"Militarization is a specialized approach to violence that de facto excludes that large majority of people who are unable or unwilling to be part of an armed struggle. It tends to reduce the terrain of struggle to a war of attrition with the state, which also serves to situate the armed resistance as the leaders over the resistance as a whole, further entrenching hiearchy and marginalization.
In their amazing book about the Syrian revolution and civil war, Burning Country, Leila al-Shami and Robin Yassin-Kassab describe militarization as struggle becoming about “the scramble for weapons and money” that “transformed the revolution from a leaderless movement into a cacaphony of a thousand competing leaders, from horizontalism to a jostle of hierarchies.”
The shift to the military domain meant the struggle played out more on the state’s terms, as it had an airforce, artillery, and thousands of well-trained, loyal fighters. This led one Syrian revolutionary quoted in the book, Yara Nseir, to say that the idea of capturing land and building revolutionary territories was the wrong approach, since it favoured a more violent struggle and required support from foreign states.
We need to point out though that in Syria, the state really led the way in terms of escalation, deploying massive violence against demonstrators from the very beginning. This led Robin and Leila to conclude that: “Militarisation was not solely a natural human response to regime brutality; it also grew from the logical realisation that civil resistance was not enough, that the regime would only go if forced.” It is possible the Syrian revolution had no choice but to militarize, but it is still worth considering the consequences of being forced into this position.
In the book Revolutionary Echos from Syria, two anarchists from Aleppo discuss the first years of the Syrian revolution and how their areas came to fall outside regime control. They describe how armed struggle started with a handful of individuals who happened to have guns and who would come to defend demonstrations, exchanging fire with the security forces to give demonstrators a chance to get away. It was one role among others, and, in a country with mandatory military service, one a lot of people could fill. Other people pushed back against the security services with rocks and molotovs — guns weren’t the only tactic.
As armed struggle against the regime grew in intensity, the two comrades noticed that the majority of revolutionaries—themselves included—were losing their agency. The struggle was coming to be defined by the use of guns, and those with the guns were increasingly determining what happened. They covered their neighbourhood with posters calling for people to choose the molotov over the kalashnikov, to choose a violent civil resistance over militarization.
Soon, though, their area was liberated by the Free Syrian Army, a coalition of armed groups that came from outside the city. The regime forces were pushed out or withdrew, but then they surrounded the area with checkpoints and began shelling it. This forced the non-militarized revolutionaries into the role of humanitarian workers, trying to coordinate food, shelter, and medicine for people displaced by the mounting violence.
Armed groups felt they should be in control of liberated areas because of the risk they were taking. “There was a lot of conflict between the two groups, those who held onto the values and principles we had put forward at the start of the revolution, that this wasn’t a matter of vengeance, that it’s not a personal grudge against the regime, that it is not against the Alawite sect.” In the comrades’ opinion, the separation between the Free Syrian Army and the activists is what led to the collapse of the revolution—it became a movement of free generals, of army defectors, rather than one of free people.
It is not that these comrades were pacifists—far from it. They were militants who didn’t shy away from situations of violence. But the specialization of violence left them with no choice but to leave the country. This was especially true for a lot of women revolutionaries, as the comrades interviewed in the book experienced. As the armed struggle took over, so did conservative religious ideologies, and in many revolutionary areas, women found themselves struggling on two fronts — against the regime, yes, but also against the rigid patriarchy of the armed groups.
One of the comrades describes that as she fled to Turkey, a fighter stopped her car to check everyone’s passport, but then refused to look at hers because he didn’t want to see a woman’s face. To become literally invisible in a struggle you had sacrificed so much for must be devastating. This increasing role of religion might have been a dynamic anyway, but it was aggravated by the way militarization required support in money and weapons from abroad—and guess who the Gulf theocracies decided to finance.
The armed struggle and the rise of conservative religion within it laid the groundwork for the sectarian and religious turn the conflict came to be characterized by civil war. Some people like to write off the Syrian revolution by claiming it was always led by religious extremists, but this dynamic only became dominant as the level of militarized violence increased.
The political theorist and revolutionary Yassin al-Haj Saleh said it’s more accurate to think about there being three currents in the Syrian conflict rather than distinct phases: a revolution, a civil war, and a proxy war. All of these elements were present starting in 2011, but they were each dominant in different places and times and had a shifting relationship to each other. How long the revolutionary current held on is hard to say. If I had to say though, I’d say the door to revolution was closed after the fall of free Aleppo in late 2016 in the face of collaboration between the Assad regime, the Russian military, and the Rojava militias."
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