chivers and Eric Schmitt, ‘Arms airlift to Syria rebels expands, with aid from C.I.A,’ New York Times, 24 March 2013. Bill Roggio, ‘Al Nusrah Front claims 3 more suicide attacks in Daraa,’ Long War Journal (blog), 27 November 2012. ‘[Tr. The truth behind Brigadier General “Mustafa Al-Sheikh”: Contain the revolution] .,’ Al-Durur Al-Shamia, 12 September 2013. Adnan Al Arour, With Syria Until Victory—Al-Sheikh Adnan Al-Arour 2012-4-26, 2012; Adnan Al Arour, With Syria Until Victory Al-Sheikh Adnan Al-Arour Hadi Al-Abdullah From Homs and the Brigadier General Mustafa Al-Sheikh Wisal Network 2012-7-12, 2012; Free Arab Media, With Syria Until Victory, Sheikh Adnan Al-Aroor, Med Mustafa AlSheikh and Bashir Al-Hajji, Al-Tawhid Brigade, Aleppo and Major General Muhammad Al-Hajj Ali 09-08-2012, 2012. Rania Abouzeid, No Turning Back: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018), 107–9, 146–50. Aron Lund, ‘Struggling to adapt: The Muslim Brotherhood in a new Syria,’ Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 7 May 2013. Joseph Holiday, ‘Syria’s maturing insurgency,’ Institute for the Study of War, June 2012, 28; Lefèvre, Ashes of Hama, 207. ‘[Tr. Zaman Al-Wasl opens the opposition’s financial portfolio … where did the LD52m to the SNC go?] “ ,’ Zaman Al-Wasl, 8 March 2015; Lund, ‘Struggling to adapt.’ Matthew Lee, ‘US poised to vet possible arms for Syrian rebels,’ Associated Press, 24 May 2012, https://news.yahoo.com/us-poised-vet-possible-arms-syrian-rebels-161312841.html; Sheera Frenkel, ‘Brotherhood “buying influence with arms,”’ The Times, 14 September 2012. ‘[Tr. The Syrian National Movement file part 2] ,’Dar News, 10 November 2018; Raphaël Lefèvre, ‘The Muslim Brotherhood prepares for a comeback in Syria,’ Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 15 May 2013; Author interviews with rebels in East Ghouta, August 2020. Stephanie Nebehay, ‘Most Houla victims killed in summary executions: UN,’ Reuters, 29 May 2012. Frederic Wehrey, ‘Saudi Arabia reins in its clerics on Syria,’ Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 14 June 2012. Global Voices, 9 June 2012, ‘Saudi Arabia: No to fundraising for Syria.’ ‘[Tr. Saudi Arabia … leading scholars’ ban [performing] jihad in Syria “without permission”] ,’ Al-Shuruq, 7 June 2012. Ernesto Londoño, ‘Visit by Egypt’s Morsi to Iran reflects foreign policy shift,’ Washington Post, 27 August 2012. Dickinson, ‘Playing with fire,’ 13; Thomas Pierret, ‘Salafis at war in Syria,’ 28. Nicholas Blanford, ‘Jihadis may want to kill Assad. But is he lucky to have them?’ Christian Science Monitor, 10 October 2013; ‘The unknown role of Kuwait’s Salafis in Syria,’ The Syrian Observer (Translated from Al-Akhbar), 26 March 2014; ‘Tr. [2013/09/29 | “Council of supporters for the Syrian revolution in Kuwait” which has created for us “Jaysh Al-Islam” and overees it!] 2013/09/29| ,’ Support Guidance for the Revolution in the Face of the Syrian ‘Frivolous’ Party, 29 September 2013; Pall, ‘Kuwaiti Salafism and its growing influence in the Levant,’ 27. Jay Solomon and Nour Malas, ‘U.S. bolsters ties to fighters in Syria,’ Wall Street Journal, 13 June 2012; Eric Schmitt, ‘C.I.A. said to aid in steering arms to Syrian opposition,’ New York Times, 21 June 2012; Ruth Sherlock and David Blair, ‘Muslim Brotherhood establishes militia inside Syria,’ The Telegraph, 3 August 2012; Rania Abouzeid, ‘Syria’s secular and Islamist rebels: Who are the Saudis and the Qataris arming?’ Time, 18 September 2012; Abouzeid, No Turning Back, 146–50. Lund, ‘Struggling to adapt’; ‘Ahmad Ramadan,’ Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 20 December 2011. Aron Lund, ‘Syrian jihadism,’ UIbrief, Swedish Institute of International Affairs, 14 September 2012; ‘Tentative jihad’; Lund, ‘Struggling to adapt’; Anne Marie Baylouny and Creighton A. Mullins, ‘Cash is king: Financial sponsorship and changing priorities in the Syrian civil war,’ Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 41, no. 12 (2 December 2018): 990–1010. Author interview with Arif Hajj Youssef, 2019; Charles Levinson, ‘Leadership rifts hobble Syrian rebels,’ Wall Street Journal, 10 September 2012; ‘[Tr. Map of armed factions in Aleppo] ,’ Al-Jumhuriyya, 6 March 2015. ‘Syria rebels seize key border crossings,’ Al Jazeera, 20 July 2012; Neil MacFarquhar, ‘Syrian rebels land deadly blow to Assad’s inner circle,’ New York Times, 18 July 2012.

69. Chivers and Schmitt, ‘Arms airlift to Syria rebels expands, with aid from C.I.A.’ 70. ‘Syria’s FSA reportedly got surface-to-air missiles, U.N. to convene over crisis,’ Al-Arabiya, 1 August 2012; Elizabeth Dickinson, ‘The case against Qatar,’ Foreign Policy, 30 September 2014; Raphaël Lefèvre, ‘The Syrian Brotherhood’s Islamic State challenge,’ Carnegie Middle East Center (blog), 11 February 2015; Military Council, Air Force Brigade Within Aleppo’s Military Council Shoots Down a Helicopter at Menagh, 2013; David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt, ‘U.S. weighs bolder effort to intervene in Syria’s conflict,’ New York Times, 28 November 2012; John Reed, ‘Chinese surfaceto-air missiles are being used by Syrian rebels,’ Foreign Policy, 28 February 2013. 71. Abouzeid, No Turning Back, 172–3. 72. C.J. Chivers and Eric Schmitt, ‘Saudis step up help for rebels in Syria with Croatian arms,’ New York Times, 25 February 2013. 73. Abouzeid, No Turning Back, 172–3; Pierret, ‘Salafis at war in Syria,’ 22; Lund, ‘Syria’s Salafi insurgents’; Chivers and Schmitt, ‘Arms airlift to Syria rebels expands, with aid from C.I.A’; ‘Ahrar Al-Sham,’ Mapping Militant Organizations (Stanford University), n.d.; ‘Ahrar Al-Sham jihadists emerge from shadows in north Syria,’ Agence France-Presse, 13 February 2013. 74. Abouzeid, No Turning Back, 213–14. 75. Murtaza Hussain, ‘NSA document says Saudi prince directly ordered coordinated attack by Syrian rebels on Damascus,’ Intercept, 24 October 2017. 76. Mark Mazzetti, C.J. Chivers, and Eric Schmitt, ‘Taking outsize role in Syria, Qatar funnels arms to rebels,’ New York Times, 29 June 2013. 77. Mariam Karoumy, ‘Saudi edges Qatar to control Syrian Rebel Support,’ Reuters, 31 May 2013. 78. Raphaël Lefèvre, ‘Can Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood salvage its relations with Riyadh?’ Carnegie Middle East Center, 28 March 2014; Raphaël Lefèvre, ‘Saudi Arabia and the Syrian Brotherhood,’ Middle East Institute (blog), 27 September 2013. 79. Hassan Hassan, ‘Syria is now Saudi Arabia’s problem,’ Foreign Policy, 6 June 2013. 80. Aland Kobani LCC, Jarablus City: Commander of the Youssef Al-Jader Brigades Speaks on Jabhat Al-Nusra’s Terrorism 2013-6-13, 2013; Zeina Khodr, ‘Meeting Al-Qaeda in Syria,’ Al Jazeera, 9 July 2013; ‘[Tr. ISIS wars in Aleppo and its countryside from August 2013 to August 2015] 2013 2015,’ Orient, August 2015. 81. Author interview with co-founder and lead financier for Liwa al-Tawhid and al-Jabha al-Shamia, July 2019; Yezid Sayigh, ‘Unifying Syria’s rebels: Saudi Arabia joins the fray,’ Carnegie Middle East Center, 28 October 2013. 82. Ernesto Londoño and Greg Miller, ‘CIA begins weapons delivery to Syrian rebels,’ Washington Post, 11 September 2013. 83. On the history of Timber Sycamore, see, for example: Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo, ‘U.S. relies heavily on Saudi money to support Syrian rebels,’ New York Times, 23 January 2016. 84. As noted above, a partial exception to this trend is in the Euphrates region around Lake Assad, where certain tribal elites had preexisting ties to Saudi Arabia. Still, this is only a partial exception, as these proxies were not able to survive the vicissitudes of Saudi funding. 85. Liz Sly, ‘Syrian rebels who received first U.S. missiles of war see shipment as “an important first step,”’ Washington Post, 27 April 2014. In December 2013, the United States also sold 15,000 anti-tank missiles to Saudi Arabia, allegedly for distribution in Syria. See: ‘The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia—tube-launched, optically-tracked wireguided 2A/2B radio-frequency (RF) missiles,’ News Release, Defense Security Cooperation Agency, 5 December 2013. 86. Patrick J. McDonnell and Nabih Bulos, ‘Syrian rebel leader killed in another blow to Assad foes,’ Los Angeles Times, 18 November 2013. 87. ‘Syria: Ahrar Al-Sham Leader killed by suicide bomber,’ BBC, 10 September 2014. 88. Department of the Treasury, ‘Treasury designates Al-Qa’ida supporters in Qatar and Yemen,’ 18 December 2013. 89. David Andrew Weinberg, ‘Qatar and terror finance part I: Negligence,’ Foundation for Defense of Democracies, December 2014, https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/defenddemocracy/uploads/publications/Qatar_Part_I.pdf; David Andrew Weinberg, ‘Qatar and terror finance part II: Private funders of Al-Qaeda in Syria,’ Foundation for Defense of Democracies, January 2017. 90. Author interviews with Hadhrani and Arab tribal figures from Manbij, 2017–19. 91. The Hosh is a confederation of five tribes found in the areas immediately south and east of Manbij: Bani Saʿid, al-ʿAun,

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al-Ghanaim, al-Kharraj, and al-ʿAjlan. The Albu Banna is a tribe found predominately in the south of Manbij, concentrated between Abu Qalqal and al-Khafseh sub-districts. After 2000, the tribe had a sizeable presence in Maskana sub-district as well. Strictly speaking, the post was Author interviews with revolutionary activist Muhammad Bashir al-Khalaf, Jund al-Haramein-linked Salah Muhammad, and Albu Sultan figure and president of the Revolutionary Council, Ahmed al-Rahmo, 2018–20. Author interviews with Faruq Sheikh Weis and Hani Salal, 2018; Baʿathist restrictions on the free market were gradually lessened, beginning with Hafez al-Assad’s ‘corrective movement’ in 1970 and continuing apace through the 1990s, meaning the Hadhrani bourgeoisie was able to regain some of their previous financial standing by 2000. As we described above, the Syrian National Movement was headed by ʿAimad al-Din Rashid, one of the leaders of the May 2012 delegation to Libya which was pivotal in helping Liwa al-Tawhid and other Brotherhood groups gain prominence. Author interviews with Revolutionary Council members Aimad al-Hanaydhil, Munzir Salal, Ahmed al-Rahmo, July 2019. See also, ‘Syria’s Islamists: The “National Movement’ includes all perspectives,’ Al Ikhwan Online, 10 December 2011. That group was called the al-Nuʿman Brigades. Within six months, the al-Nuʿman Brigades would effectively split; some members would affiliate with the Revolutionary Council under new brigade names, while the remainder of the group kept the name al-Nuʿman Brigades and was no longer affiliated with the Revolutionary Council. Author interviews with two leaders of Jund al-Haramein and one member of al-Nuʿman, July 2019. Even after the shift to ‘structured competition’ and the Qatari-Saudi rivalry, individuals adept at managing foreign ties sometimes succeeded in drawing funds from both sides. As late as 2013, for example, Taʿan managed to secure funding from the Saudi-backed Authenticity and Development front. Author interviews with Revolutionary Council members, including Munzir Salal, August 2019. That hardly a shot was fired is corroborated by multiple eyewitnesses. However, one child died while the regime troops were withdrawing, although the circumstances under which this occurred are unclear. The family believes it was due to a stray bullet. Author interview with family, other residents, Manbij, 2017–19. Author interview with Revolutionary Council members, including Nefi, 2018–20. The three battalions were Thuwwar Manbij (commander: Anas Sheikh Weiss), al-Karama (commander: Zakaria Qarisli), and Shuhada Manbij (commander: Abu Abdullah Baggari). Collectively, they comprised Liwa al-Tawhid’s 2nd Division. These three battalions are now part of the Syrian National Army and constitute the principal force directed against the Syrian Democratic Forces in Manbij today. See Shams al-Horreya, ‘News,’ Issue 23; Masar al-Horr, ‘News,’ Issue 20, 28 January 2013. These are locally produced newspapers documenting this period. The al-Nuʿman Brigades, which the council had been created six months earlier, still functioned but had become an independent faction. The delegation included an activist from the Brotherhood’s youth wing, Basil al-Hafar, and a member from a leading landowning family in Mareʿ, Yassin al-Najjar—further demonstrating the overlap between Mareʿ and Brotherhood networks. Author interviews with Revolutionary Council leading figures Munzir Salal, Ahmed Rahmo, and RYM activists Abu al-Ows and Ahmed al-Faraj, 2018–20. Author interviews with Weiss and other leading figures in Manbij, and corroborated by local newspapers. Author interviews with Revolutionary Council leading figures Munzir Salal, Ahmed al-Rahmo, 2019. Author interview with former rebel figure who operated in Manbij, 2019. Author interview with Jund al-Haramein associate Salah Muhammad, Revolutionary Council members ‘Aimad alHanaydhil and Ahmed al-Rahmo, 2019. Author interviews with Jund al-Haramein associate Salah Muhammad, Revolutionary Council members ‘Aimad alHanaydhil and Ahmed al-Rahmo, 2019. See also, ‘Ugarit Manbij Aleppo, announcement of the formation of the Jund alHaramein Brigades 11 7 Manbij Aleppo,’ Ugarit News—Syria, 12 July 2012. Author interviews with Revolutionary Council members and numerous Jund al-Haramein associates, September 2019. The allied factions included al-Faruq Battalions, al-Qaʿqaʿ Brigade, and Abu Ayub al-Ansari Brigade; Shams alHorreya, ‘Fatwa fever,’ Issue 11, 7 October 2012. Al-Masaral-Horr, ‘MRC responds to accusations published in Masar al-Horr,’ Issue 5, 8 October 2012. Al-Masar al-Horr, ‘Victims of freedom,’ Issue 2, 10 September 2012; Free Teachers Association Press Release, 15 September 2012; Al-Masar al-Horr, ‘Kidnapping, a temporary phenomenon? Or organized crime?’ Issue 2, 8 October

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2012, 15 September 2012; Shams al-Horreya, ‘News,’ Issue 2, 15 October 2012. Al-Masar al-Horr, ‘Interview with Revolutionary Council member (and head of bread distribution) ‘Aimad alHanaydhil. See RC flour mill and mechanism for running it,’ Issue 10, 20 November 2012. See: Shams al-Horreya, ‘Meeting with Sheikh Hajji (Ammar bin Khattab brigades),’ Issue 31, 14 April 2013; Malik AlAbdeh, ‘Rebels Inc.,’ Foreign Policy, 21 November 2013. Shams al-Horreya, ‘Baked bread: First investigation of its kind in 40 years,’ Issue 1, 25 November 2012; Al-Masar alHorr, ‘Al-Masar eye,’ Issue 10, 20 November 2012. Author interviews with individuals from across the political spectrum in Manbij, 2018–20. The Prince’s exploits were also described in detail in the revolutionary weeklies Al-Masar al-Horr and Shams al-Horreya. Author interviews with Fursan al-Furat commander Mustafa Abu Suleiman, author interview with Revolutionary Council member ‘Aimad al-Hanaydhil, June and September 2019, respectively. Syrian Dreams, 4 September 2012, ‘Suqur al-Sham: Civilian protection body and the Muslim Brotherhood.’ Author interview with a Fursan al-Furat founder, 2019. Abouzeid, ‘Syria’s secular and Islamist rebels: Who are the Saudis and the Qataris arming?’; Rasha Abi Haider, ‘[Tr. Chairman of the Islamic Front’s shura [council]: A [Muslim Brotherhood Member] in the arms of KSA and the US],’ AlAkhbar, 17 January 2014; Lefèvre, ‘The Muslim Brotherhood prepares for a comeback in Syria’; ‘Bahrain says Islamist MPs made unofficial Syria visit,’ Naharnet, 7 August 2012; Husain Marhoon, ‘Bahraini Salafists in spotlight,’ AlMonitor, 18 June 2013. Author interviews with Jund al-Haramein affiliate Salah Muhammad and Revolutionary Council member Munzir Salal, 2019. Günter Meyer, ‘Rural development and migration in northeast Syria,’ in Anthropology and Development in North Africa and the Middle East, 1990, 245–78; Raymond Hinnebus et al., ‘Agriculture and reform in Syria,’ Syria Studies 3, no. 1 (2011): 83–109; Andrew J. Tabler, ‘A tale of six tribes: Securing the middle Euphrates river valley,’ Policy Notes (Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 21 June 2018); ‘[Tr. Tabqa before ISIS and after] ,’ Ain AlMadina, 18 April 2017. These factions included Uweis al-Qurni, Saraya al-Furat and Ahrar Tabqa. Author interviews with Hadiddiyin sheikh Khalaf al-Mudhi (financier from Deir Hafer), Ibrahim al-Muhammad (director of Maskana’s central bread furnace under the FSA) and ʿAbd al-Rahman Suleiman (lawyer, founder of Mousab bin Umayr brigade), June 2019. Author interviews with Jund al-Haramein affiliate Salah Muhammad and Revolutionary Council member ‘Aimad alHanaydhil, 2019. Author interviews with Mustafa Suleiman (Fursan al-Furat), Salah Muhammad (Jund al-Haramein), Munzir Salal (Revolutionary Council), and other Revolutionary Council and Jund al-Haramein associates, 2019; ‘[Tr. What did the SDF leader say about his photo with Suheil Al-Hassan?] ,’ Orient Net, 28 August 2017. Author interviews with Revolutionary Council members and Jund al-Haramein associates, 2019. Faraj belongs to the al-Salama clan of the Nasser tribe. Author interviews with Jund al-Haramein associate Salah Muhammad, and Revolutionary Council leaders Munzir Salal, and ‘Aimad al-Hanaydhil, 2019. Shams al-Horreya, ‘New Revolutionary Council … representing all segments,’ Issue 9, 11 November 2012; Zajil Network, Aleppo Countryside Manbij, 2012-12-18—Formation of the Local Council, 19 December 2012; Author interviews with Salah Muhammad, Muhammad Bashir Khalaf, Ahmed al-Farraj, 2018–20. Shams al-Horreya, ‘Important statement from the Ahrar al-Sham Brigades to the dignified people of Manbij,’ Issue 17, 16 January 2013; See also Shams al-Horreya, ‘News,’ Issue 16, 30 December 2012; Shams al-Horreya, ‘Important statement from Ahrar al-Sham to the honorable people of Manbij,’ Issue 17, 30 December3 2012. Shams al-Horreya, ‘News,’ Issue 16, 30 December 2012; author interviews with Ahmed al-Rahmo (Revolutionary Council), Muhammad Bashir al-Khalaf (opposition ‘Bishr Council’), 2018–20. Abouzeid, No Turning Back. See: Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, ‘The Islamic State of Iraq and Ash-Sham expands into rural northern Syria,’ Syria Comment, 18 July 2013; ‘[Tr. The Sharia Council arrests Prince in Manbij … and his fighters respond with an armed attack on their headquarters] ,’

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Aks Al-Seir, 4 April 2013; ‘Civil [disobedience] protesting ISIS [abuses] in the city of Manbij in the Aleppo countryside,’ Akhbbar Alan, 18 May 2014; Shams al-Horreya, ‘News,’ Issue 30, 7 April 2013; ‘Terrorist [infighting]: Jabhat al-Nusra annihilates the Faruq Brigades and slaughters their leader “Prince”!!,’ General Organization of Radio and TV—Syria, 4 April 2013; ‘A month after “Prince’s” arrest … where is he now and will justice be dealt to him?’ Watan, 4 November 2014; author interviews with Ahmed al-Farraj (Revolutionary Youth Movement), Abu Ma’an (Security Brigade), Zakaria Qarasli (al-Karama Batallion), 2018–20. Author interviews with rebel affiliate Abu Ma’an and Fursan al-Furat founder Mustafa Abu Suleiman, 2019. Author interviews with former Fursan al-Furat commander, 2019. Author interview with Mustafa Abu Suleiman (Fursan al-Furat), June 2019. Shams al-Horreya, ‘MRC Press Release,’ Issue 43, 8 July 2013; Azad Minbic, Manbij Grain Silos Director Tells Us the Reason for His Arrest by Ahrar Al-Sham After His Release, 2013. Author interview with Zakaria Qarisli, 2018. Masar al-Horr, ‘Harvest season is over … the suffering of the peasants begins,’ Issue 43, 10 July 2013; author interview with Aimad al-Hanaydhil (Revolutionary Council), 2019. Shams al-Horreya, ‘Bread crisis … problems and solutions,’ Issue 43, 8 July 2013; Bisher albisher, ‘Aleppo Countryside—Manbij: Large Protest Against the Revolutionary Council in Manbij,’ 28 August 2018; MRC Statement Announcing Temporary Suspension of Activity, 5 September 2013; leaflet, Manbij Revolutionary Council; author interviews with Munzir Salal, Aimad al-Hanaydhil (Revolutionary Council), June and July 2019, respectively. ‘ISIS prepares to take over Manbij and AHS hands its bases to Jabhat Al-Nusra,’ Orient Net, 17 January 2014. The group still exists, albeit in a smaller, rebranded form as Jabhat al-Shamiya. See: Tall Refaat City, ‘Aleppo Countryside, Statement Merging [Various] Fighting Legions into Liwa Ahrar Suriya, and the Formation of the Eastern Front,’18 August 2013. This information is based on two interviews in 2019 with figures closely linked to (and supportive of) the PYD in northern Syria. The PKK supported Jabhat al-Akrad as a means of having influence within the FSA and curbing the reach of Liwa al-Tawhid. By this point, Jabhat al-Akrad had merged with other factions to form the Northern Sun Battalions. The Northern Sun became the leading element in the Manbij Military Council. Notable examples include Ibrahim Quftan (Hosh tribesman, formerly closely aligned to The Prince) and Faruq al-Mashi (Albu Banna). For more on how the regime’s policies fragmented prewar networks, see Anand Gopal, ‘The Arab Thermidor,’ Catalyst Journal 4, no. 2 (Summer 2020).

CHAPTER 4. HOW RAQQA BECAME THE CAPITAL OF ISIS 1.

Eric Robinson, Daniel Egel et al., ‘Raqqah capital of the Caliphate,’ in When ISIS Comes to Town (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2017). 2. R. Kim Cragin, ‘Semi-proxy wars and U.S. counterterrorism strategy,’ Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 38, no. 5 (4 May 2015): 311–27. 3. Research materials have been carefully anonymized and edited to remove any personally identifiable information. We supplement these data with interviews, conducted both by the authors and by local researchers, to capture the experiences of those living in the city from 2011 to the present. Interviews conducted as part of the field research are referred to as ‘Caerus interviews’ while later interviews conducted by the authors of this chapter are referenced as ‘Author’s interviews.’ Caerus interviews were conducted, whenever possible, in person in Raqqa from 2012–15. These interviews ranged from semi-structured interviews collected in a snowball sampling method to surveys where subjects were purposefully sampled for diversity of gender and profession. Author’s interviews were conducted by the first author via Skype and took place between January and June 2019. We also compared results from these surveys conducted in Raqqa to surveys conducted in other parts of Syria during the timeframe of December 2013 to November 2014. Surveys asked questions across Syria related to local conditions, such as perceptions of security and accessibility of basic goods and services. From December 2013 until November 2014, Caerus conducted 5,651 surveys in Raqqa, Damascus, Idlib, Hassakeh, Aleppo, Hama, Latakia, Dar’a, Deir ez-Zour, Rif Damascus, and Homs. For the purposes of this chapter, we compare survey results over this period in Raqqa (n=796) to the rest of Syria (n=4,855). While we did not survey each governorate previously listed across all four survey periods, each period included a sample of locations that reflected diverse conditions in Syria (i.e., opposition-controlled areas, SARG-controlled areas, contested or active

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conflict areas). This is why we believe it is reasonable to compare Raqqa to other places in Syria, despite the fact that the conflict was highly localized and the locus of fighting shifted over the course of the war. Surveys were conducted by enumerators who purposefully selected respondents for each report to meet minimum requirements for diversity in gender, socioeconomic status, and ethno-sectarian identities. Interviews were conducted in-person by local enumerators to ensure high-fidelity responses from interviewees. In this chapter, the use of the term ‘militia’ carries no pejorative implication; it simply denotes a part-time, irregular military force, drawn from a local community (or part thereof) that operates mainly in its own area. Militias may or may not be ideologically motivated and may or may not have links to external actors. Firas Al-Hikar, ‘Raqqa: Syria’s new Kandahar (Ar.),’ Al-Akhbar, 7 November 2013. This trip to Raqqa was unusual; normally, Assad observed the Eid al-Adha prayers in Damascus. ‘Protests, gunfire in Syria as Eid al-Adha begins,’ Associated Press, 6 November 2011. ‘President al-Assad performs the Eid al-Adha prayer in Al-Nour Mosque in al-Raqqa (Ar.),’ SANA, 7 November 2011. ‘Militant groups surveil Syrian Sufis, accusing them of bias against the regime (Ar.),’ Asharq Al-Aswat, 6 January 2014. The Events of the Eid Al-Adha Prayer Performed by President Bashar Al-Assad (Ar.), 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPgLh0--Atg. Ahmed Ibrahim, ‘The clan between the time of Assad and Daesh (Ar.),’ Aljumhuriya, 27 June 2015. Christoph Günther and Tom Kaden, ‘The authority of the Islamic State,’ Working Paper, Social Anthropology Working Papers (Munich, Germany: Max Planck Institute, 2016). Ibrahim, ‘The clan between the time of Assad and Daesh (Ar.).’ ‘President al-Assad: Syria strong thanks to its people, national choices and free decision … determined to restore national rights,’ SANA, 7 November 2011. These two coalitions were the Islamic Front for Unity and Liberation and the Front for the Liberation of Raqqa. Matthew Barber, ‘The Raqqa story: Rebel structure, planning, and possible war crimes,’ Syria Comment, 4 April 2013; Rania Abouzeid, ‘How Islamist rebels in Syria are ruling a fallen provincial capital,’ Time, 23 March 2013; Aymenn Jawad AlTamimi, ‘Liwa Thuwar Al-Raqqa: History, analysis & interview,’ Syria Comment, 14 September 2015. ‘Syrian activists say rebels seize security buildings in Raqqa, declare it 1st “liberated” city,’ Associated Press, 6 March 2013. Ziad Haydar, ‘Syria: Raqqa lies in ruins,’ Al-Monitor, 7 March 2013. Abouzeid, ‘How Islamist rebels in Syria are ruling a fallen provincial capital.’ See, for example, George Orwell’s description of Barcelona immediately after its fall to the revolutionary forces during the Spanish Civil War. George Orwell, Adam Hochschild, and Lionel Trilling, Homage to Catalonia, First Mariner Books edition (Boston, MA: Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015): 546–7. Caerus interview with M.J., 23 September 2013. Caerus conducted fifty-three semi-structured interviews with residents in Raqqa in April and May 2013. Those interviews help inform this assessment. Author’s interview with Mutasem Syoufi, 11 January 2019. Ibid. Caerus interview with T.H.O., 23 September 2013. Author’s email exchange with Abdalaziz Alhamza, 29 June 2019. Caerus interview with M.M., 1 November 2013. Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, Reprinted, Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009): 12–13. Author’s interview with Assaad al-Achi, 10 January 2019. There are many accounts of the ideological war between those governments in the region who supported Muslim Brotherhood factions in Syria and those who opposed them during the first four years of the war (2011–15). One of the first was by Hassan Hassan, ‘How the Muslim Brotherhood hijacked Syria’s revolution,’ Foreign Policy, 3 March 2013; also see a later summary of the effects of this ideological war on the Syrian uprising during this year by Raphaël Lefèvre, ‘Saudi Arabia and the Syrian Brotherhood,’ Middle East Institute, 27 September 2013. Qatar and Turkey support Muslim Brotherhood-backed groups across the region. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates oppose these groups, fearing they could form the basis of an organized internal challenge. This division forms the basis of an ongoing region-wide dispute. In Syria, that wider regional dispute divided these groups, with Kuwait,

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Bahrain, and others in the region supporting nationalist and Islamist opposition groups as well. President Barack Obama, who promised not to intervene in other countries’ affairs during his 2009 Cairo speech, called the Libya intervention ‘the worst decision’ of his presidency. Jeffrey Goldberg, ‘The Obama Doctrine,’ The Atlantic, April 2016. His administration was not about to get seriously involved in Syria, and the countries of the Middle East knew that. Dorothy Wickenden, ‘Ben Rhodes talks to David Remnick about America’s role in Syria,’ The New Yorker, 31 October 2016. Author’s interview with Mutasem Syoufi, 11 January 2019. Author’s interview with Qutaiba Idlibi, 23 May 2019. Author’s interview with Qutaiba Idlibi, 23 May 2019. Author’s interview with Mutasem Syoufi, 11 January 2019. Author’s interview with Qutaiba Idlibi, 23 May 2019. Author’s interview with Mutasem Syoufi, 11 January 2019. Author’s email exchange with Abdalaziz Alhamza, 29 June 2019. The Etilaf’s political structure set aside one seat for each of Syria’s fourteen governorates. ‘Official page for Mustafa Ali Nawaf,’ The National Coalition for the Syrian Revolution and Opposition. Caerus eyewitness notes on conditions in Raqqa Local Councils, 19 April 2013. Author’s interview with Mutasem Syoufi, 11 January 2019. Caerus interview with M.J., 23 September 2013. Caerus eyewitness reporting, 19 April 2013. Meanwhile, the activists in Raqqa would retain their grassroots organization led by longtime opposition activist Nabil Fawaz, who had been in prison under former president Hafez al-Assad for fifteen years. That council would continue to manage issues in the city of Raqqa. ‘Raqqa’s social, political, and administrative transformations are coming (Ar.),’ Ayn al-Medina, 5 March 2017. Caerus interviewed fifty-three residents of Raqqa in April and May 2013. These interviews lasted 1–1.5 hours, and interviewees were asked questions regarding perceptions of safety, aid requirements, and local assessments of the municipal services they were receiving from the local council. ‘Urgent action: Fears for Syrian human rights lawyer,’ Amnesty International, 22 March 2012. The shahada is the Muslim profession of faith (‘There is no God but God’) that has been co-opted by al-Qaeda and is generally set in white letters over a black background. For reporting on the so-called battle of flags, see Rania Abouzeid, ‘A black flag in Raqqa,’ The New Yorker, 2 April 2013. Hassan Hassan, ‘The battle for Raqqa and the challenges after liberation,’ CTC Sentinel 10, no. 6 (July 2017). Mona Mahmood and Ian Black, ‘Free Syrian Army rebels defect to Islamist group Jabhat Al-Nusra,’ TheGuardian, 8 May 2013. As Aymenn al-Tamimi writes of the time: ‘operation and accommodation rather than mutual hostility remain the norm at demonstrations.’ Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, ‘Jabhat Al-Nusrah and the Islamic State of Iraq and Ash-Sham: Raqqah governorate,’ Jihadology (blog), 4 July 2013. Author’s interview with Mutasem Syoufi, 11 January 2019. Al-Tamimi, ‘Jabhat Al-Nusrah and the Islamic State of Iraq and Ash-Sham: Raqqah governorate.’ ‘Raqqa docs reveal how ISIS tracked and killed prominent civil activist and lawyer,’ Zaman Al-Wasl, 31 January 2017. Al-Hikar, ‘Raqqa: Syria’s new Kandahar (Ar.).’ Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, ‘The Islamic State of Iraq and Ash-Sham billboards in Raqqa,’ Jihadology (blog), 22 October 2013. Al-Hikar, ‘Raqqa: Syria’s new Kandahar (Ar.).’ Kyle Orton, ‘Raqqa doesn’t want to be liberated by the West’s partners,’ Kyle Orton’s Blog, 30 May 2017. Andrew Tabler, ‘Eyeing Raqqa: A tale of four tribes,’ Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2017. Alison Tahmizian Meuse, ‘In Raqqa, Islamist rebels form a new regime,’ Syria Deeply, 16 August 2013. Author’s interview with Hassan Hassan, 6 February 2019. Caerus interview with J.S., 2 October 2013. Author’s interview with Assaad al-Achi, 10 January 2019.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

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Interviews by Caerus with members of the Raqqa City media office, 19 May 2013. ‘Raqqa docs reveal how ISIS tracked and killed prominent civil activist and lawyer.’ Christoph Reuter, ‘Secret files reveal the structure of the Islamic State,’ Der Spiegel Online, 18 April 2015. ‘The Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria: A primer,’ TSG IntelBrief, The Soufan Group, 13 June 2014. Reuter, ‘Secret files reveal the structure of the Islamic State.’ Caerus interview with J.S., 2 October 2013. Reuter, ‘Secret files reveal the structure of the Islamic State.’ Author’s email exchange with Abdalaziz Alhamza, 29 June 2019. Al-Hikar, ‘Raqqa: Syria’s new Kandahar (Ar.)’; Meuse, ‘In Raqqa, Islamist rebels form a new regime.’ Meuse, ‘In Raqqa, Islamist rebels form a new regime.’ Jeffrey White, Andrew J. Tabler, and Aaron Y. Zelin, ‘Syria’s military opposition: How effective, united, or extremist,’ Washington Institute for Near East Policy, September 2013. Meuse, ‘In Raqqa, Islamist rebels form a new regime.’ Al-Hikar, ‘Raqqa: Syria’s new Kandahar (Ar.).’ Hassan, ‘The battle for Raqqa and the challenges after liberation.’ This chart was built using Syrian government pre-war population statistics from 2004 via the Central Bureau of Statistics in Syria: http://cbssyr.sy/indicator/hp-m.htm (not accessible from the United States). Data on deaths in Syria from ‘Syria Shuhuda’ (the most reliable database of deaths in Syria from 2011–15). The chart only shows per capita deaths until 2015, because by that time pre-war population statistics would not be a reliable measurement of the number of people in a given area. By the beginning of 2015, approximately 50 percent of Syrians were deceased, internally displaced, or had fled as refugees, see: ‘Syria emergency,’ United National High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). ‘Syria’s metastasising conflicts,’ Middle East and North Africa, International Crisis Group, 17 June 2013. There have been eight mass graves (burial sites containing three or more victims of execution) found thus far in Raqqa. The largest contained approximately 2,500 bodies. Maya Gebeily, ‘Largest ISIS mass grave found outside Syria’s Raqqa,’ Agence France-Presse, 21 February 2019. Public Execution of Three Syrians by Jihadist Group in Raqqa, 2013. For a detailed description of this theoretical framework, see: David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013): 114. Nate Rosenblatt, ‘ISIS’ plan to govern Syria—and what the US should do about it,’ War on the Rocks, 31 October 2013. Emma Beals, ‘Wheat as a weapon of war in Syria,’ Vice, 23 June 2016. Al-Tamimi, ‘The Islamic State of Iraq and Ash-Sham billboards in Raqqa.’ Author’s interview with Assaad al-Achi, 10 January 2019. Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains. Caerus surveys (n=2282) in Aleppo, Rif Damascus, Deir ez-Zour, Deraa, Hama, Hassakeh, Idlib, and Raqqa: April–July 2014. A RAND-sponsored analysis of satellite imagery over Raqqa concluded that, by the end of the year, the abundant electricity which residents in Raqqa enjoyed in January 2014 had declined by almost 75 percent. Eric Robinson et al., When the Islamic State Comes to Town (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2017). Rukmini Callimachi, ‘The ISIS files,’ New York Times, 4 April 2018; Shadi Hamid, ‘What America never understood about ISIS,’ The Atlantic,31 October 2019. Robert F. Worth, ‘Earth is parched where Syrian farms thrived,’ New York Times, 13 October 2010. Liz Sly, ‘The Islamic State is failing at being a state,’ Washington Post, 25 December 2014. Author’s email exchange with Abdalaziz Alhamza, 29 June 2019. For discussion of this concept, see: Neil Stammers, ‘Social movements, human rights, and the challenge to power,’ in Proceedings of the ASIL General Meeting 97 (2003): 299–301; and Patrick G. Coy, ‘Conflict resolution, conflict transformation, and peacebuilding,’ in Peace, Justice and Security Studies, Timothy McAlwee, B. Welling Hall, Joseph Liechty, and Julie Garber, eds. (New York: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2009): 63–78. Andrew Tabler, ‘Eyeing Raqqa: A tale of four tribes,’ Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2017. Author’s interview with Lieutenant General Terry Wolff, 16 February 2019. Author’s interview with a journalist, 1 March 2019.

97. Author’s interview with an analyst, 1 March 2019. 98. Current estimates of Raqqa’s population are between 100,000–150,000, down from a pre-war population of 503,960. Population figures from UN-OCHA (July 2018) and UN-IA Mission (April 2018). 99. ‘Situation overview: Area-based assessment of Ar-Raqqa city,’ REACH, October 2018. 100. UN Internal Inter-Agency mission report. al-Raqqa City, April 2018. 101. Hamoud Al-Mousa, ‘The economic situation in Raqqa, from neglect to exploitation,’ Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, 28 February 2017. 102. Ruth Sherlock and Lama Al-Arian, ‘“This is not liberation”: Life in the rubble of Raqqa, Syria,’ NPR, October 26, 2018. 103. Arguments about so-called Sunni grievances abound as explaining the reason for the rise of ISIS and other Sunni Muslim non-state militants. See, for example: Emily Anagnostos, Jessica Lewis McFate, Jennifer Cafarella, and Alexandra Gutowski, ‘Anticipating Iraq’s next Sunni insurgency,’ Institute for the Study of War,30 November 2016,http://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/anticipating-iraq%E2%80%99s-next-sunni-insurgency. CHAPTER 5. ‘THIS WAR IS OUT OF OUR HANDS’ 1.

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This account of the funeral of the Russian officer Gleb Mostov is taken from Ilya Barabanov and Pavel Aksenov, ‘The circumstances of the death are “not our business.” An officer who died in Libya was buried near Orenburg’ (in Russian), BBC Russia, 14 February 2020, https://www.bbc.com/russian/features-51501122. The author is grateful to Carnegie colleague Andrew Weiss for assistance in translation. Frederic Wehrey, ‘Among the Syrian militiamen of Turkey’s Libya intervention,’ New York Review of Books, 23 January 2020, https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/01/23/among-the-syrian-militiamen-of-turkeys-intervention-in-libya/. Melissa Salyk-Virk, ‘Airstrikes, proxy warfare, and civilian casualties in Libya,’ New America, June 2020, https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/reports/airstrikes-proxy-warfare-and-civilian-casualties-libya/. Oliver Imhof, ‘Libya: A year of living dangerously,’ Airwars,6 April 2020, https://airwars.org/news-and-investigations/. Author interview with a Libyan aid worker, Misrata, Libya, January 2020. See Peter Cole and Brian McQuinn, eds., The Libyan Revolution and Its Aftermath (London: Hurst, 2013). For the post-2011 period, see Frederic Wehrey, The Burning Shores: Inside the Battle for the New Libya (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018); Jacob Mundy, Libya (Hot Spots in Global Politics) (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019); Wolfram Lacher, Libya’s Fragmentation: Structure and Process in Violent Conflict (London: I.B. Tauris, 2020); Ulf Laessing, Understanding Libya After Gaddafi (London: Hurst, 2020). Irene Constantini, ‘Conflict dynamics in post-2011 Libya: A political economy perspective,’ Conflict, Security & Development 16, no. 5 (2011): 405–22; Jalel Harchaoui and Mohamed-Essaïd Lazib, Proxy War Dynamics in Libya (Blacksburg: VT Publishing, 2019), https://doi.org/10.21061/proxy-wars-harchaoui-lazib. See Wolfram Lacher, ‘Drones, deniability, and disinformation: Warfare in Libya and the new international disorder,’ War on the Rocks, 3 March 2020, https://warontherocks.com/2020/03/drones-deniability-and-disinformation-warfare-inlibya-and-the-new-international-disorder/. Also, Matt Herbert, ‘Libya’s war becomes a tech battleground,’ Institute for Security Studies, 8 October 2019, https://issafrica.org/iss-today/libyas-war-becomes-a-tech-battleground. Lisa Anderson, ‘“They defeated us all”: International interests, local politics, and contested sovereignty in Libya,’ The Middle East Journal 71, no. 2 (Spring 2017). For economic resources as a draw for outside intervention, see Michael G. Findley and Josiah F. Marineau, ‘Lootable resources and third-party intervention into civil wars,’ Conflict Management and Peace Science 32, no. 5 (November 2015): 465–86, http://www.michael-findley.com/uploads/2/0/4/5/20455799/resources_civil-warintervention_may2013.pdf, 2. Mark Furness and Bernhard Trautner, ‘Reconstituting social contracts in conflict-affected MENA countries: Whither Iraq and Libya?’ World Development 135 (November 2020), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X20302114. This is especially evident in Haftar’s inability to sell oil on the global market—including to his patron the United Arab Emirates—despite repeated attempts, largely because of pressure from the United States. Benoit Faucon, Jared Malsin, and Summer Said, ‘U.A.E. backed militia leader’s bid to take control of Libyan oil exports,’ Wall Street Journal, 13 July 2018. https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-a-e-backed-militia-leaders-bid-to-take-control-of-libyan-oil-exports-1531474200. See Lacher, ‘Drones, deniability and disinformation.’ Also, Ishaan Tharoor, ‘Libya’s war could be a snapshot of the 21st century’s new normal,’ Washington Post, 10 January 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/01/10/libyas-

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war-could-be-snapshot-21st-centurys-new-normal/. Kimberly Marten has usefully coined the term ‘semi-state’ to refer to Russia’s global deployment of Wagner Group fighters, arguing that the paramilitary group does not fit standard definition of private military companies. See Kimberly Marten, ‘Russia’s use of semi-state security forces: The case of the Wagner Group,’ Post-Soviet Affairs 35, no. 3 (2019): 181–204. On the outsourcing and privatization of military force, see Sean McFate, The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Author email exchange with a UN diplomat working on Libya, June 2020. For an overview of the 2019 phase, see Atlantic Council Digital Forensics Research Lab, ‘A Twitter hashtag campaign in Libya: How jingoism went viral,’ Medium,6 June 2019, https://medium.com/dfrlab/a-twitter-hashtag-campaign-in-libyapart-1-how-jingoism-went-viral-43d3812e8d3f. Frederic Wehrey, ‘The NATO intervention,’ The Libyan Revolution and Its Aftermath, 105–25. Author interview with revolutionary leaders in Misrata, February 2012. Alex De Waal, ‘African roles in the Libyan conflict of 2011,’ International Affairs 89, no. 2 (March 2013). Author interviews with JEM fighters captured by Libyan revolutionary forces, Misrata, Libya, February 2012. Author interview with Fathi Bashagha, Misrata, Libya, February 2012, and Sirte, Libya, June 2016. Author telephone interview with a US military officer involved in the 2011 NATO intervention, 15 October 2016. Mary Fitzgerald, ‘Finding their place: Libya’s Islamists during and after the revolution,’ The Libyan Revolution and Its Aftermath, 177–204. Wehrey, The Burning Shores, 70. Telephone interview with a White House NSC official involved with the 2011 intervention, June 2016. Interview with a White House NSC official involved with the 2011 intervention, 15 March 2017. Wehrey, The Burning Shores, 46–7. Wehrey, The Burning Shores,56–8. Author interview with Abd al-Hakim Bilhaj, Istanbul, Turkey, December 2016. Author interview with Zintani revolutionary leaders involved in liaison with French ground personnel during the 2011 revolution, Zintan, Libya, February 2012. David Jolly and Kareem Fahim, ‘France says it gave arms to the rebels in Libya,’ New York Times,29 June 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/30/world/europe/30france.html. Peter Cole and Umar Khan, ‘The fall of Tripoli: Part 2,’ The Libyan Revolution and Its Aftermath, 94–104. Tarek Megerisi, ‘Libya’s global civil war,’ European Council on Foreign Relations, 26 June 2019, https://www.ecfr.eu/publications/summary/libyas_global_civil_war1. Wehrey, The Burning Shores, 78. Author’s observations during a protest in Tripoli against the Political Isolation Law, Zawiyat al-Dahmani, Libya, May 2013. Anouar Boukhars, Nathan J. Brown, Michele Dunne, Raphaël Lefèvre, Marwan Muasher, Frederic Wehrey, Katherine Wilkens, Scott Williamson, ‘The Egypt effect: Sharpened tensions, reshuffled alliances,’ Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 13 February 2014, https://carnegieendowment.org/2014/02/13/egypt-effect-sharpened-tensionsreshuffled-alliances-pub-54515. Michelle Nichols, ‘Libya arms fueling conflicts in Syria, Mali and beyond: U.N. experts,’ Reuters, 9 April 2013, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-arms-un/libya-arms-fueling-conflicts-in-syria-mali-and-beyond-u-n-expertsidUSBRE93814Y20130409. Importantly, Turkey was an important thoroughfare for these weapons and aid to Syria from Libya factions, including the terrorist group Ansar al-Sharia, which reportedly transited Turkish territory in early 2014. Aaron Stein, ‘Turkey’s proxy war in Libya,’ War on the Rocks, 15 January 2015, https://warontherocks.com/2015/01/turkeys-proxy-war-in-libya/. Andrew Rettman, ‘Libya is test of EU2 geopolitics, ex-UN inspector says,’ EU Observer, 25 February 2020, https://euobserver.com/foreign/147536. Stanford Internet Observatory, ‘Analysis of April 2020 Twitter takedowns linked to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Honduras, Serbia, and Indonesia,’ 2 April 2020, https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/april-2020-twitter-takedown. Many of these paramilitaries hailed from the eastern Awaqir tribe. Author interviews with the pro-LAAF Awaqir ‘support force’ leaders from the Majura Protection Force and also Faraj ‘Iqaim al-Abdali al-Agur, commander of a Benghazi-based Ministry of Interior-affiliated ‘Special task force for countering terrorism apparatus,’ Benghazi,

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September 2015 and May 2017. David D. Kirkpatrick and Eric Schmitt, ‘Arab nations strike in Libya, surprising U.S.,’ New York Times, 26 August 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/26/world/africa/egypt-and-united-arab-emirates-said-to-have-secretly-carried-outlibya-airstrikes.html. In a June 2014 interview from his field headquarters in al-Marj, Haftar denied receiving Egyptian support and requested American military aid in the form of ‘drones and Apaches.’ Author interview with Khalifa Haftar, al-Marj, Libya, 26 June 2014. The Zintani buildup included Emirati-supplied ‘Tiger’ armored personnel carriers, AR-M9F assault rifles, and uniforms. United Nations Security Council, ‘UN panel of experts report,’ 9 March 2016, 24, https://www.undocs.org/S/2016/209. Also, author interview with Libyan militia leader Salah Badi, Misrata, Libya, February 2015. Frederic Wehrey, ‘What’s behind Libya’s spiraling violence?’ Washington Post, 28 July 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/07/28/whats-behind-libyas-spiraling-violence/. Kirkpatrick and Schmitt, ‘Arab nations strike in Libya, surprising U.S.’; United Nations Security Council, ‘Final report of the panel of experts on Libya established pursuant to resolution 1973 (2011),’ 23 February 2015, 39, https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/N1711623.pdf. Comments by Khadeja Ramali in the online panel, ‘The scramble for Libya: A globalized civil war at a tipping point,’ Carnegie Endowment for Peace, 8 July 2020. https://carnegieendowment.org/2020/07/08/scramble-for-libya-globalizedcivil-war-at-tipping-point-event-7381. Stanford Internet Observatory, Cyber Policy Center ‘Analysis of April 2020 Twitter takedowns linked to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Honduras, Serbia, and Indonesia,’ 2 April 2020, https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/april-2020twitter-takedown. On this dynamic in Chad, see Marielle Debos, Living by the Gun in Chad: Combatants, Impunity and State (London: Zed Books, 2016). Author interviews with armed group leaders and political personalities, Ubari, Libya, February 2016. Also, Libya Herald,‘Clashes in Zillah-supposedly between pro- and anti-LNA forces,’ 3 May 2016, https://www.libyaherald.com/2016/05/03/clashes-in-zillah-supposedly-between-pro-and-anti-LNA-forces/; United Nations Security Council, ‘UN Panel of Experts Report,’ 1 June 2017, 18, https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/N1711623.pdf. Ibid. Author interviews with Tuareg notables and tribal mediators, Ubari, Libya, February 2016. Author interview with a senior US diplomat, Washington, DC, June 2017. Wehrey, The Burning Shores,180. According to the UN, these intermediaries included the Libyan businessman Ashraf bin Ismail. UN Security Council, ‘UN panel of experts report on Libya,’1 June 2017, https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/N1711623.pdf. UN Security Council, ‘Final report of the panel of experts on Libya established pursuant to resolution 1973 (2011),’ 24– 35. For context on the domestic and ideological drivers of France’s Libya’s policy, see Jalel Harchaoui, ‘La politique libyenne de la France et ses antécédents historiques,’ Revue internationale et stratégique, no. 116 (April 2019): 33–43; https://www.cairn.info/revue-internationale-et-strategique-2019-4-page-33.htm. For an overview, see Peter Tinti, ‘Nearly there, but never further away,’ Foreign Policy, 5 October 2017, http://europeslamsitsgates.foreignpolicy.com/part-3-nearly-there-but-never-further-away-libya-africa-europe-EUmilitias-migration. Author interview with Special Deterrence Force commander Abdelraouf Kara, Tripoli, Libya, 16 March 2020. Also, Frederic Wehrey, ‘When the Islamic State came to Libya,’ The Atlantic, 10 February 2018; https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/02/isis-libya-hiftar-al-qaeda-syria/552419/. Author interview with US officials in Washington, DC, July 2016. Aidan Lewis, ‘Covert Emirati support gave east Libyan air power key boost: U.N. report,’ Reuters, 9 June 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-security/covert-emirati-support-gave-east-libyan-air-power-key-boost-u-nreport-idUSKBN1902K0. The aircraft were flown from an airbase, al-Khadim, which the Emirates had refurbished, according to the United Nations. Aidan Lewis, ‘Covert Emirati support gave east Libyan air power key boost: U.N. report,’ Reuters, 9 June 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-security/covert-emirati-support-gave-east-libyan-air-power-key-boost-u-nreport-idUSKBN1902K0.

61. Human Rights Watch, ‘Libya: War crimes as Benghazi residents flee,’ 22 March 2017, https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/03/22/libya-war-crimes-benghazi-residents-flee#. 62. Author interviews with LAAF officers, Benghazi, Libya, September 2015. 63. Frederic Wehrey and Emadeddin Badi, ‘Libya’s coming forever war: Why backing one militia against another is not the solution,’ War on the Rocks,15 May 2019, https://warontherocks.com/2019/05/libyas-coming-forever-war-why-backingone-militia-against-another-is-not-the-solution/. 64. Cyril Bensimon, Frédéric Bobin, and Madjid Zerrouky, ‘Trois membres de la DGSE tués en Libye, le gouvernement libyen proteste,’ Le Monde, 20 July 2016, https://www.lemonde.fr/international/article/2016/07/20/trois-militairesfrancais-tues-en-libye_4972142_3210.html. 65. Author interviews with pro-LAAF Libyan militia members, Benghazi, Libya, May 2017 and UN officials, Tunis, Tunisia, November 2017. 66. For background, see Jihad Gillon, ‘France-Libya: Marshal Haftar, the controversial friend of the Élysée,’ The Africa Report, 20 March 2020, https://www.theafricareport.com/24823/france-libya-marshal-haftar-the-controversial-friend-ofthe-elysee/. 67. Author interviews with pro-LAAF Libyan militia members, Benghazi, Libya, May 2017. 68. Ellen Barry, ‘Putin criticizes West for Libya incursion,’ New York Times, 26 April 2011. 69. Jo Becker and Eric Schmitt, ‘As Trump wavers on Libya, an ISIS haven, Russia presses on,’ New York Times, 7 February 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/world/africa/trump-libya-policy-russia.html. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid. 72. Reuters, ‘East Libya strongman visits Russian aircraft carrier in Mediterranean: RIA,’ 11 January 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-russia-haftar/east-libya-strongman-visits-russian-aircraft-carrier-inmediterranean-ria-idUSKBN14V1T2; Rinat Sagdiev, Aidan Lewis, ‘Supplies of banknotes from Russia to east Libya accelerated this year,’ Moscow Times,29 October 2019, https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/10/29/supplies-ofbanknotes-from-russia-to-east-libya-accelerated-this-year-a67960. 73. For an overview, see Nathaniel Greenberg, ‘Russia opens digital interference front in Libya,’ Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), 4 October 2019, https://merip.org/2019/10/russia-opens-digital-interference-front-inlibya/. 74. For the US intelligence presence in Benghazi, Missy Ryan, ‘U.S. establishes Libyan outposts with eye toward offensive against Islamic State,’ Washington Post, 12 March 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/usestablishes-libyan-outposts-with-eye-toward-offensive-against-islamic-state/2016/05/12/11195d32-183c-11e6-9e162e5a123aac62_story.html. 75. Author telephone interview with a former US official, June 2020. 76. Aaron Y. Zelin, ‘The others: Foreign fighters in Libya,’ The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, January 2018, https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/the-others-foreign-fighters-in-libya-and-the-islamic-state. 77. Frederic Wehrey and Ala’ Alrababa’h, ‘Splitting the Islamists: The Islamic State’s creeping advance in Libya,’ Diwan, 19 June 2015, https://carnegie-mec.org/diwan/60447. 78. Author interviews with Misratan civic leaders and armed group leaders, Misrata, Libya, September 2015. 79. Sean D. Naylor and Nick Turse, ‘Libyan war escalates amid lack of U.S strategy for secret missions in Africa,’ Yahoo News, 10 April 2019, https://sg.news.yahoo.com/libyan-war-escalates-amid-lack-of-us-strategy-for-secret-missions-inafrica-090000507.html. 80. Author interviews with US defense officials, Washington, DC, May 2017. Deborah K. Jones, ‘Opening statement by US ambassador-retired Deborah K. Jones,’ US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing ‘The crisis in Libya: Next steps and U.S. policy options,’25 April 2017, https://www.foreign.senate.gov/download/jones-testimony-042517. 81. Sean D. Naylor and Nick Turse, ‘Libyan war escalates amid lack of U.S strategy for secret missions in Africa,’ Yahoo News, 10 April 2019, https://sg.news.yahoo.com/libyan-war-escalates-amid-lack-of-us-strategy-for-secret-missions-inafrica-090000507.html. 82. Author interview with a member of the Misrata-based Mahjub Brigade, Misrata, Libya, December 2016. 83. Author interviews with political elites and civil society in Tripoli and Misrata, December 2017. 84. Harchaoui and Lazib, Proxy War Dynamics in Libya. 85. Jalel Harchaoui, ‘Libya’s coming contest for the central bank,’ War on the Rocks, 1 April 2019,

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https://warontherocks.com/2019/04/libyas-looming-contest-for-the-central-bank/. Wolfram Lacher, ‘Tripoli’s militia cartel: How ill-conceived stabilisation blocks political progress, and risks renewed war,’ SWP Comment, 20 April 2018, https://www.swp-berlin.org/en/publication/libya-tripolis-militia-cartel/. Author email exchange with a Western diplomat based in Tripoli, Libya, July 2020. Aidan Lewis and Ulf Laessing, ‘Militia leader’s bravado shows limits of Libya reforms,’ Reuters, 13 December 2018. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-security-insight/militia-leaders-bravado-shows-limits-of-libya-reformsidUSKBN1OC0GN. Benoit Faucon, Jared Malsin and Summer Said, ‘U.A.E. backed militia leader’s bid to take control of Libyan oil exports,’ Wall Street Journal, 13 July 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-a-e-backed-militia-leaders-bid-to-takecontrol-of-libyan-oil-exports-1531474200. Author interview with a senior French diplomat, Washington, DC, March 2019. Emadeddin Badi, ‘Libya’s Hifter and the false narrative of authoritarian stability,’ Middle East Institute, 3 September 2019, https://www.mei.edu/publications/libyas-hifter-and-false-narrative-authoritarian-stability. Ulf Laessing, ‘After Tripoli assault, Libya’s next battle could be over banks,’ Reuters, 25 April 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-security-analysis/after-tripoli-assault-libyas-next-battle-could-be-over-banksidUSKCN1S10KU. Harchaoui and Lazib, Proxy War Dynamics in Libya. This move was accompanied by an assassination campaign within the Tripoli Revolutionaries Brigade to clear the way for a pro-Emirati cadre. See Emadeddin Badi, ‘Mergers and assassinations as Tripoli remains under militia control,’ Middle East Institute, 4 January 2019, https://www.mei.edu/publications/mergers-and-assassinations-tripoli-remains-under-militia-control. Author interview with Fathi Bashagha, Tripoli, Libya, January 2019. See also, Frederic Wehrey, ‘A minister, a general, & the militias: Libya’s shifting balance of power,’ New York Review of Books, 19 March 2019, https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/03/19/a-minister-a-general-militias-libyas-shifting-balance-of-power/. Wehrey, ‘A minister, a general, & the militias: Libya’s shifting balance of power.’ See Frederic Wehrey, ‘Salafism and Libya’s state collapse: The case of the Madkhalis,’ 12 December 2019; https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/12/19/salafism-and-libya-s-state-collapse-case-of-madkhalis-pub-81835, book chapter extracted from Frederic Wehrey and Anouar Boukhars, Salafism in the Maghreb: Politics, Piety and Militancy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 107–37. Jared Malsin and Summer Said, ‘Saudi Arabia promised support to Libyan warlord in push to seize Tripoli,’ Wall Street Journal, 12 April 2019. https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-arabia-promised-support-to-libyan-warlord-in-push-to-seizetripoli-11555077600. For Saudi social media mobilization on behalf of Haftar, Atlantic Council Digital Forensics Research Lab, ‘A Twitter hashtag campaign in Libya: How jingoism went viral,’ Medium,6 June 2019, https://medium.com/dfrlab/a-twitter-hashtag-campaign-in-libya-part-1-how-jingoism-went-viral-43d3812e8d3f. Author conversations with senior US State Department officials, June 2018. Author conversations with US diplomats, Washington, DC, March 2019. Author telephone conversations with UN officials, March 2019. Mada Masr, ‘The Libyan National Army’s patchy walk toward Tripoli,’ 8 July 2019, https://madamasr.com/en/2019/07/08/feature/politics/the-libyan-national-armys-patchwork-walk-toward-tripoli/. Author telephone conversation with a Tripoli based Libyan civil society activist, April 2019. For an overview, Stanford Internet Observatory, ‘Libya: Presidential and parliamentary elections scene setter,’ 2 October 2019, https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/libya-scene-setter. Also, Atlantic Council Digital Forensics Research Lab, ‘A Twitter hashtag campaign in Libya: How jingoism went viral,’ Medium,6 June 2019, https://medium.com/dfrlab/atwitter-hashtag-campaign-in-libya-part-1-how-jingoism-went-viral-43d3812e8d3f. For Facebook content, see Facebook, ‘Removing coordinated inauthentic behavior in UAE, Egypt and Saudi Arabia,’ 1 August 2019, https://about.fb.com/news/2019/08/cib-uae-egypt-saudi-arabia/. Mada Masr, ‘The Libyan National Army’s patchy walk toward Tripoli.’ See Wehrey, The Burning Shores, 265. On the Bolton phone call, David D. Kirkpatrick, ‘The White House blessed a war in Libya, but Russia won it,’ New York Times, 14 April 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/world/middleeast/libya-russia-john-bolton.html. See, Wehrey, The Burning Shores, 265; Jonathan M. Winer, ‘Origins of the Libyan conflict and options for its resolution,’ Middle East Institute, 21 May 2019, https://www.mei.edu/publications/origins-libyan-conflict-and-optionsits-resolution.

107. International Crisis Group, ‘After the showdown in Libya’s oil crescent,’ 9 August 2018, https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-east-north-africa/north-africa/libya/189-after-showdown-libyas-oil-crescent. 108. France 24, ‘US, Russia thwart progress on UN call for Libya ceasefire: Diplomats,’ 18 April 2019, https://www.france24.com/en/20190418-us-russia-thwart-progress-un-call-libya-ceasefire-diplomats. 109. Tarek Megerisi, ‘Why the “ignored war” in Libya will come to haunt a blinkered West,’ The Guardian,24 March 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/commentisfree/2020/mar/24/why-the-ignored-war-in-libya-willcome-to-haunt-a-blinkered-west. 110. Dan Sabbagh, Jason Burke and Bethan McKernan, ‘“Libya is ground zero”: Drones on frontline in bloody civil war,’ The Guardian, 27 November 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/nov/27/libya-is-ground-zero-drones-onfrontline-in-bloody-civil-war. 111. Author telephone conversation with a European diplomat working on Libya, 23 July 2020. 112. Author’s observations on the Tripoli frontlines, June and November 2019. 113. Declan Walsh, ‘In Libya, toothless U.N. embargo lets foreign states meddle with impunity,’ New York Times, 2 February 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/02/world/middleeast/libya-un-arms-embargo.html. 114. On 18 November 2019 the author arrived five hours after an Emirati drone strike on a biscuit factory outside Tripoli which killed ten civilians. Also, Human Rights Watch, ‘Libya: UAE strike kills 8 civilians,’ 29 April 2020, https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/29/libya-uae-strike-kills-8-civilians. 115. Haftar was reportedly never fully convinced of the Emiratis’ ‘soft-power’ engagement with these militias, and was pushing for a more direct military attack. The author is grateful to Jalel Harchaoui for this observation. 116. On the Libyan armed groups’ social entrenchment as a factor in their resistance to Haftar, see Wolfram Lacher, ‘Think Libya’s warring factions are only in it for the money? Think again,’ Washington Post, 10 April 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/10/think-libyas-warring-factions-are-only-it-money-think-again/. 117. United Nations Security Council, ‘Final report of the panel of experts on Libya submitted in accordance with resolution 2441 (2018),’ 9 December 2019, 21, https://undocs.org/S/2019/914. 118. Author interview with Misratan armed group leaders, Tripoli and Misrata, June 2019. Also, Paul Iddon, ‘Turkey is fighting a formidable drone war in Libya,’ Ahvalnews, 14 September 2019, https://ahvalnews.com/libya/turkey-fightingformidable-drone-war-libya. 119. Author interview with a Misratan GNA official, Tunis, Tunisia, June 2019. 120. Kirkpatrick, ‘The White House blessed a war in Libya, but Russia won it.’ 121. Bellingcat, ‘Putin chef’s kisses of death: Russia’s shadow army’s state-run structure exposed,’ 14 August 2020, https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2020/08/14/pmc-structure-exposed/. 122. For more on the Wagner Group, see Marten, ‘Russia’s use of semi-state security forces: The case of the Wagner Group,’ and Paul Stronski, ‘Implausible deniability: Russia’s private military companies,’ Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2 June 2020, https://carnegieendowment.org/2020/06/02/implausible-deniability-russia-s-private-militarycompanies-pub-81954. 123. Author email exchanges with a European official working on Libya, March 2020. 124. Author interview with Western diplomats, Tripoli, Libya, July 2019. Kirill Semenov, ‘Sarraj visit to Sochi exposes rival Russian factions on Libya policy,’ Al-Monitor,28 October 2019, https://www.almonitor.com/pulse/originals/2019/10/russia-libya-sarraj-hifter-tripoli-pmcs.html. 125. Andrew Higgins and Declan Walsh, ‘How two Russians got caught up in Libya’s war, now an action movie,’ New York Times, 18 June 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/world/middleeast/russia-libya-maksim-Shugalei.html, author interview with GNA officials Tripoli, Libya, July 2019. 126. Shelby Grossman, Khadeja Ramali, and Renee DiResta, ‘Blurring the lines of media authenticity: Prigozhin-linked group funding Libyan broadcast media,’ Stanford Internet Observatory, 20 March 2020, https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/libya-prigozhin. 127. Reuters, ‘Libya’s NOC says Tatneft resumed exploring activities in Libya’s Ghadames basin,’ 9 December 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/libya-noc-tatneft/libyas-noc-says-tatneft-resumed-exploring-activities-in-libyasghadames-basin-idUSL8N28J69K. 128. Emmanuel Dreyfus, ‘Russian military companies. Wagner, how many divisions, XXI?’ Orient XXI,24 April 2020, https://orientxxi.info/magazine/russian-military-companies-wagner-how-many-divisions,3828. 129. Candace Rondeaux, ‘Decoding the Wagner Group: Analyzing the role of private military security contractors in Russian

130. 131. 132. 133. 134.

135. 136.

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140. 141. 142. 143.

144. 145. 146. 147.

148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153.

proxy warfare,’ New America, 7 November 2019, https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/reports/decodingwagner-group-analyzing-role-private-military-security-contractors-russian-proxy-warfare/. Author interview with Western diplomats, Tripoli, Libya, November 2019 and telephone interview, December 2019. Author observations on the Salahaddin frontline, Tripoli, Libya, November 2019. Author interview with GNA military commander Usama Juwayli, Tripoli, Libya, November 2019. David Kirkpatrick, ‘Russian snipers, missiles and warplanes try to tilt Libyan war,’ New York Times, 5 November 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/05/world/middleeast/russia-libya-mercenaries.html. Daren Butler and Tuvan Gumrukcu, ‘Turkey signs maritime boundaries deal with Libya amid exploration row,’ Reuters, 28 November 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-libya/turkey-signs-maritime-boundaries-deal-with-libyaamid-exploration-row-idUSKBN1Y213I. Carlotta Gall, ‘Turkey, flexing its muscles, will send troops to Libya,’ New York Times, 2 January 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/02/world/europe/erdogan-turkey-libya.html. European Council for Foreign Relations, ‘Deep sea rivals: Europe, Turkey, and new eastern Mediterranean conflict lines,’ May 2020, https://www.ecfr.eu/specials/eastern_med/about. Also, Sinan Ulgen, ‘Erdogan is taking a big gamble in Libya,’ Bloomberg, 9 January 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-01-09/turkey-s-erdogan-istaking-a-big-gamble-in-libya. Ceyda Caglayan, ‘Turkey aims to sign deal with Libya over Gaddafi-era compensation,’ Reuters, 10 January 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-security-turkey/turkey-aims-to-sign-deal-with-libya-over-gaddafi-eracompensation-idUSKBN1Z913A. Asli Aydıntas¸bas¸, ‘The Turkish sonderweg: The new Turkey’s role in the global order,’ European Council on Foreign Relations, 2 April 2020, https://www.ecfr.eu/article/commentary_the_turkish_sonderweg_the_new_turkeys_role_in_the_global_order. Also, Lamine Ghanmi, ‘Erdogan’s statements add to wariness about Turkish designs in Libya,’ The Arab Weekly, 15 January 2020, https://thearabweekly.com/erdogans-statements-add-wariness-about-turkish-designs-libya. Ismaeel Naar, ‘Haftar accuses Erdogan of attempting to revive Ottoman legacy in Libya, region,’ Al-Arabiya, 3 January 2020, https://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/north-africa/2020/01/04/Haftar-accuses-Erdogan-of-attempting-to-reviveOttoman-legacy-in-Libya-region. Syrian fighters told the author there were plans for an additional 6,000 fighters in the coming months. Author interviews with Syrian militia fighters on the GNA frontlines, Tripoli, Libya, January 2020. Author interview with three Syrian militia fighters on the Salahaddin front, Tripoli, Libya, January 2020. Author interviews with GNA commanders liaising with Turkish forces, Tripoli, Libya, January 2020. Author interview with Misratan GNA commanders, Salahaddin front, Tripoli, Libya, January 2020. See also, Frederic Wehrey, ‘Among the Syrian militiamen of Turkey’s Libya intervention,’ New York Review of Books, 23 January 2020, https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/01/23/among-the-syrian-militiamen-of-turkeys-intervention-in-libya/. Author interview with Misratan GNA commanders, Salahaddin front, Tripoli, Libya, January 2020. Author interview with Misratan civil society and business leaders, Misrata, Libya, January 2020. Isabel Debre, ‘Pentagon report: Turkey sent up to 3,800 fighters to Libya,’ Associated Press, 17 July 2020, https://apnews.com/c339f71bf029f36b1091ee31c9f0171a. Author interview with a UN official, Tunis, Tunisia, January 2020. Also Jeffrey Mankoff, ‘Don’t forget the historical context of Russo-Turkish competition,’ War on the Rocks, 7 April 2020, https://warontherocks.com/2020/04/dont-forgetthe-historical-context-of-russo-turkish-competition/. Patrick Wintour, ‘Libya talks in Moscow in diplomatic coup for Putin,’ The Guardian, 13 January 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/13/libya-talks-moscow-diplomatic-coup-vladimir-putin. Authors’ observations on the Salahaddin front, Tripoli, Libya, January 2020. Author interview with a US diplomat, Tunis, Tunisia, January 2020. Author interviews with GNA fighters, Abu Ghrein front, Libya, January 2020. The fifty-five points are listed here on the German federal government’s website: https://www.bundesregierung.de/bregde/aktuelles/the-berlin-conference-on-libya-1713868/. Frederic Wehrey, ‘Libya’s bloodshed will continue unless foreign powers stop backing Khalifa Haftar,’ The Guardian, 2 February 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/02/libya-foreign-powers-khalifa-haftar-emiratesrussia-us.

154. Emadeddin Badi, ‘Europe’s weak hand in Libya,’ International Politics and Society Journal, 24 January 2020, https://www.ips-journal.eu/regions/middle-east/article/show/europes-weak-hand-in-libya-4025/. 155. Statement by David Schenker Assistant Secretary, Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,’ 12 February 2020, https://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/021220_Schenker_Testimony.pdf. 156. Author conversations with US officials, Washington, DC, November 2019. 157. According to European diplomat critical of US policy, the 3M policy was based on Washington’s assumption of what would appeal to the Emirates, rather than a direct solicitation of Emirati goals. Author email exchange with a European diplomat, July 2020. 158. However, even with the war effort, Minister of Interior Fathi Bashagha pledged that the capital’s criminal militias would eventually be held accountable. ‘No forgiveness just because you fought Haftar,’ he told the author in June 2019, even while acknowledging his continued reliance on certain militias, namely the counterterrorism wing of the Special Deterrence Force and key Misratan armed groups. Author interview with Fathi Bashagha, Tunis, Tunisia, June 2019. 159. Author telephone discussions with Libyan analysts, June 2020. 160. Author conversations with US officials, Tunis, Tunisia, January 2020. Even so, the deployment of Syrians to Tripoli stirred dissent within the Syrian opposition ranks, who viewed it as a distraction from the war against Assad. 161. Jason Burke and Patrick Wintour, ‘Suspected military supplies pour into Libya as UN flounders,’ The Guardian,11 March 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/11/suspected-military-supplies-libya-un-cargo. 162. Metin Gurcan, ‘Battle for air supremacy heats up in Libya despite COVID-19 outbreak,’ Al-Monitor, 6 April 2020, https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2020/04/turkey-libya-air-supremacy-heats-up-despite-amidcoronavirus.xhtml#ixzz6KpbzHvcL. 163. For analysis of Turkish innovative use of drones and Libya’s broader significance as a ‘laboratory’ for drone warfare, see Tom Kington, ‘Libya is turning into a battle lab for air warfare,’ DefenseNews, 6 August 2020. 164. Author telephone interview with a Libyan source close to the Turkish military, April 2020. 165. Al Jazeera, ‘Libya: Tripoli gov’t retakes three cities from Haftar’s forces,’ 14 April 2020, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/libya-tripoli-gov-retakes-cities-haftar-forces-200413150239683.html. 166. United Nations data attributes responsibility for the preponderance of combat-related civilian deaths in Tripoli to the LAAF and their foreign backers. See United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) Civilian Casualties Report, 1 January to 20 March 2020; https://unsmil.unmissions.org/sites/default/files/first_quarter_civilian_casualty_report_2020_1.pdf. 167. On the Chadians, see Mark Micallef, Raouf Farrah and Alexandre Bish, ‘After the storm: Organized crime across the Sahel-Sahara following upheaval in Libya and Mali,’ Global Initiative, 2019, https://globalinitiative.net/after-the-storm/. On the Sudanese, Mohammed Amin, ‘Sudanese youths accuse UAE security firm of duping them into protecting Libyan oil fields,’ The Middle East Eye, 1 February 2020, https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/uae-security-firm-accusedluring-sudanese-emirate-protect-libya-oilfields 168. United Nations Security Council, ‘Final report of the panel of experts on Libya submitted in accordance with resolution 2441 (2018),’ 9 December 2019. 169. David Wainer, ‘Russian mercenaries act as “force multiplier” in Libya, UN says,’ Bloomberg, 5 April 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-05/russian-mercenaries-act-as-force-multiplier-in-libya-un-says. Simultaneously, another 500 Syrian fighters—from rebels co-opted by Assad—were recruited by the Wagner Group for service in Libya, but quickly withdrew when they learned they were headed for frontline combat. 170. Declan Walsh and Eric Schmitt, ‘U.S. accuses Russia of sending warplanes to Libya,’ New York Times, 18 June 2020. Jared Malsin, ‘Russia reinforces foothold in Libya as militia leader retreats,’ Wall Street Journal, 29 June 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-reinforces-foothold-in-libya-as-militia-leader-retreats-11593453304. On Wagner Group mines and booby traps, see US Africa Command, ‘Russia, Wagner Group complicating Libyan ceasefire efforts,’ 15 July 2020, https://www.africom.mil/pressrelease/33008/russia-wagner-group-complicating-libyan-cease. 171. Al Jazeera, ‘Egypt’s parliament approves troop deployment to Libya,’ 20 July 2020, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/07/egypt-legislators-vote-deploying-troops-libya-200720141515828.html. Also, Borzou Daragahi, ‘“Too late to stop”: Egypt and Turkey ramp up Libya war preparations,’ The Independent, 21 July 2020. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/egypt-turkey-libya-deployment-el-sisi-khalifa-haftara9629661.html. 172. See Egypt Defense Review (pseudonym), ‘Egypt’s military limitations: Cairo’s options to defend eastern Libya,’ Foreign

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178. 179.

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Policy Research Institute, 13 July 2020. https://www.fpri.org/article/2020/07/egypts-military-limitations-cairos-optionsto-defend-eastern-libya/. For a good discussion on military logistics and air power in Libya from Turkey’s perspective, see Ben Fishman and Conor Hiney, ‘What turned the battle for Tripoli?’ Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 6 May 2020, https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/what-turned-the-battle-for-tripoli. Jared Malsin, ‘Russia reinforces foothold in Libya as militia leader retreats,’ Wall Street Journal, 29 June 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-reinforces-foothold-in-libya-as-militia-leader-retreats-11593453304. Reuters, ‘Syrian forces seize most of Aleppo province, on eve of Turkey-Russia talks,’ 16 February 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-syria-security-turkey-russia/syrian-forces-seize-most-of-aleppo-province-ahead-ofturkey-russia-talks-idUSKBN20A0EZ. Author telephone conversation with a Misratan advisor to the GNA, 26 July 2020. Galip Dalay, ‘Libya conflict: Turkey is looking for a “third way” in Sirte,’ Middle East Eye, 21 July 2020, https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/libya-conflict-turkey--options. See also the announcement of a Turkish-Russian working group on Libya by the Russian embassy in Turkey: https://twitter.com/RusEmbTurkey/status/1285898147819069440. On linkages to Idlib, see Metin Gurcan, ‘Full-fledged military escalation looms large in Idlib,’ Al-Monitor, 6 August 2020, https://www.almonitor.com/pulse/originals/2020/08/turkey-syria-russia-fragile-ceasefire-in-idlib-may-collapse.html. Africa Intelligence, ‘Turkish military company Sadat turns Erdogan-Sarraj alliance into business opportunity,’ 6 August 2020; Anadolu Agency, ‘Turkey, Libya, Qatar agree to ink military deal,’ 17 August 2020, https://www.aa.com.tr/en/middle-east/turkey-libya-qatar-agree-to-ink-military-deal/1944893. Mada Masr, ‘What comes after the collapse of Haftar’s Western campaign?’ 8 June 2020, https://www.madamasr.com/en/2020/06/08/feature/politics/what-comes-after-the-collapse-of-haftars-western-campaign/. The roadmap was announced shortly after Haftar publicly renounced the 2015 UN-brokered accord and the HOR’s legitimacy, in an attempt to position himself as the sole political authority in the east and salvage his role in a settlement with foreign powers. According to a leaked recording by Saleh, the roadmap had been devised with Russian assistance. Malik Traina and Rami Alloum, ‘Is Libya’s Khalifa Haftar on the way out?’ Al Jazeera, 24 May 2020, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/05/libya-khalifa-haftar-200523142442684.html. Emadeddin Badi, ‘Russia isn’t the only one getting its hands dirty in Libya,’ Foreign Policy, 21 April 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/21/libyan-civil-war-france-uae-khalifa-haftar/. Al Jazeera, ‘Libya: Haftar’s LNA says blockade on oil will continue,’ 12 July 2020, https://www.aljazeera.com/ajimpact/libya-haftar-lna-blockade-oil-continue-200712072528393.html. Lorne Cook, ‘France-Turkey spat over Libya arms exposes NATO’s limits,’ Associated Press, https://apnews.com/045a9b8eb0f7eb5adc33d1303fafa95d; Bruno Stagno Ugarte, ‘Macron’s selective indignation over Libya,’ Human Rights Watch, 17 July 2020, https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/07/17/macrons-selective-indignation-overlibya#. Tarek Megeresi, ‘The EU’s “Irini” Libya mission: Europe’s Operation Cassandra,’ European Council on Foreign Relations, 3 April 2020, https://www.ecfr.eu/article/commentary_the_eus_irini_libya_mission_europes_operation_cassandra. In addition, by mid2020, Turkey had intensified its aerial shipments into Libya, especially to Watiya airbase. Reuters, ‘France, Germany, Italy threaten sanctions over arms for Libya,’ 18 July 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-security-sanctions/france-germany-italy-threaten-sanctions-over-arms-for-libyaidUSKCN24J0SH. Humeyra Pamuk, ‘U.S. senior diplomat complains Europe not doing enough in Libya,’ Reuters, 16 July 2020, https://uk.reuters.com/article/libya-security-usa/us-senior-diplomat-complains-europe-not-doing-enough-in-libyaidUKL5N2EN60K. Al-Arabiya, ‘US says it will maintain policy of “active neutrality” on Libya,’ 3 July 2020, https://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/north-africa/2020/07/03/US-says-it-will-maintain-policy-of-active-neutrality-onLibya. US Department of the Treasury, ‘Treasury targets financier’s illicit sanctions evasion activity,’ 15 July 2020. https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm1058. See the disclosures by US Africa Command of Russian activity in Libya: https://www.africom.mil/pressrelease/33008/russia-wagner-group-complicating-libyan-cease. Also, Benoit Faucon and

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Jared Malsin, ‘Russian oil grab in Libya fuels U.S.-Kremlin tensions in Mideast,’ Wall Street Journal, 26 July 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-oil-grab-in-libya-fuels-u-s-kremlin-tensions-in-mideast-11595772000. Declan Walsh, ‘Libyan rivals call for peace talks. It may be wishful thinking,’ New York Times, 21 August 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/21/world/middleeast/libya-ceasefire.html. Reuters, ‘Libya’s Tripoli government imposes COVID-19 curfew after protests escalate,’ 27 August 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-security/libyas-tripoli-government-imposes-covid-19-curfew-after-protestsescalate-idUSKBN25N1WO. Reuters, ‘Influential Libyan interior minister suspended amid protests,’ 28 August 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-security/influential-libyan-interior-minister-suspended-amid-protestsidUSKBN25O301. Author telephone interview with a senior Western diplomat, 22 August 2020. Frederic Wehrey and Emadeddin Badi, ‘Flames on the horizon?’ Diwan (blog), Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 7 January 2022, https://carnegie-mec.org/diwan/86145. Luca Raineri, ‘Robot fighting: Libya and the wars of the future,’ Security Praxis, 13 December 2019, https://securitypraxis.eu/robot-fighting-libya/.

CHAPTER 6. THE PROXY AIR WARS OVER LIBYA 1. 2. 3.

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5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Chris Stephen, ‘Gaddafi Stronghold Bani Walid captured by Libya government troops,’ The Guardian, 24 October 2012, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/24/bani-walid-captured-by-libya-government. United States Africa Command, 8 June 2018, https://www.africom.mil/media-room/pressrelease/30862/u-s-conductsprecision-strike-in-libya. HUMAN RIGHTS REPORT ON CIVILIAN CASUALTIES—JUNE 2018, HUMAN RIGHTS REPORT ON CIVILIAN CASUALTIES—JUNE 2018 § (2018), https://unsmil.unmissions.org/human-rights-report-civiliancasualties-june-2018. Abdulkader Assad, ‘Report: Haftar could have the upper hand in Derna fighting, thanks to French aircraft,’ Libya Observer, 3 June 2018, https://www.libyaobserver.ly/news/report-haftar-could-have-upper-hand-derna-fighting-thanksfrench-aircraft. Eric Schmitt and Declan Walsh, ‘U.S. missiles found in Libyan rebel camp were first sold to France,’ New York Times, 9 July 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/09/world/middleeast/us-missiles-libya-france.html ‘Libya conflict: French missiles found on pro-Haftar base,’ BBC, 10 July 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa48935242. @awlad.suleiman.sabha, Facebook post, 16 June 2018, 23:09. http://archive.is/hkEYv. HUMAN RIGHTS REPORT ON CIVILIAN CASUALTIES—JUNE 2018, HUMAN RIGHTS REPORT ON CIVILIAN CASUALTIES—JUNE 2018 § (2018), https://unsmil.unmissions.org/human-rights-report-civiliancasualties-june-2018. The data presented in this chapter reflects the reporting on strikes in Libya as it stood in March 2021, when New America’s project tracking strikes with Airwars concluded. ‘OCHA Libya.’ United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, 25 February 2019, https://www.unocha.org/libya/about-ocha-libya. Operational Portal Refugee Situations. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, November 2019, https://data2.unhcr.org/en/country/lby. Operational Portal Refugee Situations. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, November 2019, https://data2.unhcr.org/en/country/lby. ‘United Nations Official Document.’ Children and armed conflict report of the Secretary-General, United Nations, 20 June 2019, https://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/2019/509&Lang=E. ‘United Nations Official Document.’ Children and armed conflict report of the Secretary-General, United Nations, 20 June 2019, https://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/2019/509&Lang=E. ‘Libya.’ Libya facts and figures, Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, 2019, https://www.opec.org/opec_web/en/about_us/166.htm. Natasha Turak, ‘Russian mercenaries, a CIA-linked general and lots of oil: Explaining Libya’s war,’ CNBC, 29 January 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/29/libyas-war-explained-khalifa-haftar-oil-cuts-uae-airstrikes-and-russian-

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63. Tommy Hilton, ‘Libyan National Army gains control of third largest district in Libya’s Sirte,’ Al Arabiya English, 6 January 2020, http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/north-africa/2020/01/06/Libyan-National-Army-gains-control-ofmost-of-Libya-s-third-city-Sirte.html. 64. Nicholas Saidel, ‘The Middle East conflict you haven’t heard about,’ Wall Street Journal, 9 February 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-middle-east-conflict-you-havent-heard-about-11581277914. 65. Abdulrahim, ‘Foreign backing brings militias in Libya to a stalemate—and no further.’ 66. Abdulrahim, ‘Foreign backing brings militias in Libya to a stalemate—and no further.’ 67. Kirkpatrick, ‘A police state with an Islamist Twist: Inside Hifter’s Libya,’ New York Times, 20 February 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/world/middleeast/libya-hifter-benghazi.html. 68. David, Kirkpatrick, ‘A police state with an Islamist Twist.’ 69. Jared Malsin and Summer Said, ‘Saudi Arabia promised support to Libyan warlord in push to seize Tripoli,’ Wall Street Journal, 12 April 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-arabia-promised-support-to-libyan-warlord-in-push-to-seizetripoli-11555077600. 70. Anas El Gomati, ‘Libya’s civil war: Navigating its dangerous new phase,’ War on the Rocks, 12 July 2019, https://warontherocks.com/2019/07/libyas-civil-war-navigating-its-dangerous-new-phase/. 71. ‘State of emergency declared in Tripoli after days of fighting,’ 2 September 2018, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/09/state-emergency-declared-tripoli-days-fighting-180902174017177.html. 72. Tommy Hilton, ‘Libyan National Army gains control of third largest district in Libya’s Sirte,’ Al Arabiya English, 6 January 2020, http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/north-africa/2020/01/06/Libyan-National-Army-gains-control-ofmost-of-Libya-s-third-city-Sirte.html. 73. Malsin and Said, ‘Saudi Arabia promised support to Libyan warlord in push to seize Tripoli.’ 74. ‘UN committed “to support the Libyan people” as Guterres departs “with deep concern and a heavy heart”’ § (2019), https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/04/1036161. 75. ‘About 40 dead and more than 70 wounded in an air strike on a detention center for migrants in Libya (Paramedics),’ France 24, 3 July 2019, http://archive.fo/7KEV1; ‘40 killed and 80 injured after bombing a migrant detention center in Libya,’ Aawsat News, 3 July 2019, http://archive.fo/85Htd#selection-1669.1-1682.0. 76. ‘Libya: Deadly airstrike apparently unlawful,’ Human Rights Watch News, 19 October 2019, https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/10/19/libya-deadly-airstrike-apparently-unlawful; Sami Zaptia, ‘Hafter-attributed airstrike on Janzur equestrian club condemned.’ Libya Herald, 7 October 2019, https://www.libyaherald.com/2019/10/07/hafter-attributed-airstrike-on-janzur-equestrian-club-condemned/. 77. ‘UNSMIL APPALLED BY AN AIRSTRIKE TARGETING THE EQUESTRIAN CLUB IN TRIPOLI’S JANZOUR, REPORTEDLY INJURING A NUMBER OF CHILDREN,’ United Nations Support Mission in Libya, 6 October 2019, https://unsmil.unmissions.org/unsmil-appalled-airstrike-targeting-equestrian-club-tripoli’s-janzour-reportedly-injuringnumber. 78. New America tracks US drone strikes and other operations in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Our data can be accessed here: https://www.newamerica.org/in-depth/americas-counterterrorism-wars/. 79. Bergen and Sims, ‘Airstrikes and civilian casualties in Libya: Since the 2011 NATO intervention.’ 80. Stephen Tankel, ‘Donald Trump’s shadow war,’ Politico Magazine, 9 May 2018, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/05/09/donald-trumps-shadow-war-218327. 81. Stephen Tankel, ‘Donald Trump’s shadow war,’ Politico Magazine, 9 May 2018, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/05/09/donald-trumps-shadow-war-218327. 82. ‘Libyan officials say American military drone shot down by mistake,’ Military Times, 25 November 2019, https://www.militarytimes.com/flashpoints/2019/11/25/libyan-officials-say-american-military-drone-shot-down-bymistake/. 83. Tom Kington, ‘Italy confirms military drone crashed in Libya,’ Military Times, 20 November 2019, https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2019/11/21/italy-confirms-military-drone-crashed-in-libya/. 84. ‘Berlin summit on Libya conflict: What did world powers agree?’ Al Jazeera, 20 January 2020, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/01/berlin-summit-libya-conflict-key-points-200120070222589.html. 85. Barbara Bibbo, ‘Libya rivals show “genuine will” to start ceasefire talks: UN,’ Al Jazeera, 4 February 2020, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/02/libya-rivals-show-genuine-start-ceasefire-talks-200204103250564.html. 86. ‘Libya facing “serious crisis” fueled by outsiders bent on dividing the county, UN Assembly told | UN News,’ United

Nations, United Nations, 25 September 2019, https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/09/1047592. 87. ‘Libya facing “serious crisis” fueled by outsiders bent on dividing the county, UN Assembly told | UN News.’ 88. Bergen and Sims, ‘Airstrikes and civilian casualties in Libya: Since the 2011 NATO intervention.’ CHAPTER 7. THE VIEW FROM THE CITY OF TAIZ 1.

2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8.

9.

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13. 14.

Research was conducted from April through July of 2019 using multiple field researchers, and the analysis of that research was performed in 2019. The researchers and their interviewees remain anonymous in this chapter out of concern for their safety in an ongoing conflict. Researchers were tasked with assessing the present situation in Taiz, and they gathered information through multiple interviews with fighters, political leaders, and local residents of Taiz (known as Taizis). Where not otherwise footnoted or common knowledge, all information herein is derived from these interviews. Helen Lackner, Yemen in Crisis: Autocracy, Neo-Liberalism and the Disintegration of a State (London: Saqi Books, 2017), 42–57. Joe Dyke, ‘Is the Saudi war on Yemen legal?’ The New Humanitarian, 16 April 2019, http://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/analysis/2015/04/03/saudi-war-yemen-legal. For a characteristic framing on the first end, see Juan Cole, ‘Trump-Saudi war on Yemen collapsing as southern separatists take Aden,’ Informed Comment, 12 August 2019, https://www.juancole.com/2019/08/collapsing-southernseparatists.html. For a characteristic framing on the second, see Faith Salama, ‘Saudi Arabia ups the ante on Iran-backed Houthis,’ The Arab Weekly, 16 June 2019, https://thearabweekly.com/saudi-arabia-ups-ante-iran-backed-houthis. Helen Lackner, ‘Yemen. A misleading withdrawal from the Emirates,’ Orient XXI, 26 August 2019, https://orientxxi.info/magazine/the-yemen-war-impact-of-recent-developments, 3253. Nada Altaher, Jennifer Hauser, and Ivana Kottasova, ‘Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim a “large-scale” drone attack on Saudi oil facilities,’ CNN, 14 September 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/14/middleeast/yemen-houthi-rebels-droneattacks-saudi-aramco-intl/index.html. Geoff Brumfiel, ‘What we know about the attack on Saudi oil facilities,’ NPR, 19 September 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/09/19/762065119/what-we-know-about-the-attack-on-saudi-oil-facilities. John Irish and Kylie MacLellean, ‘European powers back U.S. in blaming Iran for Saudi oil attack, urge broader talks,’ Reuters, 23 September 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-iran-un/european-powers-back-us-in-blaming-iranfor-saudi-oil-attack-urge-broader-talks-idUSKBN1W81TK. ‘Briefing security council on Yemen, special envoy warns oil facilities attack could threaten regional stability, calls for inclusive process to end fighting,’ United Nations, 16 September 2019, https://www.un.org/press/en/2019/sc13952.doc.htm. See, for example, on the question of proxy relationships and different models of understanding proxy war and what constitutes a proxy: David Sterman, ‘How do we move past proxy paralysis,’ New America Weekly, 7 March 2019, https://www.newamerica.org/weekly/edition-239/redfine-proxy-warfare-strategy-identity/. Taiz’s rise began in 1173 AD, with the arrival of Turan Shah, an emir of the Ayyubid dynasty. After the Ayubbids exited Yemen, the Rasulid dynasty made the city its capital, from 1229 AD to 1454 AD. Taiz reached its civilizational height under the Rasulids, who developed a sophisticated administrative system, built fortresses and schools, and spread innovative agricultural techniques throughout the country, such as coffee production. In the seventeenth century, a maritime dispute with the Portuguese led the Ottomans to begin trading via the port of Al-Mokha instead of Aden. In 1918, after the collapse of the Ottoman empire, the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen selected Taiz as their capital until its overthrow in 1962. Historically characterized by its diversity and religious tolerance, Taiz was a notable center for Yemeni Jews for hundreds of years, beginning in 130 AD; the Shar’ab Assalam district boasted a vibrant and illustrious Jewish Quarter until the 1940s. Faisal Saeed Farea, Taiz: Faradat Al-Makan Wa ’adamat Al-Tarikh (Taiz: Al-Saeed Foundation for Sciences and Culture, 2012), 2. Prior to 1990, Yemen was divided into two countries: ‘North’ Yemen with its capital in Sanaa and ‘South’ Yemen with its capital in Aden. The north was under the rule of the Zaidi imamate until its overthrow in the 26 September republican revolution in 1962; the south was ruled by the Marxist People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) following the withdrawal of the British in 1967. See: Noel Brehony, Yemen Divided: The Story of a Failed State in South Arabia (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013). Charles Dunbar, ‘The unification of Yemen: Process, politics, and prospects,’ Middle East Journal 46, no. 3 (1992). Sasha Gordon, ‘Taiz: The heart of Yemen’s revolution,’ Critical Threats Project, 12 January 2012,

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17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

https://www.criticalthreats.org/analysis/taiz-the-heart-of-yemens-revolution Adam Baron, ‘Qatar’s dispute with neighbors reverberates in Yemen,’ The Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, 19 July 2017, https://agsiw.org/qatars-dispute-with-neighbors-reverberates-in-yemen/; Peter Salisbury, ‘Yemen and the Saudi-Iranian “cold war,”’ Chatham House, February 2015, 10, https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/field/field_document/20150218YemenIranSaudi.pdf. In addition to evidence from our interviews in Taiz, this dynamic can be seen in Eric Schmitt and Robert F. Worth, ‘With arms for Yemen rebels, Iran seeks wider mideast role,’ New York Times, 15 March 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/15/world/middleeast/aiding-yemen-rebels-iran-seeks-wider-mideast-role.html. Nasser Al-Sakkaf, ‘In Taiz, some Yemenis choose war—and home—over displacement,’ The New Humanitarian, 16 July 2019, https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news-feature/2019/07/16/taiz-yemen-war-displacement. Maysaa Shuja al Deen, ‘The endless battle in Taiz,’ Atlantic Council, 26 April 2017, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/the-endless-battle-in-taiz/. These were the last reliable figures, and they are considered to be ‘anecdotal.’ ‘Yemen economic monitoring brief,’ World Bank Group, Winter 2019, 1, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/161721552490437049/pdf/135266YemEconDevBrief-Winter-2019-English-12-Mar-19.pdf; Patrick Wintour, ‘More than half of $2.6bn aid to Yemen pledged by countries involved in war,’ The Guardian, 26 February 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/globaldevelopment/2019/feb/26/more-than-half-of-26bn-aid-to-yemen-pledged-by-countries-involved-in-war. ‘Caught in the middle: A conflict mapping of Taiz governorate,’ DeepRoot Consulting, 2018, 29, https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/df2b40_e6cbadad37b248b495c4c3634996b8aa.pdf. ‘The republic of Yemen: Unlocking the potential for economic growth,’ World Bank, October 2015, 84, http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/673781467997642839/pdf/102151-REVISED-box394829B-PUBLICYemen-CEM-edited.pdf. ‘Al-Mawarid Wa Foras Al-Istithmar Fi Mohafadhat Taiz,’ National Information Center Presidency of Yemen, 2014, https://www.yemen-nic.info/gover/taiz/menwal/. These sites include Al-Janad Mosque, Al-Qahira Citadel, and the Islamic schools such as Al-Modhafariah, Al-Ashrafiah and Al-Mu’tabiah. ‘In Yemen, a different kind of battle: Getting people trained and finding good bureaucrats,’ Knowledge@Wharton, 18 September 2012, https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/in-yemen-a-different-kind-of-battle-getting-peopletrained-and-finding-good-bureaucrats/. ‘Caught in the middle: A conflict mapping of Taiz governorate,’ 29. ‘Yemen war death toll exceeds 90,000 according to new ACLED data for 2015,’ ACLED, 18 June 2019), https://www.acleddata.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/ACLED_Yemen-2015-Data_6.2019-2.pdf. ‘Yemen war death toll exceeds 90,000.’ Sam Jones and Matthias Sulz, ‘Press release: Over 100,000 reported killed in Yemen War,’ ACLED, 31 October 2019, https://www.acleddata.com/2019/10/31/press-release-over-100000-reported-killed-in-yemen-war/. ‘Yemen war death toll exceeds 90,000.’ Barak A. Salmoni, Bryce Loidolt, and Madeleine Wells, Regime and Periphery in Northern Yemen: The Huthi Phenomenon (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2010), 1. Salmoni, Loidolt, and Wells, 114. Saeed Al-Batati and Kareem Fahim, ‘Rebels seize key parts of Yemen’s third-largest city, Taiz,’ New York Times, 22 March 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/23/world/middleeast/houthi-rebels-taiz-yemen.html. Omar Said, ‘The view from Aden: A shadow state between the coalition and civil war,’ Arab Reform Initiative, 19 April 2019), https://www.arab-reform.net/publication/the-view-from-aden-a-shadow-state-between-the-coalition-and-civilwar/. Helen Lackner, Yemen’s ‘Peaceful’ Transition from Autocracy: Could It Have Succeeded? (International IDEA, 2016), 14. Lackner, 14. Lackner, 23. For general clashes, see: Laura Kasinof, ‘Yemeni city feeds unrest’s roots,’ New York Times, 25 February 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/26/world/middleeast/26yemen.html. For clashes between Islah-Houthi supporters, see: ‘Ishtibakat’ Anifah Bayn Al-Islah Wa Al-Huthiyein Fi Sahat Al-Hurryia,’ Yemress, 6 September 2012,

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51. 52.

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55. 56. 57.

58.

https://www.yemeress.com/saadahpress/5996. Saleh Al-Samad served as President of ‘Yemen’s Supreme Political Council,’ which was the de facto executive body of the Houthis, until his death by a Saudi airstrike on 19 April 2018. Marwa Rashad and Sarah Dadouch, ‘Saudi-led air strike kills top Houthi official in Yemen,’ Reuters, 23 April 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-yemen-securityofficial/saudi-led-air-strike-kills-top-houthi-official-in-yemen-idUSKBN1HU28Z. ‘Al-Juneid Yo’akid Hirs Al-Dawlah Wa Ihtimamiha Bi Ri’ayet Osar Al-Shuhada,’ Al-Thawra, 28 February 2016, http://althawrah.ye/archives/380024. Author’s interviews held with Yemeni political activists in Beirut and Sanaa over 2012 and 2013. Al-Batati and Fahim, ‘Rebels seize key parts.’ Ahmed Al-Haj, ‘Shia rebels kill six in clashes with thousands of protesters in Yemen,’ Associated Press, 24 March 2015. Ibid. Saleh Al-Diwani, ‘27 Yom’an Min Tahajom Al-Inqlabiyeen Wa Tahqiq Agradh Al-Tahalof,’ Al-Watan Online, 26 March 2016, https://www.alwatan.com.sa/article/295558/ Amr Al-Sabagh, ‘Ra’ees Al-Yemen Yo’aiyn Qa’id Jadid Lil Liwa 35,’ DotMsr, 2 April 2015, http://www.dotmsr.com/news/196/247700/ UNSCR, ‘7721st meeting. Provisional meeting, UN Doc S//PV.7721,’ 21 June 2016, 5, https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/s_pv_7721.pdf. See also,‘Annual report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and reports of the Office of the High Commissioner and the Secretary-General.A/HRC/39/43,’ United Nations Human Rights Council, 2018, https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/YE/A_HRC_39_43_EN.docx. This was confirmed in field research interviews; also see: ‘The conflict in Yemen: April 2015,’ Stratfor, 30 April 2015, https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/conflict-yemen-april-2015; ‘Al-Yaman Thobadt Al-Liwa 35 Ya’linon Ta’yeedihim Lilraees Hadi,’ Al-Arabiya, 27 March 2015, https://www.alarabiya.net/ar/arab-and-world/yemen/2015/03/27/ . ‘Houthis take control of army brigade in Yemen’s Taiz: Residents,’ Reuters, 22 April 2015, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-yemen-security-taiz-idUSKBN0ND0QO20150422. ‘Shawqi Hayel’ Yastaqil Niha’iyan Min Mansibeh,’ Al-Ameen Press, 16 November 2015, https://alameenpress.info/print/5257. Dan Roberts and Kareem Shaheen, ‘Saudi Arabia launches Yemen air strikes as alliance builds against Houthi rebels,’ The Guardian, 26 March 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/26/saudi-arabia-begins-airstrikes-againsthouthi-in-yemen. Jodst Hiltermann and April Longley Alley, ‘The Houthis are not Hezbollah,’ Foreign Policy, 27 February 2017, https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/02/27/the-houthis-are-not-hezbollah/. For more on the Houthi-Iranian relationship, see: Thomas Juneau, ‘Iran’s policy towards the Houthis in Yemen: A limited return on a modest investment,’ International Affairs 92, no. 3 (May 2016): 647–63, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2346.12599. Jon Gambrell, ‘AP Explains: How Yemen’s rebels increasingly deploy drones,’ Associated Press, 14 May 2019, https://www.apnews.com/02c0c90050ee4b21a408db483906971b. Hiltermann and Alley, ‘The Houthis are not Hezbollah’; Elisabeth Kendall, ‘Iran’s fingerprints in Yemen: Real or imagined?’ Atlantic Council (blog), 19 October 2017), https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/issuebrief/iran-s-fingerprints-in-yemen-real-or-imagined/. Hiltermann and Alley, ‘The Houthis are not Hezbollah.’ Wesley Morgan, ‘Pentagon: No more refueling of Saudi aircraft bombing Yemen,’ Politico, 9 November 2018, https://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/09/saudi-arabia-yemen-bombing-pentagon-refueling-982924. This can be observed across Houthi media outlets; see, for example: Honah AlMasirah, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VhRE92bJP0. The narrative can also be seen in material from Houthi news agencies: ‘Update of confrontations with US-Saudi forces in border fronts, September 18th, 2019,’ Almasirah Media Network, 9 September 2019, http://english.almasirah.net/details.php?es_id=8861&cat_id=1; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VhRE92bJP0. Sarah Aziza, ‘Trump’s veto on Yemen war is a sign that the strongmen in the U.S. and Saudi Arabia are winning,’ The Intercept, 9 September 2019, https://theintercept.com/2019/04/18/trump-veto-yemen-saudi-arabia-mbs.

59. Nadwa Al-Dawsari, ‘Yemen: A view from Marib,’ Atlantic Council (blog), 1 May 2015, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/menasource/yemen-a-view-from-marib/. 60. Adam Baron, ‘The Gulf country that will shape the future of Yemen,’ The Atlantic, 22 September 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/09/yemen-mukalla-uae-al-qaeda/570943; ‘Yemen’s Al-Qaeda: expanding the base,’ International Crisis Group, 2 February 2017, https://d2071andvip0wj.cloudfront.net/174-yemen-sal-qaeda-expanding-the-base.pdf. 61. Kendall, ‘Iran’s fingerprints in Yemen: Real or imagined?’ 62. Mustafa Naji, ‘Yemen: Taiz, martyred and forgotten city,’ Orient XXI, 14 May 2019, https://orientxxi.info/magazine/yemen-taiz-martyred-and-forgotten-city, 3091. 63. Al-Ahmar is one of the most prominent military commanders in Yemen’s modern history. He is a leading member of Islah and the former general of the First Armoured Brigade pre-2014, which was a military brigade as strong as the Republican Guard, commanded by Saleh’s son, Ahmed. Al-Ahmar has close connections with Saudi Arabia and the tribes around northwestern Yemen, and is considered one of the strongest leaders of the Arab Spring who fought directly with Saleh at the time. SeePeter Salisbury, ‘Yemen’s Ali Mohsen Al-Ahmar: Last Sanhan Standing,’ Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, 15 December 2017, https://agsiw.org/yemens-ali-mohsen-al-ahmar-last-sanhan-standing/. 64. Sudarsan Raghavan, ‘The U.S. put a Yemeni warlord on a terrorist list. One of its close allies is still arming him,’ Washington Post, 29 December 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/the-us-put-a-yemeniwarlord-on-a-terrorist-list-one-of-its-close-allies-is-still-arming-him/2018/12/28/f3c4fb5b-f366-4570-b27b75a3ed0f0f52_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.2a63e1d91201. 65. Ibid. 66. Eleonora Ardemagni, ‘The Yemen element in the UAE’s anti-Brotherhood fight,’ Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2 July 2019, https://carnegieendowment.org/sada/79423; ‘Former Yemen allies furious as UAE assassination campaign exposed,’ Middle East Eye, 29 January 2019, https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/former-yemen-alliesfurious-uae-assassination-campaign-exposed. 67. ‘Tawjih Muhafedh Taiz Birafe Niqat Altaftish Bayn Taiz Wa Hayjat Alabd Khilal Asharat Ayam,’ News Yemen, 13 July 2018, https://www.newsyemen.net/news32384.html. 68. ‘The teen warlord who runs Yemen’s second city with fear,’ Middle East Eye, 26 November 2018, https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/teen-warlord-who-runs-yemens-second-city-fear. 69. Emad Al-Marshahi, ‘Clashes erupt between coalition’s rival militias in Taiz,’ Uprising Today, 6 January 2019, https://www.uprising.today/clashes-erupt-between-coalitions-rival-militias-in-taiz. 70. ‘Ghazwan Al-Mekhlafi: Qina’ Morahiq l‘Wajh’ Al-Islah,’ News Yemen, 2 December 2018, http://newsyemen.news/news35967.html. 71. ‘Tawjih Muhafedh Taiz Birafe Niqat Altaftish Bayn Taiz Wa Hayjat Alabd Khilal Asharat Ayam.’ 72. ‘Taiz. Police chief survives an assassination attempt, security campaigns to capture remaining defendants,’ Debriefer, 23 March 2019, https://debriefer.net/en/news-7498.html. 73. ‘Crisis group Yemen update #8,’ International Crisis Group, 5 April 2019, https://www.crisisgroup.org/middle-eastnorth-africa/gulf-and-arabian-peninsula/yemen/crisis-group-yemen-update-8. 74. Maged Sultan, Mareike Transfeld, and Kamal Muqbil, ‘Formalizing the informal: State and non-state security providers in government controlled Taiz city,’ Yemen Polling Center, 22 July 2019, https://www.yemenpolling.org/formalizing_the_informal/. 75. The timeline of governors in Taiz since 2015 is as follows: Shawqi Hayel Saeed: April 2012–November 2015; Ali AlMaamari: January 2016–January 2018; Amin Mahmoud: January 2018–December 2018; Nabil Shamsan: December 2018–present. 76. Emma Tveit, Miranda Morton, and Matthew Cassidy, ‘Gulf of Aden Security Review—September 26, 2017,’ Critical Threats Project (blog), 26 September 2017, https://www.criticalthreats.org/briefs/gulf-of-aden-security-review/gulf-ofaden-security-review-september-26-2017. 77. Literally: judicious, a name used to describe wise men and elders of local communities. 78. Sultan, Transfeld, and Muqbil, ‘Formalizing the informal: State and non-state security providers in government controlled Taiz city.’ 79. Badr Basalmah, ‘Local governance in Yemen: Challenges and opportunities,’ Berghof Foundation, 2018, 9, https://www.berghoffoundation.org/fileadmin/redaktion/Publications/Other_Resources/Berghof_Foundation_Yemen_locgov_Paper02LocalGovernanc

80. Basalmah, ‘Local governance in Yemen: Challenges and opportunities.’ CHAPTER 8. DECODING THE WAGNER GROUP 1.

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The author and affiliated researchers conducted interviews with more than seventy experts based in Russia, Ukraine, Syria, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as eyewitnesses impacted by the conflicts in Syria and Ukraine. Due to diplomatic sensitivities and security concerns, the majority of those interviewed only agreed to be interviewed on condition that their names would not be released. Where possible, sources are named and/or the source of their expertise and insights are noted. Maria Tsetkova and Anton Zverev, ‘Kremlin-linked contractors help guard Venezuela’s Maduro—sources,’ Reuters, 25 January 2001, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-russia-exclusive/exclusive-kremlin-linkedcontractors-help-guard-venezuelas-maduro-sources-idUSKCN1PJ22M. This study began with trips to Ukraine in October 2018 and February 2019, and the bulk of the data analyzed in this study was collected from January to June 2019 by the author and a small team of researchers based at New America’s institutional partners, Arizona State University and Omran Center for Strategic Studies. Where possible we have indicated the source of interviewees’ expertise, e.g., ‘Senior Western diplomat,’ or ‘local Syrian contractor,’ or ‘Ukraine human rights expert’; the mode of interviews (in person, phone, Skype, etc.); and indicated the date and place where the interviews took place. In some cases, where sources agreed to attribution, we have so indicated with name, title, date, and place. Christoph Reuter, ‘American fury: The truth about the Russian deaths in Syria,’ Der Spiegel, 1 March 2018, https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/american-fury-the-truth-about-the-russian-deaths-in-syria-a-1196074.html; Sebastien Robin, ‘Did Russia and America almost go to war in Syria?’ The National Interest, 18 June 2018, https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/did-russia-america-almost-go-war-syria-26279?page=2. Thomas Gibbons-Neff, ‘How a 4-hour battle between Russian Mercenaries and U.S. commandos unfolded in Syria,’ New York Times,24 May 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/world/middleeast/american-commandos-russianmercenaries-syria.html. The February 2018 clash in Deir ez-Zour has been analyzed by a wide array of investigative journalists, military, and Russia scholars. In addition to Christoph Reuter’s reporting, see also: Kimberly Marten, ‘Russia’s use of semi-state security forces: The Case of the Wagner Group,’ Journal of Post-Soviet Affairs 35, no. 2 (26 March 2019): 1–24; Christopher R. Spearin, ‘Russia’s military and security privatization,’ Parameters, US Army War College Quarterly (Summer 2018): 39–49; Sergey Sukhanin, ‘Continuing war by other means: The case of Wagner, Russia’s premier private military company in the Middle East,’ Jamestown Foundation, 13 July 2018, https://jamestown.org/program/continuing-war-by-other-means-the-case-of-wagner-russias-premier-private-militarycompany-in-the-middle-east/. Kyle Rempfer, ‘Americans and Russians have exchanged fire more than once,’ The Military Times, 26 November 2018, https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-air-force/2018/11/26/americans-and-russians-have-exchanged-gunfire-insyria-more-than-once/. See also: US Department of State, ‘Ambassador James F. Jeffrey, special representative for Syria engagement, interview with RIA Novosti and Kommersant,’ 21 November 2018, https://ru.usembassy.gov/specialrepresentative-for-syria-engagement-jeffrey-in-interview-with-ria-novosti-and-kommersant/. Marc Bennetts, ‘Russia admits “several dozen” of its citizens killed in Syria fighting,’ The Guardian, 20 February 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/20/russia-admits-several-dozen-its-citizens-killed-syria-fighting. A number of media and human rights organizations have collected data on the social media accounts of members of Russian-backed paramilitary groups and PMSCs; the most notable among these are Bellingcat, the Conflict Intelligence Team, the Dossier Center, StopFake.org, and Myrotvorets, a Ukraine-based citizen-driven human rights and transparency organization. The principal investigator for this study began research by interviewing leaders at several of these organizations to gain a better understanding of the online use and behaviors of Russian paramilitary groups. Acting on a tip from an open-source intelligence (OSINT) expert with deep experience in tracking the activities of Russian citizens who fought on the side of Russian separatists in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) in eastern Ukraine, we began collecting data on Russian PMSC online social networks (OSNs) in January 2019. The researcher, a Ukrainian citizen who contributed to investigations on the downing of the MH-17 commercial airliner, passed on links to the Twitter page of a well-known OSINT activist. This activist had established a following in the OSINT community for successful investigations on paramilitaries in Ukraine and Syria by posting information about the identities of individuals who fought on behalf of Russian-backed proxy forces in both conflicts. Throughout both conflicts, the OSINT investigator collected and archived the social media accounts and other open-source data on more

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than 500 individuals reportedly affiliated with Russian mercenary groups who were killed in action (KIA) while fighting on behalf of Russia proxy forces in Ukraine and Syria. Mark Bennetts, ‘Families ask Russia to admit mercenaries killed in Syria,’ The Guardian, 16 February 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/16/russian-mercenaries-in-syria-buried-quietly-and-forgotten. Rory Cormac and Richard J. Aldrich, ‘Grey is the new black: Covert action and implausible deniability,’ International Affairs 94, no. 3 (2018): 487–8. Thomas Waldman, ‘Strategic narratives and U.S. surrogate warfare,’ Survival 61, no. 1 (February–March 2019): 163. On the connection between limited war, escalation control, secrecy, plausible deniability, and proxy warfare, see, among other sources: Yaacov Bar-Siman-Tov, ‘The strategy of war by proxy,’ Cooperation and Conflict 19, no. 4 (November 1984): 263–73, https://doi.org/10.1177/001083678401900405; Daniel Byman, ‘Why engage in proxy war? A state’s perspective’ Lawfare, 22 May 2018, https://www.lawfareblog.com/why-be-pawn-state-proxy-wars-proxys-perspective; Daniel Byman and Sarah E. Kreps, ‘Agents of destruction?’ International Studies Perspectives 11, no. 1 (February 2010): 1–18; Austin Carson, Secret Wars: Covert Conflict in International Politics, Princeton Studies in International History and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); Ben Connable, Jason H. Campbell, and Dan Madden, Stretching and Exploiting Thresholds for High-Order War: How Russia, China, and Iran Are Eroding American Influence Using Time-Tested Measures Short of War, research report, RR-1003-A (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2016); Andrew Mumford, Proxy Warfare (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013); and Geraint Hughes, My Enemy’s Enemy: Proxy Warfare in International Politics (Chicago, IL: Sussex Academic Press, 2012). Lawrence Freedman, ‘Ukraine and the art of limited war,’ Survival 56, no. 6 (25 November 2014): 15–17. Julian Borger, Alec Luhn, and Richard Norton-Taylor, ‘EU announces further sanctions on Russia after downing of MH17,’ The Guardian, 22 July 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/22/eu-plans-further-sanctions-russiaputin-mh17. Adam Taylor, ‘The shadowy Russian mercenary firm behind an attack on U.S. troops in Syria,’ Washington Post, 23 February 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/02/23/what-we-know-about-the-shadowyrussian-mercenary-firm-behind-the-attack-on-u-s-troops-in-syria/?utm_term=.a9ebba79f689. Office of the President of the Russian Federation, ‘Following direct line with Vladimir Putin, the president answered a number of questions from media representatives,’ 20 July 2019, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/60797. Luke Harding, ‘Yevgeny Prigozhin: Who is the man leading Russia’s push into Africa?’ The Guardian, 11 June 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/11/yevgeny-prigozhin-who-is-the-man-leading-russias-push-into-africa. US Department of Treasury, press release, ‘Treasury targets assets of Russian financier who attempted to influence 2018 U.S. elections,’ 30 September 2019, https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm787. Agence-France Presse (AFP) for the Times of Israel, ‘Moscow vows to retaliate over new “anti-Russian” sanctions,’ 1 October 2019, https://www.timesofisrael.com/moscow-vows-to-retaliate-over-new-anti-russian-us-sanctions/. See: Indictment in United States of America v. Internet Research Agency et al., 16 February 2018 in Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller, III, ‘Report on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election,’ March 2019. Analysis of Russian PMSCs by journalists and OSINT researchers is voluminous, but the Russian publications Fontanka and Novaya Gazeta, Bellingcat, Conflict Intelligence Team, and C4ADS have produced the most rigorous. See, for instance: Fontanka, Онисражались за Пальмиру, ‘Oni Srazhalis za Palmire’ (‘They fought for Palmyra’), 29 March 2016. https://www.fontanka.ru/2016/03/28/171/; Belingcat Investigations Team, A Birdie is Flying Towards You: Identifying the Separatists Linked to the Downing of MH17, June 2019. https://www.bellingcat.com/wpcontent/uploads/2019/06/a-birdie-is-flying-towards-you.pdf; Conflict Intelligence Team, ‘Families of Russian mercenaries killed in Syria left in the dark about their loved ones’ fate,’ 18 December 2017. https://citeam.org/familiesof-russian-mercenaries-killed-in-syria-left-in-the-dark-about-their-loved-ones-fate; Jack Margolin, Paper Trails: How a Russia-Based Logistics Network Ties Together Russian Mining Companies and Military Contractors in Africa, C4ADS, 13 June 2019, https://c4ads.org/blogposts/2019/6/13/paper-trails. Kimberly Marten, ‘Into Africa: Prigozhin Wagner and the Russian military,’ PONARS Memo, no. 561 (January 2019): 2, http://www.ponarseurasia.org/memo/africa-prigozhin-wagner-and-russian-military. See, for instance: Conflict Intelligence Team, ‘Turan—A new private military company fighting in Syria or an elaborate hoax?’ 6 January 2018, https://citeam.org/turan-pmc/?lang=en. Domestic private security activity within Russia is excluded, both as it is outside of the region examined in this chapter and because it raises distinct questions that are beyond the scope and ability of this chapter to address.

27. A few standout studies on this question include: Deborah D. Avant, The Market for Force: The Consequences of Privatizing Security (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Sean McFate, The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); P.W. Singer, Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003). 28. Avant, 17. 29. ‘The international code of conduct for private security service providers,’ International Code of Conduct Association, accessed 17 September 2019, https://icoca.ch/en/the_icoc; ICRC, The Montreux Document: On Pertinent International Legal Obligations and Good Practices for States Related to Operations of Private Military and Security Companies During Armed Conflict, 17 September 2008, https://www.icrc.org/en/doc/assets/files/other/icrc_002_0996.pdf. 30. Interview with ISOA official, Washington, DC, June 2018. 31. ICRC, op. cit., September 2008, 14. 32. ICRC, op. cit., September 2008, 39. 33. ‘Participating states and international organisations,’ Montreux Document Forum, accessed 27 September 2019, http://www.mdforum.ch/en/participants. 34. ICRC, Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts (Protocol I), 8 June 1977, https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/ihl/WebART/470-750057. 35. Julie Fedor, ‘Spinning Russia’s 21st century wars Zakhar Prilepin and his “literary spetsnaz,”’ The RUSI Journal 163, no. 6 (January 2019): 18–27, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03071847.2018.1562015. 36. For a longer discussion of this definition and its relation to other definitions of proxy warfare, see the first paper in New America and Arizona State University’s series on the topic of proxy warfare: Candace Rondeaux and David Sterman, ‘21st century proxy warfare: Confronting strategic innovation in a multipolar world,’ New America, 20 February 2019, https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/reports/twenty-first-century-proxy-warfare-confronting-strategicinnovation-multipolar-world/. 37. Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, No. 63-FZ, 13 June 1996; The law states that ‘a mercenary shall be deemed to mean a person who acts for the purpose of getting a material reward, and who is not a citizen of the state in whose armed conflict or hostilities he participates, who does not reside on a permanent basis on its territory, and also who is not a person fulfilling official duties.’ Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, No. 63-FZ, 13 June 1996, https://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/acc_e/rus_e/WTACCRUS48_LEG_6.pdf. 38. Åse Gilje Østensen and Tor Bukkvoll, Russian Use of Private Military and Security Companies—the Implications for European and Norwegian Security, Chr. Michelsen Institute (11 September 2018), 3, https://www.cmi.no/publications/6637-russian-use-of-private-military-and-security. 39. Kimberly Marten, ‘Russia’s use of semi-state security forces: The case of the Wagner Group,’ Journal of Post-Soviet Affairs 35, no. 2 (26 March 2019): 6–8. 40. Stephen Blank, ‘The foundations of Russian policy in the Middle East,’ Jamestown Foundation, 5 October 2017, https://jamestown.org/program/foundations-russian-policy-middle-east/. 41. Yevgeny Primakov, ‘Blizhnevostochny kurs Rossii: istoricheskie etapy,’ Voyennoe Obozrenie, 16 January 2013, https://topwar.ru/23043-blizhnevostochnyy-kurs-rossii-istoricheskie-etapy.html. 42. Evgeny Primakov, Russia and the Arabs: Behind the Scenes in the Middle East from the Cold War to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 5. 43. Primakov, 5. 44. Aleksandr Bratersskiy, ‘Vzlet i padenie glavnogo arabskogo natsyonalista,’ Gazeta.ru, 5 February 2018, https://www.gazeta.ru/politics/2018/02/05_a_11637343.shtml. 45. Oleg Shama, ‘Eto uzhe bylo. 60 let nazad posle taynykh peregovorov SSSR nachal postavlyat milliardnye potoki oruzhyya v Siriyu,’ Novoe vremya, 20 October 2015, https://nv.ua/publications/60-let-nazad-sssr-nachal-postavljatmilliardnye-potoki-oruzhija-i-syrja-v-egipet-i-siriju-74951.html. 46. Edward R.F. Sheehan, ‘Why Sadat packed off the Russians,’ New York Times, 6 August 1972, https://www.nytimes.com/1972/08/06/archives/why-sadat-packed-off-the-russians-egypt.html. 47. Aleksandr Boyko, ‘“Ruso turisto” voyevali v Sirii i 30 let nazad,’ Komsomolskaya Pravda, 23 October 2015, https://www.kp.ru/daily/26450.7/3319715/. 48. Andrey Mozzhukhin, ‘Na vsekh Naser,’ Lenta.ru,18 October 2018, https://lenta.ru/articles/2018/10/18/naser_sadat/. 49. Gordonuna.com, ‘Военкоматы в России отказываются считать погибших в Сирии ветеранами боевых действий –

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СМИ Больше читайте тут,’ https://gordonua.com/news/worldnews/voenkomaty-v-rossii-otkazyvayutsya-schitatpogibshih-v-sirii-veteranami-boevyh-deystviy-smi-713058.html; REGNUM, ‘Сирийские ПВО сбили две израильские ракеты класса «земля-земля» Подробности,’ https://regnum.ru/news/polit/2352583.html. Andrew Kramer, ‘Russia may aid “comrade tourists” who were really soldiers,’ New York Times, 20 December 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/20/world/europe/russia-may-aid-comrade-tourists-who-were-really-soldiers.html. Clifford Jonthan Secia, ‘The sickle and the serpent: Soviet military penetration into Egypt and Syria,’ Thesis presented to the University of Southern California Graduate School, 1979. See Ladislav Bittman, The KGB and Soviet Disinformation: An Insider’s View (Oxford: Pergamon, 1985), 1–30; Sergey Sukhankin, ‘Unleashing the PMCs and irregulars in Ukraine: Crimea and Donbas,’ Jamestown Foundation, 3 September 2019, 5. https://jamestown.org/program/unleashing-the-pmcs-and-irregulars-in-ukraine-crimea-and-donbas/; D. Sergey Kolomnin, ‘Soldaty chetyrekh kontinentov i trekh okeanov,’ Nezavisimoe Voyennoe Obozrenie, 24 February 2002, http://nvo.ng.ru/wars/2012-02-24/1_international.html. John Nichol, ‘Russian military and defense policy,’ Congressional Research Service, 24 August 2011, 1. Pavel Baev, Russian Energy Policy and Military Power: Putin’s Quest for Greatness (New York: Routledge, 2009), 369. Vladimir Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2002), 12. Carey Schofeld, ‘The Russian army reborn,’ in The Russian Elite: Inside Spetsnaz and the Airborne Forces (London: Greenhill Press, October 1993), 231–54. ‘КУОС-Вымпел’ – Фонд содействия ветеранам спецназа госбезопасности имени Героя Советского Союза Г.И. Бояринова: http://www.kuos-vympel.ru/1. KnowninRussianas ‘Kursiusovershenstovovaniyaofitserstskogosostava’ (Курсы усовершенствования офицерского состава) orКУОС, theLatinizedabbreviationisKUOS. AndrewSharov, ‘AlfaiVympel, bezmaskii,’ (‘Альфа’ и Вымпел без маски’), ‘AlphaandVympel: Masksoff,’ RossiskayaGazeta, 15 January 2004, https://rg.ru/2004/01/15/spetsnaz.html. Graham H. Turbiville, Jr., ‘Logistic support and insurgency: Guerrilla sustainment and applied lessons of Soviet insurgent warfare: Why it should still be studied,’ Joint Special Operations University, October 2005, 11, https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a495398.pdf. Alexander Tikhonov, ‘FSB Special Forces: 1998–2010,’ http://www.agentura.ru/english/spetsnaz/FSBspecialforces/. Yuri Felshtinsky and Vladimir Pribylovsky, The Corporation: Russia and the KGB in the Age of Vladimir Putin (New York: Encounter Books,2008), xxiii–xv. Yuri Soldatov and Irina Borogan, The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB (New York: Public Affairs, 2011), 5–6. Schofeld. Volkov, 131. Volkov, 136. Alan Axelrod, Mercenaries: A Guide to Private Armies and Private Military Companies (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2014). See Alpha-B PSC website: http://www.alpha-b.ru/; http://archive.is/VinNS. See Alpha-Unit Granit-A Security Organization website: http://archive.is/Jikrs. Volkov, 137–9. Volkov, 137. Interview with senior Western military analyst, by phone, October 2018. Viktor Morozov, ‘Gazprom na proslushkye,’ (‘Gazprom on being tapped,’), Trudovaya Rossiya, no. 298, March 1994, http://tr.rkrp-rpk.ru/get.php?2332; archived version: http://archive.is/54JTI. Decree of the President of the Russian Federation, ‘On measures to strengthen state control of foreign trade in the field of military-technical cooperation of the Russian Federation with foreign states,’ first issued 20 August 1997, http://pravo.gov.ru/proxy/ips/?docbody=&prevDoc=102052302&backlink=1&&nd=102048759. Volkov, op.cit., 2002, 135. Cindy Hurst, ‘The militarization of Gazprom,’ Military Review (September–October 2010): 61. Ibid.; Vadim Volkov, ‘Russia’s new “state corporations”: Locomotives of modernization or covert privatization

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schemes?’ PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo, no. 25, August 2008, http://www.ponarseurasia.org/sites/default/files/policymemos-pdf/pepm_025.pdf. Vadim Volkov, ‘Russia’s new “state corporations”: Locomotives of modernization or covert privatization schemes?’ PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo, no. 25, August 2008, 1–2. http://www.ponarseurasia.org/sites/default/files/policymemos-pdf/pepm_025.pdf. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Pavel Luzin, ‘The inner workings of Rostec, Russia’s military-industrial behemoth,’ The Russia File, Kennan Institute, Wilson Center, 1 April 2019, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/the-inner-workings-rostec-russias-militaryindustrial-behemoth; for official Rostec company history, see also:https://www.rostec.ru/en/about/history/. Evgeny Asyukhin and Vladimir Bogdanov, ‘Rossiya proctila Sirii 10 milliyardov,’ (‘Russia forgives $10 billion of Syria’s debt’), Rossiskaya Gazeta, 26 January 2005, https://rg.ru/2005/01/26/asad-siria.html. Kimberly Marten, ‘Informal political networks and Putin’s foreign policy: The examples of Iran and Syria,’ Problems of Post-Communism 62 (2015): 71–87. See, for instance: Pavel K. Baev, ‘Russia aspires to the status of energy superpower,’ Journal of Strategic Analysis 31, no. 3 (18 September 2007): 447–65; Clifford Gaddy and Barry Ickes, ‘Resource rents and the Russian economy,’ Journal of Eurasian Geography and Economics 46, no. 8 (15 May 2013): 559–83. Anders Aslund, ‘Money laundering involving Russian individuals and their effect on the EU,’ Testimony to the European Parliament, 29 January 2019, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/cmsdata/161070/2019%2001%2029%20%20%20Andreas%20Aslund%20Replies%20and%20EP%20Testimony%20Russian.pdf. Sergei Denisentsev, Russia in the Global Arms Market: Stagnation in a Changing Market Landscape, CSIS, 28 August 2017, 20–2, https://www.csis.org/analysis/russia-global-arms-market. Ibid., 18–21. Evgeny Asyukhin and Vladimir Bogdanov, ‘Rossiya proctila Sirii 10 milliyardov,’ (‘Russia forgives $10 billion of Syria’s debt’), Rossiskaya Gazeta, 26 January 2005, https://rg.ru/2005/01/26/asad-siria.html. Aron Lund, From Cold War to Civil War: 75 Years of Syrian Relations, Swedish Institute of International Affairs, 2019, 12–14, https://www.ui.se/globalassets/ui.se-eng/publications/ui-publications/2019/ui-paper-no.-7-2019.pdf. See: ‘Cooperation with Syria,’ Rosoboronexport, accessed 22 October 2019, http://roe.ru/eng/export/siriya/; The most consistent source for analysis on Russian arms transfers is the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) Arms Transfer Database: https://www.sipri.org/databases/armstransfers. For post-Arab Spring analysis of transfer data, see, for instance, Pieter Wezeman et al., ‘Trends in International Arms Transfers—2018,’ Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), March 2019, https://www.sipri.org/publications/2019/sipri-fact-sheets/trends-internationalarms-transfers-2018. For historical analysis on Russia arms trade pipelines and patterns, see also: Ian Anthony, Russia and the Arms Trade, SIPRI (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 29. The Syrian-Russian Business Council website can be found at https://www.srbc-sy.com/home/rus Sergey Sukhankin, ‘War, business and ideology: How Russian private military contractors pursue Moscow’s interests,’ Jamestown Foundation, 20 March 2019, https://jamestown.org/program/war-business-and-ideology-how-russian-privatemilitary-contractors-pursue-moscows-interests/. Commentary and analysis on Russia’s hydrocarbon industry is voluminous. Anders Aslund, Clifford Gaddy, Fiona Hill, and Barry Ickes have produced some of the most incisive analysis on this count. See, for instance: Anders Aslund, Russia’s Crony Capitalism: The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019); Clifford G. Gaddy and Barry W. Ickes, ‘Resource rents and the Russian economy,’ Journal of Eurasian Geography and Economics 46, no. 8 (15 May 2013): 559–83; Fiona Hill, Energy Empire: Oil, Gas and Russia’s Revival, Foreign Policy Centre, September 2004. Jad Mouawad, ‘Oil prices drop to 20-month low,’ New York Times, 11 November 2008. Sergei Denisentsev, Russia in the Global Arms Market: Stagnation in a Changing Market Landscape, CSIS, 28 August 2017, 17, https://www.csis.org/analysis/russia-global-arms-market. Richard Connolly and Cecilie Senstad, Russia’s Role as an Arms Exporter: The Strategic and Economic Importance of Arms Exports for Russia, Chatham House, March 2017, 3. Sergey Kortunov, ‘The influence of external factors on Russia’s arms export policy,’ Russia and the Arms Trade (Stockholm, Sweden: SIPRI, 2019), 92–9; ‘Russia sold $15 billion worth of weapons in 2017,’ Agence France-Presse, 2

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July 2018, https://www.france24.com/en/20180207-russia-sold-15-billion-worth-weapons-2017. Kortunov, 29. Marten, ‘Informal political networks,’ 81. ‘Wagner Group,’ Wikipedia, accessed 30 September 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagner_Group. US Treasury, press release, ‘Treasury designates individuals and entities involved in the ongoing conflict in Ukraine,’ 20 June 2017, https://www.treasury.gov/press-center/press-releases/Pages/sm0114.aspx. The term siloviki is typically translated ‘strongmen’ (from Russian сила, ‘force’) and originated with the phrase ‘institutions of force’ (Russian: силовые структуры). The colloquialism typically refers to political and business powerbrokers who once served in or have strong ties to successor organs of the KGB and other security services. The registry for the veterans’ group can be found at: https://zachestnyibiznes.ru/company/ul/1075700000375_5753041703_OOO-MOO-VVDV-IVSPN-SOYuZDESANTNIKOV; an archived version is available at: http://archive.is/GNNhJ. Registries for further companies registered under Epishkin’s name can be found at: https://zachestnyibiznes.ru/search? query=affb_575202234009; an archived version is available at: http://archive.is/juvgx. See archived version of the Anti-Terror Orel website here: https://web.archive.org/web/20070713125520/http://www.antiterror-orel.ru/; see also: Sergey Sukhanin, ‘From “volunteers” to quasiPMCs: Retracing the footprint of Russian irregulars in the Yugoslav wars and post-Soviet conflicts,’ Jamestown Foundation, 25 June 2019, https://jamestown.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Paper-3-Volunteers-to-QuasiPMCs-1.pdf?x25462. For more background on Rusich, see: ‘Russian neo-Nazi who killed Ukrainians, trained Belarus teens now fighting in Syria,’ Belsat, 20 October 2017, https://belsat.eu/en/news/russian-neo-nazi-who-killed-ukrainians-trained-belarus-teensnow-fighting-in-syria/. Author interviews, Kyiv, Ukraine, February/March 2019. The Zenit and Grom subunits are widely credited for leading the 1979 raid on the seat of Afghan political power in Kabul. Soon after Storm-333, the Soviets also introduced the Kaskad and Omega intelligence task forces in 1980. These specific units are considered part of the Vympel lineage. For a detailed historical account of the Storm-333 operation, see: Aleksandr Antonovich Lyakhovskiy, ‘Inside the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the seizure of Kabul, December 1979,’ Cold War International History Project, Working Paper No. 51, Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, January 2007, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/WP51_Web_Final.pdf; and Mark Galeotti, Spetsnaz: Russia’s Special Forces (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2015), 27. Information on RusCorp can be found at: https://web.archive.org/web/20120501230158/http://www.ruscorp.ru; UK Companies House Registry Number 0066079272, Annual Filing 363a, 30 June 2009. Fedor Butsko, ‘Rossiya sozdayet bizness-armyu,’ (‘Россия создает бизнесармию,’ ‘Russia Creates a Business Army’) Vzgl yad, 21 March 2008, https://vz.ru/society/2008/3/21/153822.html. The 4 June 2008 archived version of the RusCorp site can be found here: https://web.archive.org/web/20080604154006/http://ruscorp.ru/. Connolly and Senstad, 11–12.103. Viktor Feshchenko, ‘Vivozii zdelani,’ (‘Pickups complete,’), Rossikaya Gazeta, 28 February 2011, https://rg.ru/2011/02/28/escape.html. Viktor Feshchenko, ‘Vivozii zdelani,’ (‘Pickups complete,’), Rossikaya Gazeta, 28 February 2011, https://rg.ru/2011/02/28/escape.html. Denis Korotkov, ‘Posledni’i boi slavyanskovo korpusa’ (‘Slavonic corp’s last battle,’ Последний бой «Славянского корпуса»), Fontanka, 14 November 2013, https://www.fontanka.ru/2013/11/14/060/. BBC, ‘Nigerian navy detains Russian crew over arms,’ 23 October 2012, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa20047851. Denis Korotkov, ‘Kukhnya chastnoi armii,’ (Private army kitchen intrigues) Fontanka.ru, 9 June 2016. War Is Boring, ‘There are Russian mercenaries fighting in Syria,’ 18 November 2013, https://medium.com/war-isboring/there-are-russian-mercenaries-fighting-in-syria-18ae26e885f7 Michael Weiss, ‘The case of the Keystone Cossacks,’ Foreign Policy, 21 November 2013, https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/11/21/the-case-of-the-keystone-cossacks/. An archived version of the Moran Group’s 2010 website can be found at: https://web.archive.org/web/20100112154951/http://www.moran-group.org/.

121. See: Anthony, Russia and the Arms Trade, and Denitsiev, Russia in the Global Arms Market: Stagnation in a Changing World. 122. Tom Wallace and Farley Mesko, The Odessa Network: Mapping Facilitators of Russian and Ukrainian Arms Transfers, C4ADS, 4 September 2013, 4, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/566ef8b4d8af107232d5358a/t/56af8a2dd210b86520934e62/1454344757606/The+Odessa+N 123. Ibid. 124. The Syrian Observer, ‘Russian ambitions for Syrian phosphates,’ 7 November 2017, https://syrianobserver.com/EN/features/19755/russian_ambitions_syrian_phosphates.html 125. Interviews with local Syrian contractors, via Skype, May 2019–June 2019; an email from the author on 23 October 2019 requesting information about StroyTransGaz projects in Syria was sent to the press contact for STG but did not receive a response. 126. Murad al-Qwatly, ‘NDF militia is under threat due to Russian plans to replace it with the Fourth Corps,’ al-Souria Net, 12 January 2015, archived version available at https://web.archive.org/web/20171230150903/https://www.alsouria.net/content/127. Omran Center for Strategic Studies, The Syrian Military Establishment in 2019: Sectarianism, Militias, and Foreign Investment, 29 May, 92–5. 128. Abdullah al-Jabbassini, From Insurgents to Soldiers: The Fifth Assault Corps in Daraa, Southern Syria, European University Institute, 14 May 2019, https://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/62964/RR_2019_09_EN.pdf? sequence=1&isAllowed=y. 129. Omran Center for Strategic Studies, The Syrian Military Establishment in 2019: Sectarianism, Militias, and Foreign Investment, May 2019, 50–2. See also: Gregory Waters, The Lion and the Eagle: The Syrian Arab Army’s Destruction and Rebirth, Middle East Institute, 18 July 2019, https://www.mei.edu/publications/lion-and-eagle-syrian-arab-armysdestruction-and-rebirth 130. Omran Center for Strategic Studies, The Syrian Military Establishment in 2019: Sectarianism, Militias, and Foreign Investment, May 2019, 92–5. 131. Interview with former senior US intelligence advisor, February 2019. 132. Interview with senior Western diplomats, Kyiv, October 2018; February 2019. 133. Interviews with senior Western diplomats, Kyiv, Ukraine, October 2018; interviews with Ukrainian human rights experts, Kyiv, February–March 2019. 134. Interview with senior officials in Ministry for the Temporarily Occupied Territory, Kyiv, March 2019; interview with Ukrainian human rights activists, Kyiv, March 2019. 135. Bellingcat Investigation Team, ‘MH17—Russian GRU commander “Orion” identified as Oleg Ivannikov,’ 25 May 2018, https://www.bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2018/05/25/mh17-russian-gru-commander-orion-identified-olegivannikov/. 136. Gregory Waters, ‘Rebuilding,’ in The Lion and the Eagle: The Syrian Arab Army’s Destruction and Rebirth, Middle East Institute, 18 July 2019, https://www.mei.edu/publications/lion-and-eagle-syrian-arab-armys-destruction-and-rebirth. 137. Tom O’Connor, ‘Syria’s ISIS hunters offer $1 million for Russian hostages,’ Newsweek, 5 October 2017, https://www.newsweek.com/syrias-isis-hunters-offers-pay-1-million-russian-hostages-or-kill-100-679127. 138. Candace Rondeaux and David Sterman, ‘21st century proxy warfare: Confronting strategic innovation in a multipolar world,’ New America, 20 February 2019, https://d1y8sb8igg2f8e.cloudfront.net/documents/TwentyFirst_Century_Proxy_Warfare_Final.pdf. 139. Todd Emerson Hutchins, ‘Structuring a sustainable letters of marque regime: How commissioning privateers can defeat the Somali pirates,’ California Law Review 99, no. 3 (June 2011): 838. 140. Michelle Nichols, ‘Family of American killed in downed MH17 jet sues Russia banks, money-transfer firms,’ Reuters, 4 April 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-mh17-usa/family-of-american-killed-in-downed-mh17-jetsues-russia-banks-money-transfer-firms-idUSKCN1RG1UR; ‘MH-17: Four charged with shooting down plane over Ukraine,’ BBC, 19 June 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48691488. 141. Kimberly Marten, ‘Russia’s use of semi-state security forces: The case of the Wagner Group,’ Journal of Post-Soviet Affairs, 26 March 2019, 7. 142. Thomas C. Schelling, Arms and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 66–8. 143. Barton Whaley, Stratagem: Deception and Surprise in War, originally published in 1969 by the Center for International

Studies at MIT (Boston, MA: Artech House, 2007), 188–90. 144. Andrew Roth, ‘Russian journalists in CAR “were researching military firm,”’ The Guardian, 1 August 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/01/russian-journalists-killed-central-african-republic-investigatingmilitary-firm-kremlin-links. CHAPTER 9. THE ISLAMIC REVOLUTIONARY GUARD CORPS OF THE 2020S 1.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

Christopher Clary and Caitlin Talmadge, ‘The U.S.-Iran crisis has calmed down—but things won’t ever go back to how they were before,’ Washington Post, 12 January 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/01/12/us-irancrisis-has-calmed-down-things-wont-ever-go-back-way-they-were-before/. Kamal Ayash and John Davison, ‘Hours of forewarning saved U.S., Iraqi lives from Iran’s missile attack,’ Reuters, 13 January 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iraq-security-early-warning/hours-of-forewarning-saved-u-s-iraqilives-from-irans-missile-attack-idUSKBN1ZC218. ‘The Quds Force strategy will be the same as during the martyr general Soleimani,’ Khamenei.ir, 3 January 2020, https://english.khamenei.ir/news/7271/The-Quds-Force-strategy-will-be-the-same-as-during-the-Martyr. ‘The “virus of zionism” won’t last long and will be eliminated,’ Khamenei.ir, 22 May 2020, https://english.khamenei.ir/news/7570/The-virus-of-Zionism-won-t-last-long-and-will-be-eliminated. ‘Palestinian militant leader says Soleimani sent weapons to Gaza,’ Radio Farda, 22 May 2020, https://en.radiofarda.com/a/palestinian-militant-leader-says-soleimani-sent-weapons-to-gaza/30629288.html. Falahatpisheh is hardly a dove in the context of the Iranian Islamist system. He began his career advocating for hardline policies but shifted toward a critical stance of Tehran’s foreign policy agenda over the course of the 2010s. ‘Iran lawmaker says $30 billion spent on Syria must be returned,’ Radio Farda, 20 May 2020, https://en.radiofarda.com/a/iran-lawmaker-says-30-billion-paid-to-syria-must-be-paid-back/30623998.html. ‘ ,’ Hamshari Online, 21 May 2020, https://www.hamshahrionline.ir/news/513846/-. For an overview of the history of US-Iran relations, see, for example: Ervand Abrahamian, The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations (New York: The New Press, 2013); Kenneth M. Pollack, The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America, Paperback edition. (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2005); Mark J. Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne, Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran (Syraceuse, NY: Syraceuse University Press, 2015); James A. Bill, The Eagle and the Lion: The Tragedy of American-Iranian Relations (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988); Ali M. Ansari, Confronting Iran: The Failure of American Foreign Policy and the Next Great Crisis in the Middle East (New York: Basic Books, 2006). David Crist, The Twilight War: The Secret History of America’s Thirty-Year Conflict With Iran, 2013; Uri Friedman, ‘The blueprint Iran could follow After Soleimani’s death,’ The Atlantic, 4 January 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/01/what-iranian-way-war-looks-like/604438/. Ali Alfoneh, ‘Brigadier General Qassem Suleimani: A biography,’ AEI, 24 January 2011, https://www.aei.org/researchproducts/report/brigadier-general-qassem-suleimani-a-biography/. This division was also comprised of volunteers from Baluchistan and Hormozgan provinces, located in the far south and far southeast of Iran. The Iranians worked both with the forces loyal to the Barzani and Talibani families in Iraqi Kurdistan. See: Arash Reisinezhad, The Shah of Iran, the Iraqi Kurds, and the Lebanese Shia, Middle East Today 14803 (New York, NY: Springer Science+Business Media, 2018). ‘Haj Qassem and commanding 41st Sarallah Division ( ),’ Iranian Students’ News Agency, 4 January 2020, https://www.isna.ir/news/98101309348. ‘Iran’s networks of influence in the Middle East,’ IISS, November 2019, https://www.iiss.org/publications/strategicdossiers/iran-dossier/iran-19-03-ch-1-tehrans-strategic-intent; Alfoneh, ‘Brigadier General Qassem Suleimani: A biography.’ ‘How was the Quds Force formed ( ),’ Iranian Students’ News Agency, 5 January 2020, https://www.isna.ir/news/98101511412. ‘Mostafa Chamran: The founder of asymmetric warfare,’ Tasnim News, 19 June 2016, https://www.tasnimnews.com/fa/news/1395/03/30/1109150/. Morad Veisi, ‘From Ahmad Vahidi to Esmail Qa’ani: Three decades of the Qods Force,’ Radio Farda, 4 January 2020,

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

https://www.radiofarda.com/a/structure-of-the-quds-force-of-iran/30360139.html. Richard J. Payne, The Clash With Distant Cultures: Values, Interests, and Force in American Foreign Policy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), 193. Daniel Levin, ‘The Iran primer: Iran, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic jihad,’ United States Institute of Peace, 9 July 2018, https://iranprimer.usip.org/blog/2018/jul/09/iran-hamas-and-palestinian-islamic-jihad. David Menashri, ‘Iran’s regional policy: Between radicalism and pragmatism,’ Journal of International Affairs 60, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2007), https://www.jstor.org/stable/24357976?seq=1. Menashri, 156–7. Menashri, ‘Iran’s regional policy: Between radicalism and pragmatism.’ Michael Knights, ‘The evolution of Iran’s special groups in Iraq,’ CTC Sentinel 3, no. 11–12 (November 2010), https://ctc.usma.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/CTCSentinel-Vol3Iss11-127.pdf. Veisi, ‘From Ahmad Vahidi to Esmail Qa’ani: Three decades of the Qods Force.’ For more background see: Mehdi Khalaji, ‘The future of leadership in the Shiite community,’ Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2017, 50, https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/uploads/Documents/pubs/PolicyFocus152-Khalaji.pdf. See also: ‘(Mohsen Rezai speaks of an important selection) ,’ Iranian Students’ News Agency, 19 January 2016, https://www.isna.ir/news/94102917240/ Khalaji, ‘The future of leadership in the Shiite community,’ 45. Maryam Alemzadeh, ‘Ordinary brother, exceptional general,’ Foreign Affairs, 15 January 2020, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/iran/2020-01-15/ordinary-brother-exceptional-general. Alex Vatanka, ‘Iran’s IRGC has long kept Khamenei in power,’ Foreign Policy, 29 October 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/29/iran-irgc-islamic-revolutionary-guard-corps-kept-supreme-leader-ayatollah-alikhamenei-power/. Also see: Veisi, ‘From Ahmad Vahidi to Esmail Qa’ani: Three decades of the Qods Force.’ Alfoneh, ‘Brigadier General Qassem Suleimani: A biography,’ 5. Alfoneh, ‘Brigadier General Qassem Suleimani: A biography,’ 4. Alfoneh, ‘Brigadier General Qassem Suleimani: A biography’; Sayed Jalal Shajjan, ‘Afghanistan reacts to Soleimani’s death,’ The Diplomat, 6 January 2020, https://thediplomat.com/2020/01/afghanistan-reacts-to-suleimanis-death/. For background information about Iran’s role in the Afghan civil war, see: Nader Uskowi, ‘Chapter 9: Unfinised business in Afghanistan,’ in Temperature Rising: Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and Wars in the Middle East (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). See also: Alex Vatanka, Iran and Pakistan: Security, Diplomacy and American Influence, International Library of Iranian Studies 57 (London: Tauris, 2015), 209–19. Vatanka, Iran and Pakistan, 217–19. Mohsen M. Milani, ‘Iran’s policy towards Afghanistan,’ Middle East Journal 60, no. 2 (Spring 2006), https://www.jstor.org/stable/4330248?seq=1. Fereydoun Azhand, ‘(What Afghans remember about Qassem Soleimani) ,’ Independent Persian, 3 January 2020, https://www.independentpersian.com/node/35356

36. Milani, ‘Iran’s policy towards Afghanistan.’ 37. ‘Zarif sees the martyrdom of Soleimani

38.

39. 40. 41.

as the end of U.S. presence in the region ( ),’ Mehr News, 6 February 2020, https://www.mehrnews.com/news/4846514/. See also: ‘The Americans will feel the impact of the criminal [assassination] in the coming years,’ Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 4 January 2020, https://www.mfa.gov.ir/portal/newsview/570722/. Tim Arango, Ronen Bergman, and Ben Hubbard, ‘Qassim Suleimani, master of Iran’s intrigue, built a Shiite axis of power in Mideast,’ New York Times, 3 January 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/03/obituaries/qassem-soleimanidead.html. Veisi, ‘From Ahmad Vahidi to Esmail Qa’ani: Three decades of the Qods Force.’ These ambassadors were Hassan Kazemi Qomi, Hassan Danai-far, and Iraj Masjedi. There are no definite data on Iran’s financial support for Hezbollah. The Trump administration has claimed that Iran provided up to US$700 million per year before US sanctions. See Liz Sly and Suzan Haidamous, ‘Trump’s sanctions on Iran are hitting Hezbollah, and it hurts,’ Washington Post, 18 May 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/trumps-sanctions-on-iran-are-hitting-hezbollah-

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hard/2019/05/18/970bc656-5d48-11e9-98d4-844088d135f2_story.html. Veisi, ‘From Ahmad Vahidi to Esmail Qa’ani: Three decades of the Qods Force.’ See also ‘Imad Mughniyeh was killed in joint Mossad, CIA Operation,’ Times of Israel, 31 January 2015, https://www.timesofisrael.com/imad-mughniyehkilled-in-joint-mossad-cia-operation/. For analysis of the complexity of and regional interests behind the Iran-Syria relationship, see Fred H. Lawson, ‘Syria’s relations with Iran: Managing the dilemmas of alliance,’ Middle East Journal 61, no. 1 (Winter 2007), https://www.jstor.org/stable/4330355?seq=1. Aniseh Bassiri Tabrizi and Raffaello Pantucci, ‘Understanding Iran’s role in the Syrian conflict,’ Royal United Services Institute, August 2016, https://rusi.org/sites/default/files/201608_op_understanding_irans_role_in_the_syrian_conflict_0.pdf. Ephraim Kam, ‘Iran-Russia-Syria: A threefold cord is not quickly broken,’ Institute for National Security Studies, 1 March 2018, https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep17021.6?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents. Alex Vatanka, ‘Iran’s use of Shi’i militant proxies,’ Middle East Institute, June 2018, https://www.mei.edu/sites/default/files/publications/Vatanka_PolicyPaper.pdf. Vatanka. Ali Alfoneh, ‘Four decades in the making: Shia Afghan Fatemiyoun division of the Revolutionary Guards,’ The Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington (blog), 25 July 2018, https://agsiw.org/four-decades-in-the-making-shia-afghanfatemiyoun-division-of-the-revolutionary-guards/. For a discussion on Iran’s efforts to bridge the gap with skeptical Sunnis, see Alex Vatanka, ‘The Islamic Republic’s cross-sectarian outreach,’ Hudson Institute (blog), 12 April 2011, https://www.hudson.org/research/9872-the-islamicrepublic-s-cross-sectarian-outreach. ‘Israel no longer a threat to Iran: IRGC deputy commander,’ Mehr News, 23 September 2012, https://en.mehrnews.com/news/52369/Israel-no-longer-a-threat-to-Iran-IRGC-deputy-commander. Amr Youssef, ‘Upgrading Iran’s military doctrine: An offensive “forward defense,”’ Middle East Institute, 10 December 2019, https://www.mei.edu/publications/upgrading-irans-military-doctrine-offensive-forward-defense#_edn29. Rick Gladstone, ‘Iran’s supreme leader replaces head of the Revolutionary Guards,’ New York Times, 21 April 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/21/world/middleeast/iran-revolutionary-guards-leader.html. Youssef, ‘Upgrading Iran’s military doctrine: An offensive “forward defense.”’ Thomas Juneau, ‘Iran’s policy towards the Houthis in Yemen: A limited return on a modest investment,’ International Affairs 92, no. 3 (May 2016): 647–63, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2346.12599. For more background information, see: ‘Who are the Houthis? What is the relationship between Ansarallah and Iran?’ BBC Persian, 18 May 2019, https://www.bbc.com/persian/world-features-48297537. ‘Iran news agency reports visit of new Quds chief to Syria,’ Middle East Eye, 27 June 2020, https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iran-news-agency-reports-visit-new-quds-chief-syria; Qassim Abdul-Zahra and Joseph Krauss, ‘Protests in Iraq and Lebanon pose a challenge to Iran,’ Associated Press, 30 October 2019, https://apnews.com/article/62642940e3fe4b1b87323decc9487fea; Robin Wright, ‘Iran’s generals are dying in Syria,’ The New Yorker, 26 October 2015, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/irans-generals-are-dying-in-syria. Mohammed Almahfali and James Root, ‘How Iran’s Islamic revolution does, and does not, influence Houthi rule in Northern Yemen’ (Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies, 13 February 2020), https://sanaacenter.org/publications/analysis/9050. ‘Iran’s priorities in a turbulent Middle East,’ International Crisis Group, 13 April 2018, 23, https://d2071andvip0wj.cloudfront.net/184-iran-s-priorities-in-a-turbulent-middle-east_1.pdf. Behnam Ben Taleblu, ‘Analysis: Iranian reactions to Operation Decisive Storm,’ Long War Journal (blog), 30 March 2015, https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2015/03/analysis-iranian-reactions-to-operation-decisive-storm.php. See the original Persian source: http://www.isna.ir/news/93072614511/. Alex Vatanka, ‘Iran’s Yemen play,’ Foreign Affairs, 4 March 2015, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/iran/2015-0304/irans-yemen-play. See Alex Vatanka, ‘Iran’s role in the Yemen crisis,’ in Global, Regional, and Local Dynamics in the Yemen Crisis, Stephen W. Day and Noel Brehony, eds. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 149–64. ‘Leader urges resistance against Saudi-UAE bid to split Yemen,’ PressTV, 13 August 2019, https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2019/08/13/603447/Iran-Leader-Ayatollah-Khamenei-meeting-Yemen-HouthiAnsarullah.

62. Matthew Petti, ‘The Trump administration denies that it’s fighting Iran in Yemen,’ The National Interest, 10 December 2019, https://nationalinterest.org/blog/middle-east-watch/trump-administration-denies-its-fighting-iran-yemen-103797. 63. Anthony H. Cordesman, ‘Military spending: The other side of Saudi security,’ Center for Strategic & International Studies, 13 March 2018, https://www.csis.org/analysis/military-spending-other-side-saudi-security. See also Perry Cammack and Michele Dunne, ‘Fueling Middle East conflicts—or dousing the flames,’ Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 23 October 2018, https://carnegieendowment.org/2018/10/23/fueling-middle-east-conflicts-ordousing-flames-pub-77548. 64. Sudeep Chakravarty, ‘Top spenders on defense in Middle East,’ Market Research Reports (blog), 12 August 2019, https://www.marketresearchreports.com/blog/2019/08/12/top-spenders-defense-middle-east. 65. Amy Teibel, ‘Iran’s Rouhani Says U.S. sanctions cost country $200 billion,’ Bloomberg, 31 December 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-12-31/iran-s-rouhani-says-u-s-sanctions-cost-country-200-billion. CHAPTER 10. THE MONARCHS’ PAWNS? 1.

2.

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Sean L. Yom and F. Gregory Gause, ‘Resilient royals: How Arab monarchies hang on,’ Journal of Democracy 23, no. 4 (2012): 74–88, https://doi.org/10.1353/jod.2012.0062; Toby Matthiesen, Sectarian Gulf: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the Arab Spring That Wasn’t (Stanford, CA: Stanford Briefs, an imprint of Stanford University Press, 2013); Jason Brownlee et al., The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform, 1st edition (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). While this chapter views Saudi Arabia’s role in proxy warfare as representing a revisionist agenda, it is important to note that some analysts saw Saudi Arabia’s assertion of leadership as part of a counterrevolutionary stance. See, e.g., Mehran Kamrava, ‘The Arab Spring and the Saudi-led counterrevolution,’ Orbis 56, no. 1 (January 2012): 96–104, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orbis.2011.10.011. However, such analyses confirm the importance of asserting leadership for the Saudi monarchy, and in this author’s analysis the proxy wars sponsored by Saudi Arabia had revisionist aims—i.e., replacing longstanding regimes with friendlier actors—even if its broader regional efforts sought to shore up allies against revolution. Yom and Gause, ‘Resilient royals.’ Mehran Kamrava, Qatar: Small State, Big Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); F. Gregory Gause III, ‘Between Pax Britannica and Pax Americana,’ in A Century in Thirty Years: Sheikh Zayed and The United Arab Emirates (Washington, DC: Middle East Policy Council, 1999), 26–8. Rajiv Chandrasekaran, ‘In the UAE, the United States has a quiet, potent ally nicknamed “Little Sparta,”’ Washington Post, 9 November 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-the-uae-the-united-states-has-aquiet-potent-ally-nicknamed-little-sparta/2014/11/08/3fc6a50c-643a-11e4-836c-83bc4f26eb67_story.html. Patrick E. Tyler, ‘Two said to tell of Libyan plot Against Saudi,’ New York Times, 10 June 2004, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/10/world/two-said-to-tell-of-libyan-plot-against-saudi.html. Abdul Hamid Ahmad, ‘Libyan, Saudi leaders walk out of Arab Summit after a spat,’ Gulf News, 30 March 2009, https://gulfnews.com/world/gulf/qatar/libyan-saudi-leaders-walk-out-of-arab-summit-after-a-spat-1.60102. Matthiesen, Sectarian Gulf. Seth G. Jones, ‘War by proxy: Iran’s growing footprint in the Middle East,’ CSIS, 11 March 2019, https://www.csis.org/war-by-proxy. Rosie Bsheer, ‘A counter-revolutionary state: Popular movements and the making of Saudi Arabia,’ Past & Present 238, no. 1 (1 February 2018): 233–77, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtx057 Madawi Al-Rasheed, Muted Modernists: The Struggle Over Divine Politics in Saudi Arabia (London: Hurst, 2016), 36– 7. Michael Birnbaum, ‘Saudi Arabia calm on planned “day of rage,” but protests spark violence elsewhere,’ Washington Post, 11 March 2011 https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/saudi-arabia-seems-quiet-on-planned-day-ofrage/2011/03/11/AB8WKoQ_story.html. Dilip Hiro, Cold War in the Islamic World: Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Struggle for Supremacy (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 244–5; Jason Benham, ‘Saudi King orders more handouts, security boost,’ Reuters, 18 March 2011 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-king/saudi-king-orders-more-handouts-security-boostidUSTRE72H2UQ20110318. Hiro, 244–5. Kamrava, ‘The Arab Spring and the Saudi-led counterrevolution,’ 99.

16. A US diplomatic cable noted that since 2009, the Crown Prince has been ‘the man who runs the United Arab Emirates … [and is] the key decision maker on national security issues’; quoted in David B. Roberts, ‘Qatar and the UAE: Exploring divergent responses to the Arab Spring,’ The Middle East Journal 71, no. 4 (15 October 2017): 556. 17. Courtney Jean Freer, Rentier Islamism: The Influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gulf Monarchies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 175. 18. Kristian Ulrichsen, The United Arab Emirates: Power, Politics and Policymaking, The Contemporary Middle East (London; New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2017), 192. 19. Quoted in Roberts, ‘Qatar and the UAE,’ 555. 20. Freer, Rentier Islamism, 177. 21. Mazhar al-Zo’by and Birol Bas¸kan, ‘Discourse and oppositionality in the Arab Spring: The case of the Muslim Brotherhood in the UAE,’ International Sociology 30, no. 4 (July 2015): 401–17. 22. Robert F. Worth, ‘Mohammed bin Zayed’s dark vision of the Middle East’s future,’ New York Times, 9 January 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/magazine/united-arab-emirates-mohammed-bin-zayed.html. 23. Ulrichsen, The United Arab Emirates, 191. 24. Yom and Gause, ‘Resilient royals,’ 80; Ulrichsen, The United Arab Emirates, 192; Ulrichsen writes that ‘there was virtually no prospect of any mass protest in the UAE.’ 25. Ulrichsen, The United Arab Emirates, 191. 26. Elizabeth Broomhall, ‘Arab Spring has cost Gulf Arab states $150bn,’ Arabian Business, 8 September 2011, https://www.arabianbusiness.com/arab-spring-has-cost-gulf-arab-states-150bn-419429.html. 27. Kristian Ulrichsen, Qatar and the Arab Spring (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 77–9. 28. David B. Roberts, ‘Securing the Qatari state,’ Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, Issue Paper no. 7, 23 June 2017, www.agsiw.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Roberts_Qatar_ONLINE.pdf. 29. Kamrava, Qatar, 41. 30. Roberts, ‘Qatar and the UAE,’ 557–8. 31. Kamrava, Qatar, 41. 32. Freer, Rentier Islamism, 175. 33. Steven Wright, ‘Foreign policy in the GCC states,’ in Mehran Kamrava, ed., International Politics of the Persian Gulf, Modern Intellectual and Political History of the Middle East (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011). 34. Kamrava, Qatar, 76. 35. Shahram Akbarzadeh, ‘Iran and the Gulf Cooperation Council sheikhdoms,’ in The Small Gulf States: Foreign and Security Policies Before and After the Arab Spring, Khalid S. Almezaini and Jean-Marc Rickli, eds. (Milton Park, UK: Taylor & Francis, 2016), 91. 36. Matthiesen, Sectarian Gulf. 37. Ethan Bronner and Michael Slackman, ‘Saudi troops enter Bahrain to help put down unrest,’ New York Times, 14 March 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/world/middleeast/15bahrain.html. 38. Deutsche Welle, ‘Saudi intervention in Bahrain increases Gulf instability,’ 16 March 2011, https://www.dw.com/en/saudi-intervention-in-bahrain-increases-gulf-instability/a-14912216. 39. Quoted in Al Arabiya,‘GCC troops dispatched to Bahrain to maintain order,’ 14 March 2011, https://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2011/03/14/141445.html. 40. Helene Cooper and Robert F. Worth, ‘In Arab Spring, Obama finds a sharp test,’ New York Times, 24 September 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/25/us/politics/arab-spring-proves-a-harsh-test-for-obamas-diplomatic-skill.html. 41. Matthiesen, Sectarian Gulf, 117. 42. Nada Bakri, ‘Saudi Police open fire to break up a protest,’ New York Times, 10 March 2011 https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/11/world/middleeast/11saudi.html. 43. Matthiesen, Sectarian Gulf. 44. Quoted in Rory Miller, Desert Kingdoms to Global Powers: The Rise of the Arab Gulf (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 211. 45. NATO, ‘Operation UNIFIED PROTECTOR protection of civilians and civilian-populated areas & enforcement of the no-fly zone,’ October 2011 https://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/pdf_2011_10/20111005_111005factsheet_protection_civ.pdf.

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140. 141. 142. 143. 144.

145. 146.

147.

148.

149. 150.

151. 152. 153. 154.

Phenomenon (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2010), https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2010/RAND_MG962.pdf. Quoted in Dexter Filkins, ‘A Saudi prince’s quest to remake the Middle East,’ The New Yorker, 9 April 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/09/a-saudi-princes-quest-to-remake-the-middle-east. Quoted in Helen Lackner, Yemen in Crisis: Autocracy, Neo-Liberalism and the Disintegration of a State (London: Saqi Books, 2017), 82. Kathleen J. McInnis, Coalition Contributions to Countering the Islamic State (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2016). Chandraeskaran, ‘In the UAE, the United States has a quiet, potent ally nicknamed “Little Sparta.”’ David B. Roberts, ‘Bucking the trend: The UAE and the development of military capabilities in the Arab world,’ Security Studies 29, no. 2 (14 March 2020): 301–34. Rosenblatt and Kilcullen, ‘The tweet of Damocles: Lessons for U.S. proxy warfare.’ Mike Giglio, Shatter the Nations: ISIS and the War for the Caliphate, 1st edition (New York: Public Affairs, 2019). Liz Sly, Louisa Loveluck, Asser Khattab, and Sarah Dadouch, ‘U. S.-allied Kurds strike deal to bring Assad’s Syrian troops back into Kurdish areas.’ Washington Post, 13 October 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/us-troopswithdraw-from-another-syrian-town-as-turkish-forces-block-supply-lines/2019/10/13/aab5fab8-ec5a-11e9-a3297378fbfa1b63_story.html. The civil war in Yemen began in September 2014 when a Zaidi Shia military group known as Ansar-Allah, or the Houthis, seized the capital Sanaa, driving the internationally recognized government to seek refuge in Yemen’s southern port city of Aden. Peter Salisbury, Yemen: National Chaos, Local Order (London: Chatham House, 2017), 10, https://www.chathamhouse.org/publication/yemen-national-chaos-local-order. Coalition members include Saudi Arabia and the UAE, the de facto leaders of the coalition, as well as Bahrain, Kuwait, Morocco, Senegal, and Sudan. Qatar was also a coalition member until 2017. Dina Esfandiary and Ariane Tabatabai, ‘Yemen: An opportunity for Iran-Saudi dialogue?’ The Washington Quarterly 39, no. 2 (2 April 2016): 155. Quoted in Jeffrey Goldberg, ‘Saudi crown prince: Iran’s supreme leader “makes Hitler look good,”’ The Atlantic, 2 April 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/04/mohammed-bin-salman-iran-israel/557036/. Quoted in Sami Aboudi, ‘UAE says sees systematic Iranian meddling in Yemen, region,’ Reuters, 8 April 2015, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-yemen-crisis-uae-iran/uae-says-sees-systematic-iranian-meddling-in-yemen-regionidUSKBN0MZ1P520150408. Aboudi, ‘UAE sees systemtic Iranian meddling in Yemen, region.’ Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, ‘Endgames for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in Yemen,’ in Politics, Governance, and Reconstruction in Yemen, Stacey Philbrick Yadav and Marc Lynch, eds. (Washington, DC: POMEPS studies 29, January 2018), 33. Laurent Bonnefoy, ‘Sunni Islamist dynamics in context of war: What happened to al-Islah and the Salafis?’ in Politics, Governance, and Reconstruction in Yemen, Stacey Philbrick Yadav and Marc Lynch, eds. (Washington, DC: POMEPS, 2018), 23. Alexandra Stark, ‘Mohammed bin Salman’s collapsing coalition in Yemen means trouble for Trump,’ Foreign Policy, 23 August 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/08/23/mohammed-bin-salmans-coalition-in-yemen-is-collapsing-thatmeans-trouble-for-trump-uae-saudi-arabia-aden/. Stephen Snyder, ‘Saudi and UAE boots on the ground intensify the Yemen war,’ PRI, 12 August 2015, https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-08-12/saudi-and-uae-boots-ground-intensify-yemen-war. Michael Knights and Alex Almeida, ‘The Saudi-UAE war effort in Yemen (Part 1): Operation Golden Arrow in Aden,’ Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 10 August 2015, https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policyanalysis/view/the-saudi-uae-war-effort-in-yemen-part-1-operation-golden-arrow-in-aden. Ulrichsen, 210. Ulrichsen, 209. Eman Ragab, ‘Beyond money and diplomacy: Regional policies of Saudi Arabia and UAE after the Arab Spring,’ The International Spectator 52, no. 2 (3 April 2017): 45, https://doi.org/10.1080/03932729.2017.1309101. Lackner, Yemen in Crisis, 55.

155. Zach Vertin, ‘Red Sea rivalries: The Gulf, the Horn, & the new geopolitics of the Red Sea,’ Brookings Institution Doha, 2019. 156. Kenneth Katzman, The United Arab Emirates (UAE): Issues for U.S. Policy (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2018), 16. 157. Robert Malley, ‘What happens in the Gulf doesn’t stay in the Gulf,’ The Atlantic, 7 June 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/06/somalia-gulf-crisis-vegas-rules/562292/. 158. Stephen Kalin and Lisa Barrington, ‘UAE drawdown in Yemen raises hopes of ceasefire this year,’ Reuters, 24 July 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-yemen-security/uae-drawdown-in-yemen-raises-hopes-of-ceasefire-this-yearidUSKCN1UJ17R; Stark, ‘Mohammed bin Salman’s collapsing coalition in Yemen means trouble for Trump.’ 159. Roberts, Qatar, 151; Ulrichsen, The United Arab Emirates, 211. 160. Reuters, ‘Qatar sends 1,000 ground troops to Yemen conflict: al Jazeera,’ 7 September 2015, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-yemen-security/qatar-sends-1000-ground-troops-to-yemen-conflict-al-jazeeraidUSKCN0R710W20150907. 161. Wehrey, The Burning Shores, 253. 162. Abigail Hauslohner and Sharif Abdel Kouddous, ‘Khalifa Hifter, the ex-general leading a revolt in Libya, spent years in exile in northern Virginia,’ Washington Post, 20 May 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/rival-militiasprepare-for-showdown-in-tripoli-after-takeover-of-parliament/2014/05/19/cb36acc2-df6f-11e3-810f764fe508b82d_story.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_14. 163. Council on Foreign Relations, ‘Civil war in Libya,’ https://www.cfr.org/interactive/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/civilwar-libya. 164. David D. Kirkpatrick, ‘The White House blessed a war in Libya, but Russia won it,’ New York Times, 14 April 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/world/middleeast/libya-russia-john-bolton.html; Candace Rondeaux, ‘Decoding the Wagner Group: Analyzing the role of private military security contractors in Russian proxy warfare,’ New America, 7 November 2019, https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/reports/decoding-wagner-group-analyzing-roleprivate-military-security-contractors-russian-proxy-warfare/. 165. Jared Malsin and Summer Said, ‘Saudi Arabia promised support to Libyan warlord in push to seize Tripoli,’ Wall Street Journal, 12 April 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-arabia-promised-support-to-libyan-warlord-in-push-to-seizetripoli-11555077600. 166. Worth, ‘Mohammed bin Zayed’s dark vision.’ 167. Wehrey, The Burning Shores, 264. 168. David D. Kirkpatrick and Declan Walsh, ‘As Libya descends into chaos, foreign powers look for a way out,’ New York Times,18 January 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/world/middleeast/libya-war-hifter-russia.html. 169. Jalel Harchaoui and Mohadem-Essaid Lazib, ‘Proxy war dynamics in Libya,’ Virginia Tech School of Public and International Affairs in Association with Virginia Tech Publishing, 2019. 170. International Crisis Group, Intra-Gulf Competition in Africa’s Horn. 171. Ronen Bergman and David D. Kirkpatrick, ‘With guns, cash and terrorism, Gulf states vie for power in Somalia,’ New York Times, 22 July 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/world/africa/somalia-qatar-uae.html. 172. International Crisis Group, Intra-Gulf Competition in Africa’s Horn. 173. International Crisis Group, Intra-Gulf Competition in Africa’s Horn,3. 174. International Crisis Group, Intra-Gulf Competition in Africa’s Horn, ii. 175. Rohan Advani, Constructing Commercial Empire: The United Arab Emirates in the Red Sea and the Horn, The Century Foundation, 9 December 2019, https://tcf.org/content/report/constructing-commercial-empire-united-arab-emirates-redsea-horn/. 176. Candace Rondeaux and David Sterman, ‘Twenty-First Century Proxy Warfare: Confronting Strategic Innovation in a Multipolar World,’ New America, 20 February 2019, https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/reports/twentyfirst-century-proxy-warfare-confronting-strategic-innovation-multipolar-world/executive-summary-key-findings. 177. UNHCR, ‘Libya,’ https://www.unhcr.org/libya.html; UNHCR, ‘2018 trafficking in persons report—Libya,’ https://www.refworld.org/docid/5b3e0af04.html. 178. UNICEF, ‘Syria crisis March 2019 humanitarian results,’ https://www.unicef.org/appeals/files/UNICEF_Syria_Crisis_Situation_Report_March_2019.pdf. 179. Frederik Federspiel and Mohammad Ali, ‘The cholera outbreak in Yemen: Lessons learned and way forward,’ BMC

180.

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Public Health 18, no. 1 (December 2018): 1338. United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, ‘Humanitarian update: Resources needed to sustain world’s largest aid operation in 2020,’ March 2020, https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/Humanitarian%20Update%20%2303_Final_0.pdf. ACLED, ‘Press release: Yemen war death toll exceeds 90,000 according to new ACLED data for 2015,’ 18 June 2019, https://acleddata.com/2019/06/18/press-release-yemen-war-death-toll-exceeds-90000-according-to-new-acled-data-for2015/. Frederic Wehrey, ‘The conflict in Libya,’ Testimony before the House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, 15 May 2019 https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/05/15/conflict-in-libya-pub-79160. E.g., see Anke Hoeffler, ‘On the causes of civil war,’ in The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Peace and Conflict, Michelle R. Garfinkel and Stergio Skaperdas, eds.(Oxford University Press, 2012); Håvard Hegre and Nicholas Sambanis, ‘Sensitivity analysis of empirical results on civil war onset,’ Journal of Conflict Resolution 50, no. 4 (August 2006): 508–35, https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002706289303; James D. Fearon, ‘Governance and civil war onset,’ World Bank, 2011; James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin, ‘Ethnicity, insurgency, and civil war,’ American Political Science Review 97, no. 01 (February 2003): 75–90, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055403000534. Lise Morjé Howard and Alexandra Stark, ‘How civil wars end: The international system, norms, and the role of external actors,’ International Security 42, no. 3 (January 2018): 127–71; Patrick M. Regan and Aysegul Aydin, ‘Diplomacy and other forms of intervention in civil wars,’ Journal of Conflict Resolution 50, no. 5 (October 2006): 736–56; Jeffrey Dixon, ‘Emerging consensus: Results from the second wave of statistical studies on civil war termination,’ Civil Wars 11, no. 2 (June 2009): 121–36. Alexandra Stark, ‘International troops are leaving Yemen. Here’s what will help bring peace,’ Washington Post, 13 December 2019.

INDEX

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” refer to notes, “f    ” refer to figures and “t” refer to tables

Abaqiq, 210 al-Abbas, Abu, 208, 212, 222 Abboud, Samer, 307 Abdul-Jalil, Mustapha, 300 Abdulla, Abdulkhaleq, 311 al-Abdullah, Mohammed Saeed, 132 Abkhazia, 37, 255 Aboud, Hassan, 91 Abouzeid, Rania, 131 Abu al-Abbas Brigades, 208 Abu al-Qaqa, 84 Abu Ammar, 91 Abu Dhabi, 154, 169, 291, 293–4 Abu Dhabi-Riyadh axis, 318 Abu Luqman. See Shawakh, Ali Moussa Abu Slim Central Security Force, 179 al-Achi, Assad, 125 activist Salafism, 79–82 activist Salafis, 77, 78, 90 activist Salafi networks, 86 Aden, 210, 216, 314 Afghan Auxiliary Police, 24 Afghan civil war (1990), 277 Afghan forces, 29 Afghan Local Police (ALP), 23, 24 Afghanistan, 2, 17–18, 23, 202, 275

end of Soviet incursion in, 247 political groups, 276 proxy conflict, 33–4 US invasion of, 277 Afghantsy, 248 Afghanvet, 248 Africa, 155, 173, 235 African fighters, 180 AFRICOM, 187 Afrin, 175 Ahfad al-Rasul, 136 al-Ahmar, Ali Mohsen, 221, 383n63 Ahram, Ariel, 17 Ahrar al-Sham (AS), 82, 88, 91, 95–6, 109, 121–2 responsibilities ignorance in Raqqa, 144–5 Qatar and Turkey, received support from, 304 Raqqa capturing role, 124–5 aid dependence, 30 Air Force Intelligence Directorate, 261 Airborne Forces (VDV), 248, 257–8 Airwars data, 188, 195, 197, 201, 328n20 al-Ajmi, Shafi, 90 Al Arabiya, 311 Al Jazeera, 296, 316 Al Jufra, 190–1 Al Qods Day, 270 al-Albani, Muhammad Nasir al-Din, 82–3 al-Bayda, 160 Albu Sultan, 100 Aleppo, 53–4, 59, 180–1, 338n23, 338n24 Alfa Unit 1, 251 Alhamza, Abdalaziz, 124, 135 al-Khadim airbase, 179 All Union Special Forces Association of Paratroopers, 257 Alloush, Zahran, 83 Al-Masar al-Horr, 104–5 Al-Mokha, 217

al-Na’im tribe, 145 al-Nimr (Tiger Forces), 261 al-Nour mosque, 121 ALP. See Afghan Local Police (ALP) Alpha Group, 249–50 Alpha-B, 251 al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), 84 al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), 91, 314 al-Qaeda, 23, 28, 85, 220–1, 226 rise of, 35 US counterterrorism campaign against, 37–8 al-Tawhid Brigade, 304 Al-Thawra, 223 Al-Turbah, 217, 218 al-Umma party, 88 Al-Watan (political party), 159, 300 America. See United States (US) American troops, 38 Amin, Hafizullah, 33, 258 Amman, 154 Anadan, 79 Anas, Abu, 81–2, 91 Anbar Province, 23 Angola, 16 Ankara, 175, 181 Ansar al-Sharia, 305 Ansarullah, 215–16 anti-Assad forces, 53 anti-Assad militants, 52 anti-Haftar forces, 163 anti-Houthi forces, 314 anti-Houthi groups, 207 anti-IS campaign, 63 anti-Islamists, 156, 159 anti-Taliban fighters, 35 anti-Taliban forces, 276 Anti-Terror Orel Group, 257, 258

Anti-Terror Orel Training Center, 258 AQI. See al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) al-Aqill, Taher, 224 Aqlan, Talal, 217 Arab Gulf monarchies, 286–7, 290 Arab League summit, 288 Arab League, 299, 300–1 Arab Spring (2011), 13, 40, 154, 157, 213 post-Arab Spring era, 270 See also Qatar; Saudi Arabia; United Arab Emirates (UAE) Arabian Peninsula, 2, 291, 313 Arabs, 68–69 Arafat, Yasser, 249 Al-Arashi, Abdulkarim, 227 al-Arifi, Muhammad, 93 Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), 215 Armenia, 274 Article (359), 243 AS. See Ahrar al-Sham (AS) Asia, 254 Assad regime, 30, 53, 76, 93, 180, 255, 302, 305 al-Assad, Bashar, 45, 52, 89, 101, 119–21, 141 al-Assad, Hafez, 245, 355n44 Athens, 20 al-Attiya, Hamid bin Ali, 87 August Battle of Tripoli, 299 Authenticity and Development Front, 94 Avant, Deborah, 242 al-Awda, Salman, 81 ‘Axis of Evil’, 277 ‘Axis of Resistance’, 282 Ayoub, Ali, 261 Azerbaijan, 274 Aziz, Omar, 51, 53 Azzam, Abdullah, 35 Baath Party, 79

Baathist state/policies, 79 Bab Al-Mandab, 218, 314, 318 Badr Corps, 274 al-Baggari, Abu Khalid, 106 Baghdad, 98, 241, 273 al-Baghdadi, Abu Bakr, 134, 136, 142 Bahrain, 286, 291–2, 296–8 Bani Walid, 187 Banina Air Base, 164 banking secrecy, 44 al-Banna, Hassan, 80 Bashaga, Fathi, 168, 178–9, 184, 369n158 Battle of al-Qusayr, 97, 305 Bayraktar TB-2 drones, 172, 194 Beijing, 318 Beirut, 32, 311 Bekaa Valley, 45 Belhadj, Abdelhakim, 299, 300 Bellingcat, 239 Belt and Road Initiative, 318 Benghazi Defense Brigades, 317 Benghazi Revolutionaries’ Shura Council (BRSC), 162 Benghazi, 153, 156, 159–60, 162, 189–90 Bergman, Ronen, 318 Berlin conference, 179 Berlin Summit, 204 Beslan, 39 Biden administration, 48 Bilhaj, Abd al-Hakim, 158 bin Laden, Osama, 35 al-Bishir, Muhammad, 108 Black Hawk Down, 37 Black Sea, 14, 37, 42, 247, 260 Blank, Stephen, 245 Blinken, Antony, 311 ‘Blue Homeland’, 175 Bolton, John, 66, 170

Bonn conference (2001), 276 Borogan, Irina, 250 Boumediene, Houari, 245 bread factions: rise of, 104–6 Brotherhood activists, 80 Brown, Frances, 52 Buckley, William, 32 Buenos Aires, 32 ‘Bunyan al-Marsus’, 166 Bush administration, 277 Bustan al-Basha, 54–5 Byman, Daniel, 18, 45 C4ADS, 239, 328n19 Caerus Associates, 142, 337n11 Cairo, 169, 246 ‘Caliphate’, 72, 115 Camp Bucca, 134 Camp David, 162, 309 Canada, 227 Carter administration, 34 Carter Center, 310 Carter, Ash, 68 Caspian Sea, 255 Caucasus, 37 Central Asia, 37 Central Bank of Libya, 167 Central Command (CENTCOM), 308 Central Security Forces (CSF), 217 Chad/Chadians, 161, 197 Chamran, Mostafa, 273–4 Chechen task forces, 43 Chechnya, 37, 247 Chemezov, Sergei, 252 Chikin, Boris, 259 China, 14, 71, 154 CIA, 98, 303

CJTF-OIR. See Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR) client states, 22 Clinton, Hillary, 297 Coalition Provisional Authority, 134 ‘Cold War 2.0’, 43 Cold War era, 245, 247 Cold War, 13, 31, 41, 245, 329n38 Coll, Steve, 18 Color Revolutions, 256–7 Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR), 312 Comrade Tourists, 246 Conflict Intelligence Team, 239 Connolly, Richard, 256 constitutional orders, 22–3 Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams, 23 COVID-19, 320 Crimea, 42, 251 Crimean Peninsula, 261 Crimean War, 255 Cuba, 16 Czechoslovakia, 247 Dahmash, Hamoud, 218 al-Dakak, Salah, 217 Damascus, 84–5, 180, 256, 305, 311 ‘Day of Anger’ protest (2011), 86 Day of Rage, 293 Deadly Connections (Byman), 16 de-Ba’athification law (2003), 134 Debaltseve, 262–3 ‘deep-attack doctrine’, 280 Deir ez-Zour, 30, 84, 133, 136, 236–40 denial of service attacks (DDoS), 39–40 Der Spiegel (magazine), 134 Derna, 160, 190 Derzsi-Horváth, András, 17 Dickinson, Elizabeth, 90

Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE), 163–4 ‘dirty tricks’, 238 Djibouti, 315 Doctors Without Borders, 29 Doha, 87, 295, 310 Donbas, 258, 262 Donetsk People’s Republic, 42, 262 Dossier Center, 239 Douma, 83 Druze regions, 51 Dubai, 293–4 Dubs, Adolph, 33 Duma, 252 East Africa, 315, 318 east Derna, 197 eastern Aleppo, 53 Eastern Europe, 37, 172 eastern Libya, 154, 156, 163, 164–5, 180 Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum, 194 eastern Mediterranean, 174 eastern Syria, 112, 114 EastMed cooperative, 194 Education City, 295 Egypt/Egyptians, 159, 169–70, 181, 196 air strikes in Libya, 196–7 defeat in Six Day War, 246 Egyptian parliament, 180 Eid al-Adha, 121 El Salvador, 16 Emirati regime, 294 Emirati Special Forces, 314, 315 Epishkin, Sergey, 257 Erbil, 98 Erdog˘an, Recep Tayyip, 47, 175, 177, 181 Eritrea, 318 Esper, Mark, 47

Etilaf (Syrian National Coalition), 126–7, 128–9 Euphrates River, 84, 236 Euromaidan uprisings (2013–14), 255 Europe, 79, 182 European Union, 45, 182 F-16 Fighting Falcons, 298, 312 Face the Nation (television program), 47 Facebook, 293 ‘failed states’, 5 Falahatpisheh, Heshmatollah, 271, 396n6 al-Faraj, Hamud, 107–8 Faruq Brigades, 92, 93, 108–9 Fateh al-Islam, 84 Felshintsky, Yuri, 250 Feltman, Jeffrey, 301 Fezzan, 161, 167–8 FIFA World Cup (2022), 295 5th Assault Corps, 236, 263 Filipinkov, Alexander, 257 Fontanka (news site), 260 Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), 250 Foreign Policy (Kobani), 66 41st Sarallah Division, 273 Fourth Assault Corps (4th Legion), 261–2 Fourth Military Region, 224–5 France, 153, 187–8, 196 Free Syrian Army (FSA), 77, 89, 302, 304 Freer, Courtney Jean, 294, 295 FSA. See Free Syrian Army (FSA) FSB, 250, 253 Fursan al-Furat, 106–7 Gaddafi regime, 299 Gaddafi, Muammar, 40, 152, 187, 192, 288 Gaddafists, 181 Gargash, Anwar, 297 Gaston, Erica, 17

Gaza, 274 Gazprom, 251–2 GCC Summit (2015), 309 General National Congress (GNC), 158 Geneva Accords, 35 Geneva, 204 geographic origins, 76 Georgia, 37, 38, 255 Georgian campaign, 40 war between Russia and, 39 Ghaani, Esmail, 270, 277 Ghalioun, Burhan, 92 Gharyan, 169, 172 Ghattas, Kim, 301 ‘Global War on Terror’, 39 globalization, 14 Goldberg, Jeffrey, 313–14 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 34–5, 246 Government of National Accord (GNA), 152, 163, 184, 199f, 316–17, 375n33 air strikes in Libya, 192 air strikes, 200 LNA airbase Al Jufra attack, 190–1 financial support from Qatar, 188–9 Muslim Brotherhood support to, 198 GPC (party), 221, 227 Great Britain, 65, 165, 177 Greater Middle East, 31, 41, 209, 230, 264 activity of Russian PMSCs in, 244–5 conflict escalation, 36 Greece, 175 Griffiths, Martin, 211 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), 287, 289, 309–10 Gulf monarchies, 285–6, 290, 306–7 competition in Africa, 317–18 Operation Inherent Resolve, 312–13 See also Bahrain; Libya Gulf states, 14, 41, 207

intra-GCC tension, 309–10 threat from ISIS, 310–11 Gulf War I (1991), 254 Al-Guneid, Mahmoud, 217 Gusev, Vadim, 259 Guterres, António, 201 Hadhrani families, 100–1 Hadi, Abdo Rabbu Mansour, 218–19 hadith, 83 Haftar, Khalifa, 152, 153, 189, 316–17, 361n42, 366n115 Fezzan operation, 167–9 Benghazi militia bases attack, 159–60 and al-Sarraj, tensions between, 197–8 See also eastern Libya Haid, Haid, 59 Haji Bakr. See al-Khlifawi, Samir Abd Muhammad Hajizadeh, Amir Ali, 269 al-Hakim, Mohammad Baqir, 275 Hama, 79, 261–2 Hamas, 33 Al-Hammadi, Adnan, 218 Hariri, Rafik, 255 Hariri, Saad, 57 Harrington, Brooke, 45 al-Hasi, Abd al-Salam, 157 Hassan Hassan, 301, 304, 355n28 al-Hassan, Suhail, 261 al-Hawwali, Safar, 81 Hayel Saeed Anam family, 214 Hayel, Shawqi, 219 Herat Association, 248 Hezbollah, 32, 41, 219, 272, 278–9 Battle of al-Qusayr, 305 Hilal, Assad, 89 History of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydide), 20 Hitto, Ghassan, 96

hizbiyya (factionalism), 80 ‘holy struggle’, 270 Horn of Africa, 285, 290, 314, 317, 318 Hosh (tribespeople), 113, 349n91 ‘Houla Massacre’, 93 House of Representatives (HOR), 160, 181 Houthi rebels, 40 Houthis, 41, 207, 281–2 received logistical support from Iran, 219 wars with Yemeni government, 208–9 Hughes, Geraint, 19, 20 Human Rights Watch, 190 Hurst, Cindy, 252 Hussein, Saddam, 23, 134, 245 Hutchins, Todd Emerson, 265 Idlib, 79, 89, 181, 338–9n32 Idlibi, Qutaiba, 57, 58, 128 IDPs. See internally displaced persons (IDPs) Idris, Salim, 97, 303 Iliyin, Igor, 257 Ilovaisk, 262–3 India, 36 Indian commercial airliner, 35–6 Innes, Michael, 21 internally displaced persons (IDPs), 122, 320 International Code of Conduct for Private Security Service Providers (ICoC), 241 International Committee of the Red Cross, 241 International Criminal Court, 205 International Crisis Group, 138, 318 International Humanitarian Law (IHL), 26, 29, 241 International Stability Operations Association (ISOA), 241 Internet Research Agency (IRA), 239 interstate conflict, 1, 4 Intifada II, 33 Iran, 2, 208, 219, 269, 308 forward defense doctrine, 282–4

Iranian Revolution (1979), 31–2 role in Yemeni civil war, 281 and Saudi Arabia, rivalries between, 18 spreading forces in Libya, 181 support to anti-Taliban fighters, 35 support to Hamas and Hezbollah, 41 See also Iraq Iranian army, 280 Iranian Revolution (1979), 18, 31, 270 Iran-Iraq War (1980–8), 32, 33, 273, 274 Iraq, 2, 17, 23 al-Qaeda expansion, 85 invasion of Iran, 32 Syrian proxy war (2011–16), 88–9 US forces support to Iraqi forces, 25 US invasion of, 38, 277 IRGC. See Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) IS fighters, 53 IS. See Islamic State (IS) ISI. See Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) ISIS. See Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) Islah (political party), 211, 221, 293–4, 314 Islam, 80 al-Islam, Saif, 173 Islamabad, 34 ‘Islamic Brigades’, 54, 338n23 Islamic law, 133–4, 141 Islamic Republic, 273, 275, 279, 283 Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), 17, 32, 273, 278, 284 Islamic State (IS), 47, 54–6, 63, 165 Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), 131–2 Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), 41, 85, 96, 136, 191–2, 290 captured Raqqa, 116–17 defeat in Raqqa, 144 expansion, 97–8 global priorities shifted with rise of, 89 strategies of assassination, 134–5

takeover of Manbij, 111 as threat for Gulf states, 310–11 See also Raqqa Islamists, 156, 159 Israel, 14, 33 ‘Israeli-Iran cold war’, 41 Istanbul Room, 92, 304 Istanbul, 302 Italian Air Force Reaper drone, 203 Italy, 162, 197 Jabal al Gharbi, 188 Jabhat al-Nusra (JAN), 53, 85, 87, 91, 121, 130 Raqqa’s society, penetration into, 131–2 split, 96 Janzur Equestrian Club, 202 al-Jarba, Ahmed, 96–7 al-Jathran, Ibrahim, 164 Jaysh al-Islam, 304, 308 JCPOA. See Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) Jebel al-Zawiya, 57, 79, 89–90 Jeffrey, James, 66 Jibril, Mahmud, 157–8 Jihadi Salafism, 84–5 Jihadi Salafi doctrine, 84 jihadi Salafis, 78 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), 289, 308 al-Jolani, Abu Mohammed, 132, 136 Jordan, 153 Jufra airbase, 179 Jufra-Sirte axis, 180 Jund al-Haramein, 104–5, 105t, 107–8, 350n107 Jund al-Sham, 84–5 Justice and Construction Party (JCP), 158 Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), 156 al-Kabir, Sadiq, 167 Kabul, 33, 258, 393n109

Kalyvas, Stathis, 125 Kandahar, 35 Kara, Abdelraouf, 167 Karmal, Babrak, 34 Karzai, Hamid, 31 Katz, Brian, 72 Kayhan (newspaper), 271 Kennan, George, 70–1 Kerman, 273 Al Ketbi, Ebtisam, 294 KGB, 243, 248–9 Al Khalifa, Hamad bin Isa, 297 Khalil, Abdullah, 130, 133–4 Khalilzad, Zalmay, 274 Khamenei, Ayatollah Ali, 270, 275, 280–1 Khasham, 236, 240 Khashoggi, Jamal, 220 al-Khatib, Moaz, 127–8 al-Khlifawi, Samir Abd Muhammad, 134–5 Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah, 272, 273 Khomeinists, 272 Khurais, 210 al-Kikli, Abd al-Ghani, 179 Kirkpatrick, David, 318 Kobane, 65 Kobani, Mazloum, 66–7 Kosovo, 36 Kramskoi, Sergei, 259 Kremlin, 34, 37, 234, 245, 248, 255 Kreps, Sarah E., 45 Kufra, 161 Kunduz, 29 KUOS regime, 249 Kurdish groups, 32, 42 Kurdish regions, 51 Kuwait, 87–8, 90 Kyiv, 39, 42, 260–1

Kyrgyzstan, 38 LAAF. See Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF) Ladwig, Walter, 18, 30–1 Laskar-e-Taiba, 18 Latakia, 261–2 Latin America, 172, 235 Latvia, 261 Lavrov, Sergei, 40–1 Lebanon war (2006), 38 Lebanon, 272 Levant, 2 Libya Alaan (television network), 187 Libya Dawn coalition, 153, 160 Libya Joint Military Commission, 205 Libya Observer (newspaper), 187 Libya Summit (2018), 187–8 Libya, 2, 40–1, 160–1, 188, 191f, 316–17 Egypt air strikes in, 196–7 European policy on, 182 France attacks on, 196 Gulf monarchies intervention in, 298–300 Iran spreading forces in, 181 Italy air strike on, 197 LNA and GNA air strikes in, 192 NATO-led no-fly zone in, 299 outcome of proxy wars, 305–6 post-2011 chaos, 153–4 post-Gaddafi civil war (2019-2020), 185 Russian intervention in, 164 Turkey strikes on, 194–5 UAE intervention in, 192–4 Wagner intervention in, 173–4 See also United States (US) Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF), 160, 163, 172–4 Libyan civil war (2011), 152 Libyan civil war (2014), 159–60

Libyan elites, 153–4 Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), 158 Libyan Islamists, 159 Libyan National Army (LNA), 160, 187–8, 190–1, 196, 199f, 317, 375n33 air strike campaigns, 200–2 See also Government of National Accord (GNA); Libya Libyan uprising (2011), 288 Libyans, 152, 185 ‘light-footprint’ approach, 23 ‘little green men’, 42 Liwa al-Tawhid, 56, 79, 94, 102–3 LNA. See Libyan National Army (LNA) ‘Long Telegram’, 70 loyalist Salafis, 78, 94 Loyalist Salafism, 82–4 Luhansk People’s Republic, 262 Luhansk, 42 Lund, Aron, 68 Lynch, Marc, 309 Al-Maamari, Ali, 227, 228 Maarouf, Jamal, 57–8 al-Madkhali, Rabi bin Hadi, 83, 168 Madkhalis, 168–9 Mahjub Brigade, 317 Mahmoud, Amin, 227, 228 Makhlouf, Rami, 45 Making Sense of Proxy Warfare (Innes), 21, 43 Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, 263, 332n68 Mali, 159 Manbij Military Council, 113 Manbij, 77, 100–1 network structure, 109–11 Revolutionary Council and Qatar, 101–4, 105t See also Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) al-Maqdashi, Mohamed, 224 Mare, 79

Marea, Hajji, 99 Marib, 315 Marten, Kimberly, 244, 253, 359n15 Maskana, 111 Maslov, Oleg, 257 Massoud, Ahmad Shah, 276 Matthiesen, Toby, 298 Mattis, James, 308 Mazar-i Sharif, 276 McFate, Sean, 38, 242 McGurk, Brett, 66 Mediterranean Sea, 320 al-Mekhlafi, Ghazwan, 223 Al-Mekhlafi, Hamoud, 222, 223 Menashri, David, 274 Merhej, Hassan, 262 Merkel, Angela, 177 Middle East, 49, 71, 153, 155, 216 decolonization experience, 2 Islam role in, 19 Russian involvement in, 246–7 Military Operations Command (MOC), 303 Ministry of Interior, 24 Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), 250, 251 Mirage fighter jets, 298 Misrata, 165–6, 176 Mohamed, Mohamed Abdullahi, 315 Mohammed bin Salman (MbS), 309, 311, 313–14 Mohammed bin Zayed (MbZ), 293 Mohebbian, Amir, 301 Moldova, 37 MOM. See Müs¸terek Operasyon Merkezi (MOM) Monaghan, Andrew, 38 Montreux Document, 241–2 Moran Security Group, 259, 264 Moran, 259–60 Morsi, Mohamed, 86, 93–4, 159, 309

Moscow summit (2020), 177, 185 Moscow, 13, 30, 164, 239 relations with Damascus, 256 theater hostage crisis (2002), 39 Mossack Fonseca & Co., 45 Mossadegh, Mohammed, 272 Mostov, Gleb, 151–2 Mosul, 98 MQ-1 Predators, 193 Mu’ajer, Mansour Mohsen, 218 Mubarak, Ahmed Awad bin, 210, 307 Mubarak, Hosni, 309 Mughalis, Salim, 217 Mughniyeh, Imad, 278 Muhammad Surur bin Nayef Zayn al-Abadeen, 81 Mukalla, 314 Mumford, Andrew, 15, 20 Munich Security Conference (2007), 38–9 Murzuq, 190, 197, 203 Müs¸terek Operasyon Merkezi (MOM), 303 Muslim Brotherhood, 76–7, 78–9, 80, 86, 100–1, 221 ideologies in Yemen, 222 MbZ views on, 294 support to GNA, 198 al-Mutairi, Hakim, 88 al-Mutairi, Hayef, 83 mutatis mutandis, 100 MVD. See Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) Nafusa (town), 158 Nafusa mountains, 158 Nagorno-Karabakh, 274 Al Nahyan, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, 294, 314 Najd (Wilayat), 311 Nasrallah, Hassan, 278, 305 Nasser clan, 107 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 245

Nasserists, 222 National Action Group, 93 National Defense Force (NDF), 262 National Forces Alliance (NFA), 158 ‘National Guard Units’, 65 national intelligence service (MIT), 176 National Salvation Government, 160 National Transitional Council (NTC), 92–3, 192, 300 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 23, 249, 331n62 clash with Russian troops, 36 intervention in Libya, 298–300 al-Nawaf, Mustafa Ali, 128–9 Nawasi Battalion, 179 al-Nayed, Aref, 157–8 Nefi, Hassan, 102 ‘neo-medievalism’, 38 New America, 188, 195, 197, 201, 328n20 New York Times (newspaper), 301–2, 305 NFA. See National Forces Alliance (NFA) Nicaragua, 16 Nigeria, 259 Nikolaev, 246, 260–1 9/11 attacks, 16, 23 Nineveh province, 132 Nisour Square, 241 Non-Commercial Organizations, 252 non-Iranian forces, 280 North Africa, 2, 71, 292 North Korea, 36, 277 North Yemen. See Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) northeastern Syria, 47, 48, 69, 236 Northern Alliance, 35–6, 276 northern Syria, 47, 84, 112, 341n74, 352n145 northwestern Syria, 57, 124 NTC. See National Transitional Council (NTC) al-Nuami, Abd al-Rahman, 99

Obama administration, 16, 126, 157, 165, 288, 289 Arab Spring, reaction to, 307 calls for Mubarak, 308–9 Obama, Barack, 65, 96, 355n30 Odessa, 260–1 offshore banking, 44 Oktyabrsk, 260–1 Old City, 224 Olympic Games, 34 Oman, 282 OMELAS, 138 On the Logic of Violence in Civil War (Kalyvas), 125 ‘One Country, One File, One Commander’, 278 Operation Decisive Storm, 219 Operation Dignity, 159–60 ‘Operation Dignity’ faction, 153 ‘Operation Flood of Dignity’, 201 Operation Golden Arrow (2015), 314 Operation Irini, 182 Operation Peace Storm, 179 Operation Storm-333, 34 Operations Room, 59–60 Orel Airborne Forces, 257 Ostovar, Afshon, 17 Ovsyannikov, Pavel, 257 Pakistan, 36, 202 Palmyra incident (2013), 260 Palmyra, 259 Panama Papers, 44 Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê (PKK), 67–8, 112–13 Peninsula Shield Force, 297, 298 People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), 33 Persian Gulf, 14 Peshawar, 35 Pfaff, Anthony, 15, 21, 23 Phillips, Christopher, 304

PKK. See Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê (PKK) plausible deniability, 27 PMSCs. See Russian private military security contractors (PMSCs) Politburo, 34 political membership, 76 political strategy, 51 Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF), 272–3 Popular Resistance, 216, 225 ‘post-Assad Syria’, 51–2 post-Cold War era, 150 post-Soviet era, 247 post-World War II era, 20 power asymmetry, 30 Pravda (newspaper), 245 Presidential Policy Guidance (PPG), 202 Pribylovsky, Vladimir, 250 Prigozhin, Yevgeny, 172, 183, 235, 243, 256–7 Primakov, Yevgeny, 245 Pristina International Airport, 36 private military companies (PMCs), 242 private security contractors (PSCs), 241, 243 private security organizations, 240–1 “provincial congress”, 127 proxy agents, 22 Proxy capabilities, 67–9, 64f proxy relationship, 21 proxy strategies, 27 Proxy Warfare (Mumford), 43 proxy warfare, 15, 328n22 definition, 19 legal definition, 28–9 Proxy Warriors (Ahram), 17 PSCs. See private security contractors (PSCs) Putin era, 245 Putin, Vladimir, 38–9, 172, 177, 235, 252 Russian Federation, 279 ‘Russian World’, 242

Pyongyang, 36 al-Qaradawi, Yusuf, 295 Qatar, 40, 42, 77, 86–7, 287, 300–1 approach to Yemen, 315–16 financially backs GNA, 188–9 military cooperation with US, 288 post-Arab Spring period, 294–6 rivalry between UAE and, 159 support for Brotherhood, 94 See also Manbij Qatari Emiri Air Force C-130, 91 Qatari Special Forces, 299 Qatif, 293 Qods Force, 270, 273–4, 276, 277–8 Qur’an, 83 Al-Qushaibi, Hameed, 221 Ra’s Lanuf, 188 Radio Farda, 278 Rafallah al-Sahati, 299 Rafsanjani, Akbar Hashemi, 275 al-Rahma, Haitham, 93 Ramadan, Ahmed, 94 RAND report (2016), 42 Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, 124 Raqqa, 69, 111, 125–6, 143f captured by ISIS, 116–17 ISIS rule benefits in, 141–2 Local Council (LC), 124 post–ISIS, 144–7 reluctant revolution, 118–22 revolutionary rule, 122–4 Syoufi arrival in, 127–8 See also Ahrar al-Sham (AS); Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS); Syria Raqqawis, 119–21, 129, 137–8 al-Rashed, Abdulrahman, 311 al-Rashid, Aimad al-Din, 93

Rebels Without Borders (Salehyan), 19 Red Sea coast, 314 Red Sea, 208, 247, 320 Redut Antiterror, 258 religious activity, 76 Resistance Axis, 219 responsibility-to-protect (R2P), 16 restrictive checkpoints, 56, 338n26 Reuter, Christoph, 134, 135 Revival of Islamic Heritage Society (RIHS), 88, 90 Revolutionary Council, 101–3, 104, 105t, 108–9, 349n97 Riga, 261 Riyadh, 86, 91–2, 94, 169, 287, 291 Rosboronexport, 252, 254, 260 Rose Revolution (2004), 38 Rosneft, 254 Rostec, 252, 259, 260 Rouhani, Hassan, 283 RusCorp, 258 Rusich, 258 Russia, 2, 41–2, 173, 181, 238, 251, 256 Criminal Code (1996), 243 proxy warfare strategies, 240–4, 263–8 rivalries between US and, 18 scholars, 243–4 war between Georgia and, 39 See also Libya; Syria Russian Federation, 234, 389n37 Russian military, 248, 255 Russian private military security contractors (PMSCs), 30, 38, 42, 233–4, 238–9, 260, 386n10 as agents of proxy war strategy, 263–8 Montreux protocols, 241–2 Russian rebel forces, 24 Saada, 216 Saakashvili, Mikheil, 38

Sabbagh, Mustafa, 128 Sabratha, 180 Saeed, Shawqi Hayel, 218, 227 Sahwa (awakening), 81 Sahwa movement (1991), 81, 86 St. Petersburg, 250, 261 Sakr, Okab, 57, 92, 93–4 al-Salabi, Ismail, 299, 317 Salafi ideology, 89 Salafi movement, 81 Salafi patrons, 90–1 Salafist groups, 35 Salafists, 287 Salama, Abd al-Aziz, 94 Salamé, Ghassan, 204 Salami, Hossein, 280–1 Saleh, Abd al-Qadr, 94 Saleh, Aguila, 181, 183 Saleh, Ali Abdullah, 213, 216 Salehyan, Idean, 16, 339n38 Salim Idris, 95 Sallabi, Ali, 157–8 SANA (news agency), 121 Sanaa, 209–10, 216, 311 Saraqib, 89 SARG. See Syrian Arab Republic Government (SARG) Sarhan, Sadiq, 221, 223 al-Sarraj, Fayez, 177, 183, 196 Al Saud, Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, 288 Saudi Arabia, 14, 32, 85–6, 168–9, 220 military cooperation with US, 288 organized Conference for Change in Syria, 95 post-Arab Spring period, 292–3 proxy war between Iran and, 208 rivalries between Iran and, 18 Salafi networks backed by, 83 supported Kuwaiti loyalist Salafis, 107

Saudi Aramco oil facilities, 210, 211 Saudi Special Forces, 314 Saur Revolution (1978), 33 Schenker, David, 178, 182 Scud missiles, 33 SDF. See Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) Sea of Azov, 255 Sednaya Prison, 91 Sednaya, 90 SEF. See Syrian Elite Forces (SEF) selectorate theory, 30 ‘A Seminar for Establishing Local Councils’ (Aziz), 51 ‘semi-state’ auxiliaries, 155 Senstad, Cecilie, 256 ‘Shabiha’ militias, 45 Shamsan, Nabil, 223–4, 227 Sharia courts, 132 Sharia law, 158 Shariatmadari, Hossein, 271 al-Shawakh, Ali Moussa, 132 Shawkat, Asef, 95 al-Sheikh, Abu Issa, 90, 91, 106, 110 al-Sheikh, Mustafa, 91–2 Shekho, Sheikh Abdul Azim, 121 ‘shell game’, 48 Shia Iraqi Islamists, 275 Shia militia forces, 23 Shia powerbrokers, 25 Shia regime, 90 Shia revolutionary fighters, 31 Shirazi, Ali, 281 Singer, Peter, 242 Siroky, David, 16 Sirte, 165–6, 310–11 el-Sisi, Abdel Fattah, 309–10 Slavonic Corps, 259–60, 261, 264 SMC. See Supreme Military Council (SMC)

SNC. See Syrian National Council (SNC) Soldatov, Yuri, 250 ‘soldiers of fortune’, 236, 263 Soleimani, Qassem, 269–70, 273–4 solidarity network, 78 Solomon, Erika, 59 Somalia, 37, 202, 315, 318, 320, 334n104 Sons of Iraq program, 23–4 South Asia, 17, 35 South Ossetia, 37, 38, 255 Southern Front coalition, 302 southern Lebanon, 31 Southern Transitional Council (STC), 210, 230, 314 southern Yemen, 314 southwestern Yemen, 210 Soviet Spetsnaz forces, 34 Soviet Union, 34, 245, 247 collapse of, 16, 18 Sparta, 20 spetsnaz forces, 248–9 Sponsor strategy, 63–7, 64f sponsor-proxy relationship, 62 sponsor-proxy strategies, 63 Standards and Procedures (PSP), 202 Steadfast Youth, 216 Stevens, Chris, 305 Stockholm Agreement (2018), 211, 315 StopFake.org, 240 StroyTransGaz (STG), 254, 259, 261 Sudan, 121, 318 Suez Canal crisis (1956), 246 ‘sugar rush’, 24 Sunni Afghan Northern Alliance, 274 Sunni Bosnians, 274 Sunni Muslim (community), 126 ‘support forces’, 160 Supreme Military Council (SMC), 96, 97, 108, 121–2, 303

Eastern Front group, 133 Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), 276 Supreme Political Council, 217 Suqur al-Sham, 90, 91, 106–7 Surgutneftgaz, 254 Surman, 180 Sururis, 81 SVR. See Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Sweden, 298 ‘Swiss Initiative’. See Montreux Document Switzerland, 204, 241 Syoufi, Mutasem, 124, 127–8 Syria Revolutionaries Front, 98 Syria, 2, 42, 51, 61, 119f, 120f, 123 deaths in, 139f, 140f Iran’s military interventions in, 279 jihadi Salafi networks, 85 loyalist Salafi networks emerged in, 83 occupation of Lebanon, 254–5 outcome of proxy wars, 305–6 Russia’s use of PMSCs in, 238 Russian foreign policy in, 246 Russian-American firefight in, 236 Syrian civil war, 288 Tehran’s military intervention in, 280 See also United States (US) Syrian Arab Republic Government (SARG), 118, 122 Syrian Arabs, 69 Syrian army, 55, 263 Syrian cause (2011), 90 Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF),47, 49, 63, 69, 145, 237 depending on Assad regime for protection from Turkey, 313 Jund al-Haramein joined, 113 US-SDF partnership, 69–70 US-SDF relationship, 66–7 Syrian Elite Forces (SEF), 302 Syrian fighters, 175–6

Syrian Islamic Front, 95 Syrian Kurds, 68 ‘Syrian Martyrs’ Brigade, 57 Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, 129 Syrian National Coalition. See Etilaf (Syrian National Coalition) Syrian National Council (SNC), 92–3, 302–3 Syrian National Movement, 102, 349n95 Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 122 Syrian Opposition Coalition (SOC), 308 Syrian opposition groups, 302 Syrian rebel groups, 41, 57 Syrian rebels, 42 ‘Syrian Revolutionaries Front’, 57 Syrian war, 51, 67 Syrian-Russian Business Council (2008), 255 Syrians, 113, 176, 180 al-Taan, Ahmed, 102 Tabatabai, Ariane, 301 Taftanaz, 89, 91 Tahrir Square, 296 Taiz Military Axis, 226 Taiz, 207, 213–15, 378n1, 379n11 Taj-Bek Palace, 258 Tajoura, 171, 201 Tajuri, Haytham, 167 Tal Abyad, 124 Taliban forces, 276 Taliban, 18, 35–6, 276 Tankel, Stephen, 18 Tanker War (1980), 32 Tarhouni, Ali, 300 Tarhuna, 179 Tartus, 254 Tatneft, 173, 254, 259 Tawhid Mosque, 83 Tbilisi, 39

Tehran, 23, 269, 272, 277, 283–4 military intervention in Syria, 280 Tel Aviv, 32 Tel Rifaat, 134 Tenet, George, 36 Al-Thaneen, Saleh, 221 al-Thani, Hamad bin Jassim, 298, 299 al-Thani, Hamad bin Khalifa, 86–7, 96, 295–6 al-Thani, Tamim bin Hamad, 317 The Independent (newspaper), 190 35th Armored Brigade, 218–19 3M (Money, Militias, and Muslim Brotherhood), 178, 369n157 Thuwwar Manbij, 103 Tigr-Top Rent, 258 Timber Sycamore, 57, 59, 99, 303 Tobruk, 160 Transneft, 251 Transnistria, 37 tribal sheikhs, 78 Tripoli International Airport, 160 Tripoli Revolutionaries’ Brigade, 179 Tripoli, 36, 160, 163, 191–2 Tripolitania, 178, 180, 197 Trump administration, 170, 202, 271, 398n41 Trump, Donald, 65, 47–8, 202, 271 Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided (TOW), 303 Tunisia, 196, 293 Turkey, 14, 67, 95, 112, 172, 174–5, 195f, 302 intervention in Libyan war, 174–6 regional competition between Arab powers, 131 strikes on Libya, 194–5 US clashed with, 70 Turkish parliament, 194 Turkish troops, 65 Turkish-Qatari axis, 76, 85, 96 22nd Brigade, 223 Twitter, 161

2011 revolution. See Arab Spring (2011) Tzu, Sun, 237 UAE. See United Arab Emirates (UAE) Ubari, 161 UK. See United Kingdom (UK) Ukraine, 2, 24, 30, 191, 255, 262 Russia’s use of PMSCs in, 238 Ummayad mosque, 127 UN General Assembly (2019), 205 UN Security Council Resolution (2510), 204 UN Security Council, 40–1, 170, 178, 302 UN. See United Nations (UN) ungoverned spaces, 1, 6, 325n1 United Aircraftbuilding Corporation, 252 United Arab Emirates (UAE), 40, 42, 126, 153, 158, 189 air strikes on Libya, 192–4, 193f post-Arab Spring period, 293–4 rivalry between Qatar and, 159 support for Haftar’s forces, 171 United Kingdom (UK), 313 United Nations (UN), 23, 41, 147, 153, 189, 202 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), 265 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 320 United Nations Security Council Resolution (1973), 192 United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL), 188, 190, 204 United Shipbuilding Corporation, 252 United States (US), 23, 107–8, 156–7, 170, 203f, 204f, 342–3n92 American diplomacy on Libya, 182–3 assassination of Soleimani, 269 backed Kurdish groups to fight ISIS, 42 counterterrorism campaign against al-Qaeda, 37–8 counterterrorism program in Libya, 202–4 invasion of Afghanistan, 277 policymakers, 320–1 policies on proxy war, 50f policy on proxy war, 1

proxy warfare strategy against Gaddafi regime, 40 rivalries between Russia and, 18 strategy failure in Syria, 62 views on YPG/YPJ’s links to PKK, 68 See also al-Qaeda; Iraq; Qatar; Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) UNSMIL. See United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 178 US Treasury Department, 99, 239 US-Saudi-Jordanian axis, 76, 85, 96 Utkin, Dmitry, 257, 260 Vanguard of the Imam (Ostovar), 17 Veisi, Morad, 278 Vietnam, 16 Vkontakte, 236–7 Volkov, Vladimir, 248, 251 Vympel, 249–50 Wagner fighters, 236 Wagner Group, 30, 42, 152, 172, 234, 266–7 intervention in Libya, 173–4 roots of, 256–8 Wahhabi belief system, 80 Wahhabi doctrine, 80, 81 Wahhabi movement, 80 Wahhabi theology, 79 Wahhabi ulema, 83 Wahhabism, 87 Warsaw Pact countries, 248 Washington, 13, 52, 98–9, 153, 183, 239 proxy war between Tehran and, 272–3 weak states, 22–3 Wehrey, Frederic, 298 Weiss, Michael, 304 Weldeh tribe, 107 western Libya, 153, 201 White House administrations, 23, 31 White House, 34, 37, 48, 157, 303

Wing Loong drones, 163, 171 Wolff, Terry, 146 Wood, Reed, 16 World War II, 249 World Wide Web, 39–40 Yanukovych, Viktor, 38 Yekîneyên Parastina Gel (YPG), 65, 67–8 Yekîneyên Parastina Jin (YPJ), 65, 67–8 Yeltsin, Boris, 246, 250, 251 Yemen Arab Republic (YAR), 214 Yemen, 2, 29, 40, 202, 209–13 economic crisis, 214 Libya approach to, 316–17 Saudi Arabia and UAE intervention, 313–315 See also Houthis; Taiz Yemeni government, 209, 222, 224 Younis, Abd al-Fatah, 157 YPG. See Yekîneyên Parastina Gel (YPG) YPJ. See Yekîneyên Parastina Jin (YPJ) Yugoslav civil war, 274 Yuschenko, Viktor, 38 Yusuf, Shawki, 262 Zabadani, 51 Zaidi community, 216 Zakani, Ali Reza, 311 al-Zakiri, Yasser, 103 Zarif, Javad, 276 Zarubezhneft, 254 al-Zawahiri, Ayman, 132 Zintan, 158, 160, 173