WPR Syria Endgame PDF

WHAT IS THE
ENDGAME IN SYRIA?
What Is the Endgame in Syria?
A WPR REPORT
After more than seven years of civil war that gutted Syria, the
endgame is here. But there are more questions than ever. What
does victory on President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal terms look
like? How has the rise and fall of the Islamic State changed
Syria’s political map? And what about reconstruction, let alone
reconciliation? This WPR report provides a comprehensive look
at those questions and several others that will
determine what’s to come in Syria, with impacts far beyond the
Middle East.
Editor’s Note: All time references in this report are in relation to each article’s original
publication date, which is shown at the top of each article.
What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 1

World Politics Review LLC
81 Prospect Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201-1473
Tel.: +1.202.596.9771
Email: subscriptions@worldpoliticsreview.com
Web: https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com
About WPR:
World Politics Review provides uncompromising analysis of critical global
trends to give policymakers, analysts, academics and readers with a deep
interest in international affairs the context they need to have the
confidence they want.
Written by a network of leading experts and influential observers on the

ground, our substantive content gives you access to comprehensive and
detailed perspectives that are as valuable as they are rare.
Though strictly nonpartisan with regard to political party affiliation or

allegiance, WPR can be broadly described as liberal internationalist,
combining a reality-based approach that recognizes the need for all the
tools and instruments of statecraft with a preference for diplomacy and
multilateralism in support of a rules- and norms-based global order.
While WPR is a for-profit, privately owned company, it is also a mission-

based organization, committed to integrity, quality, and the principles of an
intellectually honest press whose exclusive purpose is to inform readers.
Copyright © 2018 World Politics Review LLC. All rights reserved.

Like this report? Subscribe now to get
unlimited access to must-read news,
analysis, and opinion from top experts.
Get an all-access subscription

to World Politics Review.
Subscribing to WPR is like no other resource—it’s like having
your own personal researcher and analyst for news and events
around the globe. Subscribe now, and you’ll get:
• Immediate and instant access to the full searchable library of 9,000+

articles.
• Daily articles with original analysis, written by leading topic experts,

delivered to you every weekday.
• Daily links to must-read news, analysis, and opinion from top sources
around the globe, curated by our keen-eyed team of editors.
• Daily Associated Press wire stories, selected for you by our top-notch
editors.
• Weekly in-depth reports, including features and country- and region-

specific reports.
• Smartphone- and tablet-friendly website.
• PDF versions of all articles for easy offline reading, at your leisure.
YES! I WANT TO SUBSCRIBE NOW.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Shape of Syria to Come

4
Talk of the Endgame in Syria Dodges the Question of

Recovery
8
What Will a Post-ISIS Political Order in Syria Actually Look

Like?
12
There Will Be No Justice in Assad’s ‘Victorious Syria’

16
The Wider Jihadi Movement Will Take Over Where the

Islamic State Left Off
19
America’s Syria Policy Is Incoherent, and There’s No Sign

It Will Change
23
As Syria’s Civil War Winds Down, Israel, Iran and

Hezbollah Pivot to Lebanon
26
How Facebook Made It Easier Than Ever to Traffic Middle

Eastern Antiquities
30

The Shape of Syria to Come
Aron Lund | Aug. 13, 2018
After seven years of war in Syria, the endgame is here. All major frontlines have been
frozen by foreign intervention, and military action now hinges on externally brokered
political deals. The result could be a de facto division of the country.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s Russian-backed forces spent the past two years
taking out isolated rebel strongholds, like Eastern Aleppo and Ghouta. Recently, they
recaptured the area along the border with Jordan and territory near the Golan
Heights—but at that point, they ran out of low-hanging fruit.
A Syrian national flag with the picture of the President Bashar al-Assad hangs at an army checkpoint
in the town of Douma in the eastern Ghouta region outside Damascus, July 15, 2018 (AP photo by
Hassan Ammar).
The sight of Russian diplomats shuttling between Israelis, Syrians, Iranians and

Americans to ease Assad’s return to the 1967 cease-fire line in the Golan was a sign of
things to come. Israel finally relented, accepting a Russian-monitored restoration of the
pre-2011 status quo, but it’s not clear things will be as easy in the rest of Syria, where
the three remaining areas outside Assad’s control are shielded by soldiers from NATO
member states and wrapped up in complex diplomacy.
The smallest area still outside state control is Tanf. In this 55-kilometer bubble around a
border crossing with Iraq, a few hundred U.S. forces and allied Syrian rebels remain,
ostensibly to hunt remnants of the Islamic State.
Russia has agreed not to challenge the American presence at Tanf, but what the United
States wants to do with the place is unclear. Tanf has lost most of its relevance as the
fight against the Islamic State has wound down, but a strong strand of thought in
Washington wants the U.S. military to hang on to this pocket of territory simply to spite
Damascus, Moscow and Tehran. As long as the White House can convince itself that
this is money well spent, for one strategic reason or another, Tanf will remain outside
central government control.
In northeastern Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, have set up a semi-
independent, socialist entity fighting the Islamic State, backed by some 2,000 American
soldiers. The SDF is made up of Kurds, Arabs and Syriacs, but it is not-so-secretly
controlled by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK, an arch-foe of Turkey. Over the
past few years, U.S. envoys have struggled to dissuade the Turks—who are about as
comfortable with a PKK stronghold on their southern border as the United States was
with Soviet missiles in Cuba—from attacking.
The U.S. deployment doesn’t just keep the Turks out, it also prevents Assad’s forces
from entering SDF-controlled areas. But the fact that U.S. President Donald Trump
keeps saying he wants to bring the troops home has spooked the SDF’s leaders. They
have no air force, no armor, no viable economy and no powerful friends apart from the
United States. Left alone, they couldn’t fend off Assad or Turkish President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan.
Of the two, however, they prefer Assad. Senior SDF representatives recently visited
Damascus to propose a system of decentralized rule in Syria, integration of SDF units
into the Syrian army, and an end to anti-Kurdish discrimination by the government.
Assad won’t accept genuine power-sharing, but he may be willing to satisfy some of the
SDF’s less intrusive demands and fudge others, while offering protection against
Turkey. In return, the SDF would be asked to show America the door and hand Assad
the keys.
That sort of plot twist might seem like a good fit with Trump’s desire to leave Syria, but
U.S. policymakers are also wary of a jihadist resurgence and unenthusiastic about
public humiliation at the hands of Damascus. Unless or until Trump says otherwise,

some combination of inertia and ideology is likely to keep the United States engaged in
northeastern Syria, making it off-limits to Assad.
Meanwhile, Syria’s northwest is dominated by Turkey, as part of the joint Russian-

Turkish-Iranian Astana Process that seeks to resolve or freeze the conflict on terms
favorable to those three nations. But Turkey can’t operate safely in the northwest
without Russian cooperation.
Seven years in, the Syrian war is no longer a

struggle over Assad’s future, but over the
shape of the country he will continue to rule.
In the summer of 2016, Erdogan sent his army into the city of al-Bab outside Aleppo,
supporting a Syrian rebel coalition. Two years later, Turkish forces seized the nearby
Kurdish enclave of Afrin. Moscow facilitated both interventions, allowing Erdogan to
carve out a border enclave as long as his rebel clients did not attack the Syrian
government. It’s a good deal for Russia, since it makes a key member of NATO
dependent on Moscow.
Assad seems less enthusiastic, having watched with dismay as al-Bab and Afrin mutate
into Turkish dependencies: Electricity is now wired in over the border, Turkish is taught
in schools, Ankara pays rebel salaries, Turks oversee police and local administration,
and public squares are named after Erdogan instead of Assad.
South of Afrin in Idlib, the last remaining province in Syria outside of the regime’s
control, Turkish influence is more diluted. Erdogan has been trying to change that, but
Idlib is a hard nut to crack. The area is larger than Afrin and al-Bab combined, and has
absorbed hundreds of thousands of displaced Syrians, many under so-called evacuation
deals that have transferred populations from besieged areas near Damascus, Aleppo
and other former rebel strongholds. U.N. officials warn that an attack could trigger a
mass exodus. Even so, the presence of al-Qaida-inspired jihadists in Idlib is seen as
unacceptable far outside the pro-Assad camp.
Between October and May, some 1,300 Turkish soldiers built a dozen outposts on the
edges of the province, after Russia and Iran green-lighted a plan hatched in Astana to
freeze fighting between rebels and the regime while Ankara tries to put more palatable,
Turkey-friendly Islamists in charge. For Erdogan, keeping Idlib calm is about preventing
a refugee crisis; Turkey already hosts 3.5 million Syrians. Fearing that Assad is about to
pivot north, Turkish officials are now signaling to Moscow that attacking Idlib would
cross a “red line” and violate the terms of the Astana accord.
Moscow wants Idlib’s jihadists gone, especially after a string of drone attacks on the

nearby Russian air base, south of Latakia. But the Russians also have strong incentives
to uphold the Astana-brokered status quo. They know Assad can survive without Idlib,
Afrin or al-Bab, and Russian diplomats see no pressing reason to end a stalemate where
both sides compete for Moscow’s favor. A large-scale offensive on Idlib would be “out
of the question,” Russia’s special envoy for Syria, Alexander Lavrentyev, said on July
31, contradicting his Syrian counterpart.
These Turkish-Russian understandings put Assad in a tough spot. His army would have
trouble retaking Idlib without Russian support, and forcing the Kremlin to pick sides
would not necessarily work out in his favor.
Still, Russia might want to throw Assad a bone, and there’s a lot of gray area between
total reconquest and doing nothing. Russia could very well support an attack on
outlying areas like the strategically located town of Jisr al-Shughour, south of the
Turkish border, or others near Aleppo. If the fallout seems manageable, that kind of
limited offensive could even be acceptable to Turkey, as the coming days may reveal.
With Syrian tanks rolling north and tensions mounting, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey
Lavrov is heading to Ankara this week. What he ends up agreeing to with his Turkish
counterpart will help determine many of these outcomes in Syria. Some pieces of Idlib
may be handed over to Assad, but if Russia then decides to put its thumb on the scale
in Turkey’s favor, large parts of Syria’s northwest could be out of Assad’s reach for the
foreseeable future.
It wouldn’t be a clean end to the war, but does Moscow really need that? From Moldova
to South Ossetia and eastern Ukraine, the Kremlin has a habit of letting messy
situations linger to its advantage. As seen in Cyprus, Turkey is also no stranger to the
concept of endless interim solutions.
Seven years in, the Syrian war is no longer a struggle over Assad’s regime and his
future, but over the shape of the country he will continue to rule. The fate of the areas
that still elude his control is now in the hands of foreigners.
Aron Lund is a fellow at the Century Foundation. He is a Swedish writer on Middle Eastern affairs and
has written extensively on Syrian politics. His work was supported by a research grant from the Harry
Frank Guggenheim Foundation. Between 2013 and 2016, he edited the site Syria in Crisis for the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he was a nonresident associate in 2016. He is also a
fellow of the Centre for Syrian Studies at St. Andrew’s University.

Talk of the Endgame in Syria Dodges the
Question of Recovery
Frederick Deknatel | Jan. 2, 2019
An estimated 4 million children have been born in Syria since 2011, according to
UNICEF, which means that half of the children in Syria today have grown up only
knowing war. “Every 8-year-old in Syria has been growing up amidst danger,
destruction and death,” Henrietta Fore, the executive director of UNICEF, said after
a five-day visit to the country in mid-December. Since the government first crushed a
popular uprising and precipitated the civil war that still shows little sign of ending, a
third of the schools in Syria have been destroyed or damaged, or they have
been turned into shelters for displaced families.
A Syrian army soldier outside Manbij, Aleppo Province, Syria (Sputnik photo via AP Images).

It is details like this that are lost in most headlines about Syria, especially those
generated by President Donald Trump’s abrupt announcement last month to withdraw
American forces, which are filling the void in a third of the country. This harsh but
hardly new reality is a reminder of one of the best assessments I’ve heard of Syria’s
crisis—a view that is as relevant and arresting as ever even if it’s now four years old.
In early January 2015, Peter Harling, then an analyst at the International Crisis Group,
was being interviewed on France 24 about the rise of the Islamic State and the inertia
of every outside actor, from the United States to Syria’s neighbors, in the face of the
country’s descent. “We don’t really measure in the West how bad the situation is,”
Harling said in response to a question about why the conflict was stuck in a kind of
stasis, and then went on:
We tend to see the Middle East as a remote part of the world—Syria could be Sri
Lanka for many people in France, for instance, or in the U.K. or the U.S. And
there’s this perception that the region has always been in a state of turmoil and
conflict between sects and tribes and so on. I don’t think we measure how
dangerous it is to allow a part of the world which is profoundly integrated with
Europe within the Mediterranean basin, if you will… to let it slip this far.
If you take Syria, we’re talking about a country where a large part of the children
on the scale of a whole society have not been going to school for three years.
This is something we’ll pay a price for, for years to come. Half the country’s
urban fabric has been destroyed; a large part of its industrial base. This is not a
country that’s going to recover. And we’re far from seeing any movement
towards a solution, so it’s going to be years of this. Where will that leave Syrian
society, and how are we going to deal with a society traumatized to this extent,
right on our borders?
Of course, some nine months after this interview, Russia intervened in Syria, but the
war’s overall status quo and what fueled it still didn’t really shift, even if President
Bashar al-Assad got a lifeline. 2015 was also the year that Europeans were forced to
reckon in some measure with the reality in Syria, given the record number of Syrians
seeking refuge and asylum at Europe’s borders any way they could. In response,
though, many European countries put up fences or quotas and the European Union
eventually cut a deal with Turkey to essentially act as the gatehouse for asylum-seekers
and migrants trying to reach the continent.
Things have gotten even worse in Syria since 2015, and with another year of war and
suffering ahead, the country may look to a casual observer like a never-ending story.
Cities have been “liberated” from the regime and then pounded into rubble and
retaken. There are intermittent peace talks in foreign cities while the fighting goes on.
Cease-fires are declared and soon broken. And what exactly are “de-escalation zones”?

Reconciliation between Assad and his
neighbors would be the war’s denouement.
An entire generation of children not going to school may seem more concrete. So does
being told that you’ve resigned yourself to never going home, as one Syrian academic
told me last month. He has made his opposition to the Assad regime clear. But now
that means he’ll probably never return to Damascus.
Yet the uproar in Washington over Trump’s decision to remove the 2,000 or so
American forces currently in Syria didn’t touch on any of this, which wasn’t surprising. It
was simply another reminder of what the U.S. has hoped to salvage in Syria as Assad
and his forces—regular and irregular, Syrian and increasingly foreign—carried out a
simple edict to hold on to power: “Assad, or we burn the country down.”
American soldiers weren’t on a humanitarian mission in Syria, although they were

operating as the backstop for an increasingly assertive Kurdish proto-state in the
northeast of the country, in the name of fighting the Islamic State. Abandoned by the
U.S., Syria’s Kurds no longer have their buffer between Assad, on one side, and Turkey
on the other. Syrian Kurdish leaders have already reached out to Assad for protection,
at least in some of the territories they control near the Syrian-Turkish border, fearing an
impending attack from the Turks.
Retaking corners of the country that have been under Kurdish control since the war’s
early days would be another milestone for Assad, at a time when there is
growing diplomatic outreach toward his regime from Arab states that once supported
his opponents. “The rebels’ former backers have not only given up on challenging his
regime, they now actively want to embrace it—whether in public or in private,” Hassan
Hassan recently wrote in The Observer, just as the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain
reopened their embassies in Damascus. Seven years after being expelled from the Arab
League, it looks like Syria is about to be let back in. On top of recent military advances
in southern Syria, including taking back the city of Daraa, the rebel stronghold where
the popular uprising began, these diplomatic overtures, according to Hassan, “leave no
room for doubt: Assad has decisively won the conflict.”
Reconciliation between Assad and his neighbors would be the war’s denouement. Many
of those neighbors are fellow autocrats who are keen to see their brand of control
consolidated across the Middle East, as the hope and brief momentum of the 2011 Arab
uprisings further recede. As Hassan put it, “Unlike the geopolitical winds that buffeted
Saddam Hussein in the 1990s after the first Gulf war, everything is blowing strongly in
Assad’s favor.”
That means just the opposite for many Syrians, especially the most vulnerable, who

have borne the brunt of the world letting Syria slip this far. Amid ongoing talk of
reconstruction, including Trump’s seemingly bogus claim that Saudi Arabia would foot
an unspecified amount of the bill, there is little actual mention of another word for this
traumatized society: recovery.
Frederick Deknatel is the managing editor of World Politics Review.

What Will a Post-ISIS Political Order in Syria
Actually Look Like?
Sam Heller | Nov. 16, 2017
A Russian military policeman, left, rests in the lobby of a hospital in the city of Deir el-Zour,
Syria, Sept. 15, 2017 (AP photo).
In Syria, the self-proclaimed Islamic State, or ISIS, was always treated as a problem
with an essentially military solution. At least for the U.S.-led international coalition,
there was no positive end state or program of political change that could be joined to
the military campaign against the jihadi group. The general repulsiveness of the Syrian
regime of Bashar al-Assad meant that, unlike in neighboring Iraq, Washington and its
allies could not simply invest in the Syrian state. And none of Syria’s nonstate armed
factions represented a plausible governing alternative, at least not for more than a

piece of the country. The result was a counter-ISIS military campaign absent a
coherent, viable political vision for a post-ISIS Syria.
Now that post-ISIS Syria has arrived, and the West still has no satisfactory answer for
what a good, stabilizing post-ISIS political order in Syria should actually look like. So
Syria will be defined not by what should be, but what is: a political map that has been
redrawn by the fight against the Islamic State.
But even that map is not indelible, and Syria’s broader civil war goes on. And while the
West lacks a compelling vision for the country, Assad and his allies do not.
The Islamic State lost its de facto Syrian capital in Raqqa last month and, in short order,
nearly all of its remaining territory in the country’s eastern province of Deir el-Zour.
What had been the “Caliphate” in eastern Syria has been mostly divided between the
Assad regime and the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF, led by the Kurdish
People’s Protection Units, known as the YPG.
The regime availed itself this year of a strategically timed “de-escalation” agreement
covering western Syria and critical support from its Russian and Iranian allies to launch
its drive into the Islamic State’s eastern territory. In doing so, it demonstrated its bona
fides against the Islamic State and reasserted itself as the only party to the conflict
operating on a truly national scope. The YPG, for its part, has proved itself as a
disciplined, effective military force and the U.S.-led coalition’s preferred local partner
against the Islamic State. The YPG has gone from a leftist curio on the margins of
Syria’s war to one of the conflict’s central players and the dominant force in
northeastern Syria.
Syria’s revolutionary opposition to the Assad regime, meanwhile, played a tertiary part
in the fight against the Islamic State and will reap few of the political spoils. The mixed
nationalist-jihadi opposition could never be reliably motivated or organized to fight the
Islamic State, or made to interface effectively with a great power military. They were
sidelined as a result, while their local enemies proved themselves more useful proxies
for foreign powers concerned, mostly, with killing jihadis.
The case for involving these opposition factions in the fight against the Islamic State
was that they could claim to be a more resonant, locally acceptable force in eastern
Syria. The thinking was that these almost entirely Sunni Arab rebels had unique
authenticity that could rally Sunni Arab residents in ISIS-held areas to their side,
spurring defections and minimizing local resistance. It could also, ideally, help them
stabilize these areas with a popular, representative political order.
Yet it is unclear that the opposition was necessarily a superior force against the Islamic
State, even on these terms. Rebels’ factionalism, corruption and inability to police
themselves for extremists initially helped the Islamic State infiltrate areas before it

defeated these rebels outright and scattered them in exile. In the one large section of
territory rebels captured from the Islamic State—eastern Aleppo, taken in 2016 with
extensive Turkish support—they failed to attract mass defections that might have
spared al-Bab, on the eastern edges of Aleppo, from extensive destruction. In post-ISIS
Aleppo, they have so far mostly replicated old patterns of militia dysfunction, instead of
creating a rational, stabilizing political order.
For the Assad regime, the fight against the

Islamic State has only been a single episode in
a longer struggle against insurgency and
terror.
It seems impossible to say which of the combatant parties to Syria’s war, if any, truly
represent the Sunni Arab residents living under the Islamic State in eastern Syria. It is
not clear to what extent that representativeness even really matters, as opposed to
locals’ more prosaic concerns like security and normal economic life. These easterners
have now been distributed between the Assad regime and the YPG-led SDF, each of
which have projects that are officially defined in broadly inclusive, ecumenical terms,
even if they have distinct sectarian or ethnic tones in practice. These projects have little
place for Islamism, Sunni Arab chauvinism or a post-2011 revolutionary identity. But are
those identifiers, as political categories, genuinely absolute and immutable, or are they
something more transient?
So long as Sunni-sectarian grievance persists in Syria—defined in sectarian terms, as

opposed to Syrian disenfranchisement more generally—some manifestation of the
Islamic State seems likely to survive. As scholars such as Hassan Abu Hanieh have
pointed out, the Islamic State’s message is still the purest, most readily understandable
version of Sunni revanchism among the various militant ideologies today. The Islamic
State has a track record of spectacular violence and conquest, and, for angry
sectarians, it promises a fairly straight line to revenge and death.
As for the actual organization of the Islamic State—not its mass membership and
symbolic appeal, but its individual commanders, its structures and institutional
knowledge—that too will persist in some form. The circumstances of its rapid collapse in
Deir el-Zour are still unclear. It is not obvious whether the group’s cadres deliberately
melted away, or if it was just terminally depleted by a multiyear war of attrition. But the
group has survived underground before, and it has had time to prepare for a stretch of
militant austerity. Its future in Syria is also inseparable from its prospects across the
border in Iraq, its real home, which will remain restive and unsettled.
Still, the Islamic State will inevitably be much reduced. The Assad regime and the SDF

may not have perfect local legitimacy, but they both have effective security apparatuses
that can mostly control a brutalized, fatigued populace and suppress jihadi insurgents.
The Islamic State is unlikely to really roar back or to recover the sort of strength it had
in 2015. The group’s rise to proto-statehood was the product of exceptional
circumstances: the sudden collapse of Syrian state authority, wide-open borders and a
sluice of material support and foreign manpower for an unruly insurgency. These
conditions are not replicable, at least not any time soon.
Syria’s war will go on, though, even as the Islamic State becomes an insurgent
phantom. Once it has sufficiently pacified Syria’s east, the Assad regime will turn back
west and, with Russia and Iran’s help, resume crushing the revolutionary opposition.
Eventually, it will also come after the SDF, although likely not before the Americans and
their coalition partners withdraw. There still is no clarity about the extent and duration
of the U.S. commitment to the SDF, but, presumably, it is not unlimited.
The Islamic State’s defeat only returns to the fore the central political question of Syria
today: How to reconcile Syria’s periphery with the Damascus-centered Syrian state,
which, under the regime, emanates destabilizing resentment and grievance. The West
has no way forward for Syria other than a U.N.-sponsored peace process based on a
binary regime-opposition dynamic that is now defunct. The West is still holding onto a
panacea political solution that is basically unreal. Damascus and its allies have a
different goal: a restoration of central state authority through mostly unilateral,
nonconsensual means. It is an uglier course, but one that at least makes sense on its
own terms.
For the Assad regime, the fight against the Islamic State has only been a single episode
in a longer struggle against insurgency and terror. And just as the battle against the
Islamic State has shaped the current political aftermath, it is the totality of Syria’s war—
not this interlude against the Islamic State—that will determine the country’s future.
Sam Heller is a Beirut-based freelance writer, analyst and fellow at The Century Foundation. He has
written extensively on the Syrian war for outlets including Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Monitor,
Foreign Affairs, War on the Rocks, VICE News, The Daily Beast and World Politics Review. Follow him on
Twitter @AbuJamajem.

There Will Be No Justice in Assad’s ‘Victorious
Syria’
Frederick Deknatel | Aug. 17, 2018
The billboards that greet people crossing the border from neighboring Lebanon now
read: “Welcome to victorious Syria.” It’s unclear if they’ve replaced the old signs inviting
you into “Assad’s Syria,” which have adorned highways near Syria’s land borders and
the Damascus airport for years. A decade ago, one of the many other pieces of pro-
Assad propaganda lining roads and the sides of buildings across the country was a
huge, backlit sign that guarded an entrance to Damascus’ Old City, abutting the
medieval Citadel: “I Believe in Syria,” it read, next to a beaming, waving President
Bashar al-Assad.
A poster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad with Arabic that reads “Welcome to victorious Syria,” is
displayed on the border between Lebanon and Syria, July 20, 2018 (AP photo by Hassan Ammar).

The Associated Press noted the new welcome signs in a cautiously optimistic
report from Damascus late last month, where “many of the checkpoints that for years
have snarled traffic are gone.” The outlying suburbs held by various rebel factions,
recently retaken by the regime at a staggering cost, are again connected to the city
center. “There’s a new feeling of hope that an end is near to Syria’s seven-year civil
war,” the AP explained.
What does “an end”—not the end—mean? For one thing, it means that the government
is issuing hundreds of death notices to families whose detained and missing relatives, it
now says, have been dead for years. They are “the first public acknowledgment by the
government that hundreds if not thousands of prisoners died in state
custody,” according to The New York Times. Some of the notices suggest mass
executions; others indicate torture in prison. The release of information has been
unexpected and haphazard. “In some towns, the government has posted names of the
deceased so their relatives can get death certificates,” Ben Hubbard and Karam
Shoumali reported. “In other cases, families have obtained documents that attest to
their relatives’ deaths. In some cases, security officers have informed families
personally.”
It’s an exceedingly grim and cynical attempt by the regime at closure. “The regime is
closing one chapter and starting a new one,” Emile Hokayem, a Middle East analyst at
the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told the Times. “It is telling the rebels
and the activists that this chapter is gone, that whatever hope in some surviving
revolutionary spirit has been crushed.”
As Sam Dagher wrote in The Atlantic this week, reporting from Lebanon, many Syrians
“believe the regime wants the lists of the dead to serve as a cruel, macabre epilogue for
all those who rose up more than seven years ago.” He interviewed Syrian refugees from
the town of Daraya, outside Damascus, who were starved and besieged until the rebels
there surrendered in 2016. Dagher says the message to the survivors of Daraya from
Assad “is loud and clear: You must lose everything for having challenged me. Nobody is
going to hold me accountable for punishing you.”
“For Syrian society itself, there must be a

reckoning with these abuses if there is to be
any prospect of a stable future.”
There are other demonstrations of Assad’s renewed confidence and strength. In July,
his forces, backed by Russia and Iran, retook the dusty town of Daraa, where the 2011
uprising essentially began, and the rest of southwestern Syria, which had been under
the sway of different opposition and jihadist groups since the early days of the civil war.

A new offensive looms in the northwestern province of Idlib, along the Turkish border.
The last Syrian province outside regime control, Idlib has been, in the words of the
United Nations, a “dumping ground” for rebel fighters and their families, given the
terms of so-called evacuation deals imposed by the regime on Homs, Aleppo, the
Damascus suburbs and other devastated battlegrounds once declared “liberated.” There
is nowhere else for the displaced of Idlib to go.
In his big picture briefing for WPR this week on the current landscape of Syria’s war
and what’s to come, Aron Lund explains why the fate of Idlib, like two other pockets of
the country that Assad’s forces have not retaken, “is now in the hands of foreigners.” In
Idlib, that means Turkey, which now has some 1,300 troops stationed in a dozen
outposts on the edge of the province, and Russia. They have competing interests,
between Moscow’s aim of eliminating the sizable jihadist presence in Idlib and Ankara’s
worry of another exodus of refugees into Turkey if there’s a full-blown military
offensive. “Some pieces of Idlib may be handed over to Assad,” Lund writes, “but if
Russia then decides to put its thumb on the scale in Turkey’s favor, large parts of
Syria’s northwest could be out of Assad’s reach for the foreseeable future.”
“It wouldn’t be a clean end to the war, but does Moscow really need that?” Lund adds.
“From Moldova to South Ossetia and eastern Ukraine, the Kremlin has a habit of letting
messy situations linger to its advantage. As seen in Cyprus, Turkey is also no stranger
to the concept of endless interim solutions.” The future of Syria, as the war winds
down, could be a series of more localized, semi-frozen conflicts—a Turkish dependency
in the northwest, and a Kurdish proto-republic in the northeast, tepidly backed by the
United States.
All this geopolitical wrangling, and how it may or may not be resolved, pushes other
questions out of the picture, as the regime’s sudden release of death notifications
makes clear. Four years ago, before Russia’s military intervention all but saved Assad,
and at a time when a regime defector was sharing thousands of images in Washington
of torture in Assad’s prisons, the question of accountability and justice—of a Syria
without Assad—was at least open to debate. “If Assad stays in power, I don’t see a
possibility for transitional justice,” Mohammad Al Abdallah, the executive director of the
Syria Justice and Accountability Center in Washington, told me in 2014. David Tolbert,
the president of the International Center for Transitional Justice, added: “For Syrian
society itself, there must be a reckoning with these abuses if there is to be any prospect
of a stable future.”
Four years later, a different future is here: an Assad victory, on his extreme terms, even
if victory doesn’t guarantee Syria’s full territorial integrity.
Frederick Deknatel is the managing editor of World Politics Review.

The Wider Jihadi Movement Will Take Over
Where the Islamic State Left Off
Tore Hamming | Nov. 29, 2017
Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing series on the Islamic State after the fall
of Raqqa and the outlook for Syria and its neighbors.
What does the future of the Islamic State look like in the wake of its battlefield
setbacks in Iraq and Syria, from the fall of Mosul last summer to Raqqa last month? Will
it revert to a low-level insurgency, or lash out with the kinds of terrorist attacks more
associated with its predecessors, like al-Qaida? Can it sustain itself as a movement
drawing in sympathizers and recruits from around the world?
A member of the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces walks inside a prison built by Islamic State
fighters, Raqqa, Syria, Oct. 20, 2017 (AP photo by Asmaa Waguih).

Writing for The Washington Post last month, J.M. Berger and Amarnath Amarasingam
argued that the Islamic State’s “enormous losses … will cripple the effectiveness of its
previous approach to recruitment” since “it has lost far more than territory. It has lost
the living, beating heart of its appeal.” They highlighted a fundamental factor behind
the Islamic State’s success: its ties to a broader social movement of jihadi extremism.
As they pointed out, a shared sense of identity among its adherents manifested itself in
the concept of “entitativity,” or groupness, that is essential for mobilization.
The crumbling caliphate and the resulting demise of the Islamic State’s propaganda
output will certainly make it a less attractive outfit to join for sympathizers to its cause.
Although the Islamic State will strive to mitigate these negative effects by emphasizing
a new “post-caliphate” narrative to draw in supporters, the setbacks will be evident. But
they will be setbacks for the Islamic State itself, the specific organization, and not
necessarily for the broader jihadi movement that fed it.
In the study of social movements, scholars have introduced an important

distinction between social movement “organizations” and social movement “families.”
Donatella Della Porta, an Italian political scientist at the Scuola Normale Superiore, has
argued that the social movement family is “a set of coexisting movements, which,
regardless of their specific goals, have similar basic values and organizational overlaps,
and sometimes may even join for common campaigns.” The Islamic State is thus just
one movement within a broader jihadi family, albeit the most prominent one over the
past three years.
This jihadi family, often wrongly referred to as the jihadi-Salafi movement or ideology,
has managed to attract sympathizers for more than three decades. That jihadi-Salafi
label is misplaced since far from all jihadis are in fact Salafis—ultraconservative Sunni
Muslims who adhere to a strict, puritanical form of Islam—so the notion overestimates
the Salafi influence on the jihadi movement. The movement’s success in mobilization
reached new heights after the eruption of the Syrian civil war. But even as the role of
jihadis may dwindle in Syria and Iraq as the Islamic State’s caliphate falls, the diverse
but related ideologies of jihadi groups will continue to attract followers, for three main
reasons.
First, since Syria’s civil war broke out, the vast number of people either actively fighting
for the jihadi cause on the battlefield or following and promoting it behind their
computer and smart-phone screens implies that a generation has become embedded in
jihadi ideology and accustomed to the normality of violence as a legitimate method of
political expression. A major but often overlooked challenge here is the high number of
children of foreign fighters who have grown up under the Islamic State. According to
new figures from the French Ministry of Interior, for example, as many as 500 French
children under the age of 12 are currently residing in the Islamic State’s remaining

territory in Syria or Iraq with their jihadi father or mother. What happens if or when
such indoctrinated youth return to their home countries in Europe?
There is little to suggest that the fragmentation

of the Islamic State will cause jihadism to lose
its position as the most attractive radical
ideology on offer.
Second, the immense amount of jihadi material, including propaganda, that has been
produced and disseminated in the past decade, but especially since the Islamic State
declared its caliphate in 2014, is still widely available online. As evident in the popularity
of the material of Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical Yemen-based cleric who was killed in a
U.S. drone strike in 2011, this material will prove essential for jihadi sympathizers in
years to come. Add to this the recent years of high-intensity jihadi activity that have
entailed the indoctrination of young cadres of jihadi ideologues, disseminators and
recruiters who will not necessarily put down their pen or leave the keyboard because of
the organizational demise of the Islamic State.
Third, the underlying factors initially leading to the radicalization and popularity of jihadi
groups are still prevalent. Sectarianism is only getting worse; many Middle Eastern
states remain in the hands of autocratic regimes that leave little space for political
opposition; and external actors, including Western states, continue to either uphold
such regimes or in other ways interfere counterproductively, for example through drone
strikes that inflame anti-American and anti-Western sentiment. On several occasions, I
have received messages—sometimes reliable and sometimes not—from individuals in
Yemen concerned or directly affected by the U.S. drone campaign. These on-the-
ground accounts confirm what has been widely established in reporting and other
studies on Yemen and Pakistan: that such assassination programs benefit jihadis more
than they harm them, by stoking anti-Americanism.
Nevertheless, as Berger and Amarasingam noted, the Islamic State was unique in
several ways, including its declaration of a physical caliphate and emphasis on
governance, not just terrorism, as appeals to its followers. This uniqueness will likely
have the effect of pushing Islamic State adherents, especially youth, to search for
another radical ideology to vent their frustrations, rather than shop around for a new
jihadi outfit to join. However, there is little to suggest that the organizational
fragmentation of the Islamic State will cause jihadism to lose its position as the most
attractive radical ideology currently on offer.
In fact, the broader jihadi movement—in the form of country-specific and globally
focused organizational expressions—stands ready to take over. For some jihadi

sympathizers, these known entities, such as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham—formerly the Nusra
Front—or al-Qaida, will not be enough, and they will either establish new groups or
operate outside any organizational framework. Others will favor the prospect of joining
another well-established and less radical group with a similar level of entitativity or
groupness.
In either case, the broader jihadi movement will learn from the experience of the
Islamic State, both the positive and negative. The past four years leave other groups
with a list of “do’s” and “don’ts” for the future. This especially concerns methods of
mobilization, but also warnings about not engaging everyone else as the enemy.
In attempting to forecast what will follow the collapse of the caliphate, the focus should
not be limited to the appeal of a specific group, but instead the appeal of the broader
jihadi movement. After all, there is little indication that jihad as a method of political
mobilization has lost support among those who are disaffected and radicalized.
The Islamic State’s fall will emphatically change global jihadism and its organizational
and ideological expressions, but not necessarily its prospects for mobilization and
success. There is still a long way to go to ensure that.
Tore Hamming is a doctoral candidate at the European University Institute and visiting fellow at CERI-
Sciences Po and the Danish Institute for International Studies. He blogs at Jihadica.com and is on Twitter
@Torerhamming.

America’s Syria Policy Is Incoherent, and
There’s No Sign It Will Change
Steven Metz | Sept. 28, 2018
As the tragic civil war in Syria grinds through its eighth year, it is impossible to make
sense of the Trump administration’s strategy as it moves in one direction and then
shifts in another, again and again. American policy is utterly incoherent, and there is no
sign that will change.
Protess from the Answer Coalition gather in front of the White House, Washington, April 14, 2018
(AP photo by Carolyn Kaster).
President Donald Trump’s position on Syria, expressed more often in tweets than in
formal policy statements, vacillated wildly even before he was elected president. In
June 2013, for instance, he contended that the United States should “stay the hell out

of Syria.” But two months later, after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical
weapons against his own people, Trump advocated for a U.S. military strike and
vociferously criticized then-President Barack Obama for not ordering one.
Once in the White House, Trump initially focused on defeating the Islamic State, which
by that time controlled a miniature, self-proclaimed “caliphate” based in the northern
Syrian city of Raqqa. He expanded support for local militias fighting the extremists and
increased direct U.S. air and artillery strikes. But after Raqqa fell and the Islamic State
dispersed, the Trump administration appeared to have no clear idea how to turn
battlefield success into strategic victory. By March 2017, administration officials were
saying that the U.S. would not be involved in determining Syria’s long-term future.
But a month later, after another chemical attack by the Assad regime, Trump ordered a
cruise missile strike on a Syrian airbase. “Steps are underway,” then-Secretary of State
Rex Tillerson even suggested, to create an international coalition to remove Assad. A bit
later, Tillerson said the U.S. might broker a cease-fire that included Assad, while Nikki
Haley, Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, and H.R. McMaster, Trump’s national
security adviser at the time, both expressed skepticism about a political solution that
left Assad in power.
In the late summer of 2018, the confusion escalated. The president indicated that the
U.S. would not play a role in Syria’s reconstruction despite reports that U.S. military
leaders felt that was necessary to prevent an Islamic State revival. While Trump had
indicated that he wanted to “get out of” Syria, administration officials like James
Jeffrey, a retired diplomat whom Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently named U.S.
special representative for Syrian engagement, said earlier this month that American
military forces would remain for some unspecified time. Then, this week, National
Security Adviser John Bolton switched to a different objective, announcing that U.S.
troops are not leaving Syria “as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders.”
All of this is incoherence, not flexibility. In part, it reflects the broader incoherence of
the Trump policy formulation process, where a presidential tweet or off-the-cuff remark
can change everything. With no experience at foreign or national security policy, no
overarching concept about the purpose of American power, and a personal style
focused on disaggregated responses to immediate problems rather than a long-term
approach to various challenges, Trump is the antithesis of a strategist. He operates
without a discernible vision for the Middle East or American security writ large in the
coming decades, or for how to balance security benefits against costs and risks.
Trump’s senior advisers do have more strategic mindsets but are sometimes themselves
at odds and, after staking out a public position, often are contradicted or undercut by
the president.

In the absence of a clear objective in Syria, the
best the U.S. can hope for is avoiding an
outright fiasco.
American policy in Syria is also incoherent because the U.S., out of all the nations and
nonstate groups involved there, has the least clear sense of its strategic priorities.
Assad, Turkey, Iran and Russia all know what they want and what price they are willing
to pay to get it; America does not. For a while, the defeat of the Islamic State was
paramount, although neither the Obama nor Trump administration fully explained why
that was vital for U.S. national security. Then America’s objective was to deter chemical
attacks, although it was never clear why those were unacceptable while conventional
violence was acceptable. At other times, Washington seems concerned by the
humanitarian disaster in Syria yet is unwilling to take in refugees. Sometimes the U.S.
wants to limit Russian influence, but at other times it doesn’t seem to care. Most
recently, Bolton linked the presence of American troops in Syria to containing Iran. But
no one in the administration has explained how a small U.S. troop deployment will
thwart broader Iranian aspirations or deter Tehran from supporting Assad, which it
considers a vital national interest.
At this point, there is no indication that any of this will change and that a coherent Syria
policy will emerge. Past American presidents who assumed office with limited national
security expertise, like Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, eventually
developed a feel for strategy. There is no sign that Trump will. Yet he is unwilling to
delegate control of national security policy to one of his senior advisers, in essence
making them “strategist in chief.”
With so little chance of the Trump administration setting clear priorities in Syria,
questions abound. Is preventing the return of the Islamic State the most important U.S.
objective in Syria? Or is it containing Iran? Perhaps preserving regional order? Or
maybe maintaining limitations on what dictators can do to their own people? Is it
sustaining a security relationship with Turkey, a NATO ally—or helping defend Israel?
Something else? No one knows. The best that can be hoped for, then, is avoiding an
outright fiasco. But in the face of continuing policy incoherence, there is no guarantee
of that.
Steven Metz is the author of “Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy.” His weekly WPR
column appears every Friday. You can follow him on Twitter @steven_metz.

As Syria’s Civil War Winds Down, Israel, Iran
and Hezbollah Pivot to Lebanon
Frida Ghitis | Dec. 13, 2018
After seven years of civil war, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad looks set to emerge
victorious thanks to the support he received from Russia, from his patrons in Iran and
from Iran’s Lebanese ally Hezbollah. The war is not over, but the focus on what comes
next is already underway, and one change is now plainly visible: Iran, Damascus and
Hezbollah are pivoting their attention to Lebanon’s future—and so is Israel.
Lebanese Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil leaves a stadium after a tour organized for diplomats and
journalists, Beirut, Oct. 1, 2018 (Photo by Marwan Naamani for dpa via AP Images).
In recent days, a flurry of military and political activity has shifted to Lebanon,
confirming that the tiny country—which has for so long been caught in the vice of

regional tensions, often with disastrous consequences—is once again feeling the
pressure.
Lebanon has been listening to the threats and counterthreats exchanged by Hezbollah
and Israel, watching military activities along its borders, tracking mysterious flights by
Iranian aircraft, and following a fraught political drama that shows no end in sight.
The latest chapter in Lebanon’s struggles is unfolding as the quest to form a new
government in Beirut remains stalled more than six months after the latest elections.
Lebanon remains vulnerable as ever, with President Michel Aoun warning that if an
agreement on a new government is not reached soon, “the risks are greater than we
can bear.” Lebanon’s dire economic problems are only one of the reasons why the
country’s stability remains so fragile.
With Assad now reinvigorated by battlefield victories and his gradual emergence from
the tent of ignominy back into the Arab fold, Damascus, in coordination with Iran, is
again aiming to rebuild its dominance in Lebanon.
Observers have noted that one of the reasons Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri’s
efforts to form a new government have proven so daunting is Damascus’ involvement.
The Syrians, according to the scholar Joseph Bahout, have made it clear to Hariri that
he will not be confirmed by parliament unless he commits to “reestablishing the
‘privileged relationship’” between the two countries. That relationship started to unravel
in 2005, even before the Syrian war, after Rafik Hariri—Saad’s father, a former prime
minister and a determined foe of Damascus—was assassinated, most likely by
Hezbollah agents working on Syria’s orders.
While the younger Hariri wrestles with pressure to hand powerful ministries to
Hezbollah loyalists, tensions are escalating along Lebanon’s southern border.
Last week, Israel launched an operation to destroy tunnels it said Hezbollah had been
building beneath the border and into Israeli territory, advising Lebanese residents in
Arabic to temporarily leave their homes while the demolition unfolded, lest the collapse
of the tunnels and the possible ammunition within them trigger uncontrolled explosions.
For years Israelis living near the border had complained that they were hearing
ominous sounds of activity under their homes. Israeli authorities had downplayed the
threat, concealing the fact that they knew of and were monitoring Hezbollah’s tunnel
construction. But this time they made no effort to conceal the information, in an
apparent push to deter more construction. They even released photographs and videos
apparently showing Hezbollah operatives caught by surprise by the Israelis while
working inside what the Israeli Defense Forces, or IDF, called “attack tunnels.”

Neither Hezbollah nor Israel are particularly keen on going to war right now, but
circumstances could easily escalate.
Neither Hezbollah nor Israel are particularly

keen on going to war right now, but
circumstances could easily escalate.
The demolitions, according to the Israeli Defense Forces, could take weeks, as the IDF
reported finding tunnels going deep inside Israel. Israel protested what it described as a
flagrant violation of the United Nations Security Council resolution that ended the most
recent war between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006.
Some questioned the timing of the campaign, claiming Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu launched it in an effort to protect himself from his growing legal troubles.
But the general consensus among security experts in Israel is that the Hezbollah threat
is real and must be challenged. The IDF said the decision to destroy the tunnels was
made now because the tunnel construction, which it had been monitoring for months,
had crossed into Israeli territory but had not yet become fully functional.
Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah has threatened that the next war between the two
bitter enemies will be fought in Israel, with the entirety of Israel’s territory within the
reach of Hezbollah rockets and the “the boots of resistance fighters.”
Israel takes the threat seriously and is trying to crush the underground paths so that
there will be no Hezbollah boots on Israeli soil the next time the two sides go to war—
an eventuality that seems all but assured. The operation to destroy the tunnels
continues, but the IDF says it intends to remain on the Israeli side of the border.
Neither Hezbollah nor Israel are particularly keen on going to war right now, but
circumstances could easily escalate. After sending his Lebanese militia to fight and die
to save the Syrian dictator, Nasrallah needs to maintain his credibility as the protector
of Lebanon. And however embattled Netanyahu is, Israelis across the political spectrum
agree with the country’s security red lines.
Israel articulated those red lines with respect to Syria, saying it would not allow Iran to
establish a permanent base there, nor would it allow Tehran to significantly upgrade
Hezbollah’s arsenal. The IDF acknowledged striking Iranian and Hezbollah targets in
Syria when they crossed those lines. So far, Israel has not attacked Lebanon as part of
that doctrine.
Iran’s pivot to Lebanon may include a potential escalation in its arming of Hezbollah, a
shift that could also trigger fighting inside Lebanon. Media reports claim that an Iranian

plane with ties to the Revolutionary Guards recently landed at the Beirut airport,
carrying advanced rockets destined for Hezbollah. Israel has longed worried about what
it calls the “Precision Project,” Hezbollah and Iran’s efforts to upgrade Hezbollah’s vast
rocket arsenal to include GPS-guided missiles, which would be much more accurate at
striking civilian populations than Hezbollah’s current munitions.
Israel’s security Cabinet, the inner circle of ministers with decision-making ability on
national security affairs, has reportedly designated the Precision Project as an indelible
red line for Israel, one that would warrant military action.
As Tehran, Damascus and their Hezbollah allies, now battle-hardened after years of
fighting in Syria, start turning their attention to what happens in Lebanon after the
Syrian war is finally over, Israel is also focused on preventing the trio from building a
more formidable threat—even if that means another war.
Frida Ghitis is a world affairs columnist. A former CNN producer and correspondent, she is a regular
contributor to CNN and The Washington Post. Her WPR column appears every Thursday. Follow her on
Twitter at @fridaghitis.

How Facebook Made It Easier Than Ever to
Traffic Middle Eastern Antiquities
Amr Al-Azm, Katie A. Paul | Aug. 14, 2018
The instability that followed the Arab uprisings of 2010 and 2011 has given rise to
some of the most devastating conflicts the Middle East has ever seen. Syria and Iraq, in
particular, have suffered from the dismantling of state infrastructure and the expansion
of terrorist and violent extremist organizations, most prominently the self-styled Islamic
State.
A bas-relief is displayed at the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad, Sept. 15, 2014 (AP photo by Hadi
Mizban).
The Islamic State’s short-lived dominion over some of the most archaeologically rich

territories in the “Cradle of Civilization” of Mesopotamia gave it control over many of the
region’s most valuable cultural assets. And the group exploited this to maximum effect.
Setting itself apart from terrorist organizations like al-Qaida and the Taliban, whether in
Afghanistan or Yemen, the Islamic State was able to commodify cultural heritage as a
resource that could simultaneously provide financial sustainability and propaganda
value, compounding the psychological impact of its terrorism on civilian populations.
Notably, it ushered in a new era of terrorism financing fueled by the black market trade
in cultural property.
Although the looting of antiquities is a centuries-old practice, such objects had never
before been converted into an extractive resource by a terrorist group. The existence of
a robust, and largely unregulated, international market for art and antiquities
dominated by Western nations provided ample opportunities to launder movable
cultural artifacts into the global marketplace—opportunities that are not available when
trafficking in oil, weapons or other traditional sources of terrorist financing.
It is no surprise, then, that antiquities trafficking across the Middle East has caught the
world’s attention. Yet the world’s understanding of how traffickers operate, and how the
rise of the internet has fueled their activities, remains limited. Specifically, the use of
social media platforms, most of all Facebook, for this kind of trafficking has added a
new and largely unexplored challenge to combating it.
Since the Arab uprisings, Facebook has grown to be one of the most-used social media
platforms by the region’s massive youth populations. As of 2016, there were over 80
million Facebook subscribers across the 22 countries that make up the Arab League,
with more than 1.6 million being added every month. As Facebook’s subscriber base in
the Middle East and North Africa has grown, the platform’s capabilities have continued
to evolve. What was once a means of uploading photos and videos now offers features
including live streaming, video chat communications and options for encrypted
messaging.
Facebook is the most high-profile of the social media platforms that have been used as
vehicles for the sale of illicit artifacts; others include WhatsApp, Telegram and Viber.
Antiquities traffickers use these platforms to evade the authorities and circumvent
regulations imposed by online auction and e-commerce sites like eBay, LiveAuctioneers
and Etsy (though these sites are frequently used as well).
The current “Community Standards” on platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp fall
short of providing the means to report and remove pages and groups that engage in
the trafficking of cultural property. While Facebook and other technology giants have
had success in targeting the movement of drugs and weapons on their platforms, they
have struggled to rein in antiquities traffickers, who have devised their own methods of
communication that have helped them skirt rules against such transactions, as well as
the artificial intelligence designed to enforce them.

The rise of the Islamic State ushered in a new
era of terrorism financing fueled by the black
market trade in cultural property.
For the past 10 months, we’ve been carrying out a study to monitor these traffickers’
activities. This work has allowed us to identify Facebook pages and groups in which
users are engaging in the smuggling, purchasing and selling of stolen cultural material,
including the sharing of information about illegal excavations. Though the study began
last October, the data collection process has involved reviewing Facebook archives
going back several years. The earliest relevant pages and groups we’ve found date back
to late 2013, indicating that the use of Facebook for antiquities trafficking is a fairly
recent phenomenon.
The data analyzed so far has revealed a sophisticated network of looters and traffickers
who have developed new tools and methods to facilitate their illicit transactions. These
include visuals such as maps and diagrams to aid in looting efforts and a system for
submitting specific “loot-to-order” requests that are quickly fulfilled by other group
members.
More broadly, it is becoming clear that social media has brought the world of
transnational trafficking to the fingertips of a large number of internet users throughout
the region, while streamlining the process of executing individual transactions. The
complete study will be published in a forthcoming paper.
Looting Tips from a ‘Professional Adventurer’

To identify relevant Facebook pages and groups, we began by searching Facebook for
broad common Arabic terms related to antiquities. These include the Arabic words used
for “treasures,” “monuments” and“artifacts.” All searches were conducted manually,
and no scraping for data was involved, in accordance with Facebook’s policies. Once we
identified the pages, we canvassed and recorded individual posts and communications.
Groups and pages for the illicit antiquities trade on Facebook facilitate two main
activities: looting and trafficking.
Those dedicated to looting are focused on sharing information about how to illegally
dig. Group members develop infographics to illustrate the types of tombs that exist in
particular locations and regions and their subterranean architecture. In countries like
Egypt, users provide instructions, including video instructions, for creating makeshift
water pumps to keep looting pits dry from groundwater. They also include tips on how
to spot the signs of a promising location for illegal excavation, including tomb
entrances.

A sample infographic posted in a Facebook group devoted to looting.
Image retrieved Nov. 7, 2017 (courtesy of authors).
One looting group, to take an example, was created in September 2016 as a means of
crowdsourcing knowledge for carrying out illegal excavations and authenticating
anything that diggers might find. To gain entrance to the group, Facebook users are
required to submit a request to “join” and then answer a brief series of questions in
Arabic. The questions include, “Why do you want to join this group?” and “What is your
profession?” They are generally broad and they also rotate, meaning not all prospective
members go through the same screening process. The groups’ administrators review
the answers and decide whether to accept or reject admission requests.
Interest in this group seems to have been intense. Within a year, it had amassed more
than 51,230 members, despite the fact that it was officially “closed,” or private. Roughly
5,000 of those members were active posters to the group page itself. In addition, many
group members shared their WhatsApp numbers or requested that any communications
be conducted through private Facebook messages, meaning that many of the group
members’ interactions were kept out of the public eye.

Members have used the group to both request and provide instructions on how to find,
excavate and loot from sites and tombs, along with what types of material to look for.
These instructions come in the form of detailed posts including images, videos and even
labeled infographics depicting, for example, what one might encounter underground
when excavating a tomb.
Some members of the group have posted images of Egyptian artifacts on sale at major
international auction houses as a means of conveying how much certain types of pieces
could be worth and what types of objects are in demand. In one post, dated April 25,
2017, a user provided photos from Sotheby’s, the New York-based auction house, of
Pharaonic artifacts from Egypt. These included small statues known as shabtis, which
are frequent targets for traffickers due to the ease of transporting them. The post
include the estimated values of individual Sotheby’s lots, apparently as an incentive for
those seeking an easy payday. The tactic worked: Just one day after the images were
posted, another user shared an image of a similar shabti, albeit of a lower quality, that
the user was apparently interested in selling.
In October 2017, a group member based in Cairo posted extensive instructions on how
to find and loot a Roman tomb. He described the layers and types of material one
would encounter while digging through the tomb toward the actual grave. He noted
that tombs include a layer of stone as well as a layer of thick soil, and that diggers
might become discouraged by the thickness of the soil and think they’ve missed the
grave altogether He urged them not to give up, and wrote that broken pottery pieces in
the soil should be taken as a sign that the grave is nearby. The post featured photos to
give users a better sense of what Roman tombs look like. Soon after these instructions
were posted, Roman-era material began appearing in postings on the group’s page.
Looting pages also include posts from individuals who are in the process of carrying out
excavations. One of the administrators of the aforementioned group has been posting
images of ongoing illicit excavations from as recently as June and July. His posts include
observations about the risks of death from suffocation or tomb collapse. They also
include images of water pumps and hoses he uses as a means of lowering the
groundwater in his looting pits. He signs off each of his lengthy status posts with the
phrase “memoirs of a professional adventurer.”
While the membership of looting groups is generally skewed toward young people who
are technologically savvy, online tools have been developed that are geared toward
those who are less so. For example, instead of GPS coordinates and images pulled from
Google Earth, posts are sometimes illustrated with simple, almost childlike graphics
illustrating the underground layout of specific tombs. In one such infographic, posted in
November 2017 and illustrating a Roman tomb, a pot of gold is shown at the bottom of
an underground staircase near a grouping of trees, giving the image the look of a

treasure map.
A post from a Facebook group devoted to looting with images of Egyptian artifacts that had
recently sold at Sotheby’s, the New York-based auction house. Image retrieved
Nov. 7, 2017 (courtesy of authors).
The Global Trafficking Marketplace

Facebook groups dedicated to trafficking, meanwhile, are more like online
marketplaces, primarily used for arranging the movement of specific pieces and
establishing connections between middlemen and buyers.
These groups generally have smaller memberships, with a greater rate of repeat-

engagement by members. One of the Facebook pages we examined was operational
from 2013 until this past March, when Facebook removed it for undisclosed reasons.
Though it had a total membership of just over 16,000, significantly lower than some of
the looting groups we examined, some 2,020 members were seen actively engaging
and posting on the page with regard to the purchase, sale or theft of artifacts. We have
also identified multiple users who are active on several trafficking pages. Some of them
offer the same artifacts on more than one page.
Of the 2,020 members we studied, 1,552 provided information identifying their current
locations. The traffickers come from places like Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Yemen, Turkey
and Iran, as well as destinations outside the Middle East. Dozens of users in the United
States, Germany, England, France, Belgium and elsewhere were engaged in the sale
and purchase of artifacts through the page.
Looters are now targeting material with a

previously unseen level of precision—a
practice that Facebook makes remarkably
easy.
Most members seemed to be using their real Facebook profiles. This means information
like their gender, hometown and current location—and even the schools and colleges
they attended and their cell phone numbers—is potentially visible to anyone with a
Facebook account. Based on their relatively limited engagement with trafficking pages,
it’s reasonable to conclude that these are less seasoned traffickers.
While the communication on trafficking pages we examined primarily takes place in

Arabic, people write in a variety of other languages, including English, Farsi and French.
At least some conversations are facilitated across language barriers by the translation
tools provided by Facebook.
For years, heritage experts have understood that looters and traffickers routinely share
knowledge and learn from one another about the trade. Prior to the expansion of
internet access in the Middle East, though, traffickers connected primarily through face-
to-face interaction and other traditional means of communication like phones and snail
mail. The internet in general, and Facebook in particular, have sped up communications
and exponentially increased the ability of such people to develop networks, exchange
information and conduct business transactions across national borders relatively
securely.
The content of both the looting and trafficking groups enriches our understanding of
the knowledge traffickers possess and how they operate. Until recently, we knew that

looters and traffickers would devise missions based on local knowledge and sharing
information by word-of-mouth. The use of infographics, however, shows that many
looters have a much more complete and sophisticated understanding of what they are
looking for, and a more methodological approach to seeking out tombs and other
looting sites, than experts previously realized. And while this detailed knowledge used
to be in the hands of the few, social media has allowed it to be disseminated to the
masses.
Our research also shines a light on loot-to-order transactions, in which artifacts are
stolen in response to specific requests, or “orders,” for material. Until now, there has
been little evidence confirming that this actually happens.
On Facebook, though, it unfolds in plain sight. On one of the trafficking pages we

reviewed, its administrators were making loot-to-order requests less than two months
after the page was created. These requests included contact information for the
requesting buyers, who were themselves often middlemen. The requests covered
particular types of cultural property from particular periods. For example, the
administrators at one point indicated they were seeking Islamic-era manuscripts and
books that could be made available in Istanbul, Turkey, by a specific date. Other times,
they posted requests for Jewish manuscripts, books and artifacts that could be made
available in Amman, Jordan. (Amman is a common transit point for traffickers moving
material into Israel, which has a large market for Jewish artifacts.)

A post from a Facebook group devoted to trafficking shows a “loot-to-order” request for
Jewish material in Amman, Jordan. Image retrieved Nov. 6, 2017 (courtesy of authors).
Responses to these requests varied. Some members would post a comment showing an
image of the type of object being sought, illustrating an ability to fulfill the order.
Others would simply state that they had an example of the type of desired object, and
request to communicate privately with the administrator. Others would post their
contact information, such as an email address or phone number, to connect more
securely.
These loot-to-order requests signify a major evolution in antiquities trafficking. Looters

are now targeting material with a previously unseen level of precision—a practice that
Facebook makes remarkably easy.
Confirming Looted Pieces

People share all kinds of images, videos and other content on social media, so how can
we be sure that artifacts being offered on these pages are actually what traffickers say
they are?
Some pieces are so rare that they are easy enough to track. For example, on-the-
ground intelligence gathered by The Day After Initiative, a Syrian-led civil society
organization currently based in Istanbul, combined with our own online research, has
allowed us to trace the journey of one especially rare, perhaps even one-of-a-kind item.

A screen grab from footage of an artifact that had been looted from Islamic State-held territory in Syria
in 2015. The footage was obtained by affiliates of The Day After Initiative (courtesy of authors).
The piece is carved from limestone with four outward-looking, intricately detailed
carved faces. The object was probably an ornamental fitting. It was initially tracked by
The Day After and documented by its affiliates in June 2015. It originated in territory
once held by the Islamic State, most likely Raqqa or Manbij, both cities in Syria, before
making its way to southern Turkey. Two years later, it appeared in a post on a
Facebook page devoted to antiquities trafficking.
We do not know what has become of the piece, as communications about it have been
conducted in private. However, its quick journey to the online marketplace suggests
that looters are not sitting on antiquities for extended periods.
In other cases, photographs and video footage of antiquities and other items are posted
on Facebook in the places where they were originally discovered. Carved reliefs, freshly
unearthed artifacts and even chandeliers in historic mansions have all been offered up
for sale with accompanying images. The sellers, in these cases, are simply waiting to
identify interested buyers before looting them.
In general, though, it can be difficult to confirm the provenance of antiquities being

hawked online, and it is up to buyers to establish their authenticity. Sellers usually
provide opportunities for buyers to verify the origins of goods by allowing them to

examine the goods either personally or through a trusted local intermediary. Moreover,
payment is usually made only after the buyer has secured, and presumably
authenticated, the goods.
An Uphill Battle
Whether it appears on a Facebook group or at a formal auction house, any sale of
artifacts originating in Syria, Iraq and most other countries in the Middle East these
days is likely to be illicit due to the fact that such transactions are prohibited by more
than half the countries that make up the Arab League. Countries where the trade is
prohibited include Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Qatar,
Tunisia and Yemen. The antiquities trade has also been suspended in Lebanon since
1988, after the government there determined it could not control the market because of
the country’s civil war.
In Egypt, which is home to a majority of the members of Facebook trafficking groups

we surveyed, looters and traffickers face up to 10 years in prison and a fine of 1 million
Egyptian pounds, or around $55,000. Egypt is also considering a new law that would
increase the penalty for looting or trafficking to life in prison.
Such penalties, however, are difficult to enforce, as online transactions are almost
impossible to regulate. To be sure, certain platforms have recently taken steps to
discourage fraudulent and otherwise illegal transactions. In September 2017, eBay
released a new seller regulation policy that expressly prohibits the exchanging of
emails, phone numbers and other personal contact information between users. The
eBay policy update also strongly discourages any commercial interaction between users
outside its platform. Unlike Facebook, eBay also has an entire policy dedicated to
cultural relics.
What was once an underground industry,

accessible only to seasoned traffickers, has
been democratized.
Officially, transactions on Facebook must take place via its Marketplace or Buy and Sell
Groups features. But as we’ve observed in our study of how Facebook is actually used,
members can easily get around this by making their communications private or
migrating to other social media platforms like WhatsApp.
Facebook does not currently enforce an explicit ban on transactions involving illicit
cultural property. Following Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony before
Congress in April, Facebook began undertaking a massive rewrite of its User Agreement
and Community Standards, which presents an opportunity to incorporate such a ban.
This would potentially help the platform target and remove future trafficking and looting

pages before they gain traction. However, the Congressional hearings concerned an
altogether different set of issues, and there is no indication that curbing antiquities
trafficking is an objective of the rewrite.
Such initiatives aside, the slow regulatory response to the rapid growth of illicit
antiquities trafficking online has likely encouraged more and more people to get
involved. What was once an underground industry, accessible only to seasoned
traffickers, has been democratized. The proliferation of Facebook and other social
media platforms has created a different kind of revolution in the Middle East, one that
enables any cultural property thief to operate as a transnational trafficker with contacts
and buyers far and wide.
While these new digital communities may be difficult to track, by infiltrating them we
can better understand how they operate. Using Facebook as a vehicle for “stealth”
ethnography allows us to see how these groups’ tactics continue to evolve, potentially
allowing for the adaptation of new methods to combat the plundering of the Middle
East’s cultural riches.
But our findings also underscore the fact that we are facing an uphill battle against
antiquities trafficking. As criminals continue to adapt, we must adapt with them to have
any hope of saving our past.
Amr Al-Azm is a professor of Middle East history and anthropology at Shawnee State University in Ohio.
He is a founder and board member of The Day After Initiative and currently coordinates the Heritage
Protection Initiative (HPI) for cultural heritage protection in Syria. Follow him on Twitter at @alazmamr.
Katie A. Paul is a research analyst based in Washington, D.C. She is an affiliated researcher with The
Day After Initiative and has served as a fellow at the Antiquities Coalition. Follow her on Twitter
at @AnthroPaulicy.
. . .
For more reports like this, subscribe now to get
unlimited access to must-read news, analysis, and
opinion from top experts.
Get an all-access subscription to World
Politics Review.
YES! I WANT TO SIGN UP NOW.

WPR Syria Endgame PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

WPR Syria Endgame PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

WHAT IS THE

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 1

Written by a network of leading experts and influential observers on the

Though strictly nonpartisan with regard to political party affiliation or

While WPR is a for-profit, privately owned company, it is also a mission-

Copyright © 2018 World Politics Review LLC. All rights reserved.

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 2

Get an all-access subscription

• Immediate and instant access to the full searchable library of 9,000+

• Daily articles with original analysis, written by leading topic experts,

• Weekly in-depth reports, including features and country- and region-

• Smartphone- and tablet-friendly website.

YES! I WANT TO SUBSCRIBE NOW.

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 3

The Shape of Syria to Come

Talk of the Endgame in Syria Dodges the Question of

What Will a Post-ISIS Political Order in Syria Actually Look

There Will Be No Justice in Assad’s ‘Victorious Syria’

The Wider Jihadi Movement Will Take Over Where the

America’s Syria Policy Is Incoherent, and There’s No Sign

As Syria’s Civil War Winds Down, Israel, Iran and

How Facebook Made It Easier Than Ever to Traffic Middle

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 4

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 5

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 6

Meanwhile, Syria’s northwest is dominated by Turkey, as part of the joint Russian-

Seven years in, the Syrian war is no longer a

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 7

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 8

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 9

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 10

American soldiers weren’t on a humanitarian mission in Syria, although they were

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 11

Frederick Deknatel is the managing editor of World Politics Review.

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 12

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 13

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 14

For the Assad regime, the fight against the

So long as Sunni-sectarian grievance persists in Syria—defined in sectarian terms, as

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 15

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 16

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 17

“For Syrian society itself, there must be a

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 18

Frederick Deknatel is the managing editor of World Politics Review.

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 19

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 20

In the study of social movements, scholars have introduced an important

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 21

There is little to suggest that the fragmentation

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 22

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 23

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 24

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 25

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 26

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 27

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 28

Neither Hezbollah nor Israel are particularly

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 29

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 30

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 31

What Is the Endgame in Syria? www.worldpoliticsreview.com 32

Looting Tips from a ‘Professional Adventurer’