The Battle of Aleppo - Initial Findings

A slice of what I've been spending most of my free time on over the last few months

Hello again dear readers,

I hope all is well and that you have bright days ahead.

As some of you may know, I have been obsessively working on a project related to the Syrian Revolution and the Battle of Aleppo. As of now, I have almost 300 pages of notes just on events between March 2011 and January 2014. In this almost three-year period, Aleppo went from one of the quieter parts of the country to one of its most grueling battlegrounds. This post will lay out some basic history, a timeline of the period of the first 16 months of the revolution in Aleppo, what the media got wrong, and address some larger questions regarding how societies collapse.

One may ask, why have I embarked on such a project (which I plan to focus on for the foreseeable future)? Well, the answer is not particularly complicated. This is a topic I find endlessly fascinating, and the plight of the Syrian people is something I care deeply about. Additionally, there are essentially no in-depth and comprehensive resources that cover this timeframe in Aleppo, and I have drawn upon more contemporary research methods to fill in the gaps. I also have 13 years of hindsight to work with and additional information that was not necessarily as apparent at the time.

This is probably not as interesting to most of you as it is to me, and the war on Gaza is a far more pressing issue than historical research. However, I have put together a large volume of work regarding Gaza and the region in the last nine months, and I want to write about something else, at least briefly. This is likely not my most well-written post either, but I will present it to you, dear readers, nonetheless.

The Realization of Two Centuries of Frustration

Aleppo and its countryside is a diverse region of Syria that has seen many conquerors come and go. Aleppo was once a crucial node in the Silk Road and a prosperous trading hub for the vast majority of its history. The city has seen Romans, the first Muslims, the Timurids, the Ottomans, and the French. Though Damascus has often taken the spotlight in Syrian and Middle Eastern history due to it being the seat of the Umayyad Caliphate and modern Syria, Aleppo has been a critical junction in global and regional politics and economics. To its north are the mountains of Anatolia, to its east the Euphrates River, to its West the Mediterranean, and to its south the rest of the Levant.

Indeed, the contemporary dialect of the city’s inhabitants reflects these influences, with notes of Turkish and Iraqi Arabic making their way into the city’s Levantine lexicon. Trade would have moved in every direction, whether up into Anatolia, along the Euphrates, out into the Mediterranean, or along its Levantine coastline. Though the region is now largely Sunni Arab, many have passed through it, leaving their mark or remaining in the area’s rich social fabric. The city and its countryside are home to Turkmen, Kurds, Shiites, Assyrians, Circassians, and Armenians who have generally lived in relative levels of social harmony.

Unfortunately for Aleppo, the last 200 years have not been kind to it. One of the first of these tragedies was a large earthquake that struck the region in 1822, causing untold damage to the area. In 1869, Egypt’s Suez Canal was opened, downgrading its importance in global trade networks. No longer would merchant ships coming from Europe and the Mediterranean have to pass around Africa to get to the Far East, being able to bypass the continent via the Red Sea. Overland trade routes were already suboptimal in an increasingly global system of economic commerce, and Aleppo’s status as a crucial node to reach places like Iraq, Iran, and India was sharply affected.

Coming into the 20th century, Aleppo was spared the devastation of the First World War as the Ottoman Empire collapsed. However, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s War of Independence cut Aleppo off from vital economic hubs that it had been historically connected to, such as Maraş, Antep, Urfa, and eventually Iskenderun, which would all become part of the newfound Turkish state. The loss of Iskenderun was especially painful, as it would have been Aleppo’s primary outlet to the Mediterranean.

An important part of this period was Ibrahim Hanano’s Turkish-backed uprising against the French, Aleppo’s new colonial administrator. Hanano, who was from a wealthy family of Kurdish origin from the city’s western hinterlands, studied in Aleppo before becoming an Ottoman bureaucrat. His 1920 uprising, though making some advances, collapsed after Ataturk ended his support for the revolt following an agreement with France.

Originally, the French wanted to divide its colonial possessions in the Middle East into six separate states: the state of Aleppo, the state of Damascus, the state of Latakia (for Alawites), the state of Jebel Druze (for Druze), and the state of Lebanon (for Maronites and other Levantine Christians). However, this plan was dashed rather quickly in 1925, when another revolt broke out. Originating in southern Syria, the prominent Druze sheikh Sultan al-Atrash began attacking French colonial forces, with clashes spreading to the rest of the country. The French managed to put down the revolt but settled on establishing two states: Lebanon and Syria. This would ultimately negatively impact Aleppo.

The French eventually left Lebanon and Syria not long after gaining the territories following the destruction wrought by the Second World War. Syrian independence, though celebrated, only led to Aleppo’s peripheralization in Syria and weakened its place on the global stage. The politics of Damascus were quite chaotic during Syria’s first 20 or so years of independence, with coups and counter-coups being common. In 1963, after a short-lived three years of unification with Egypt and North Yemen from 1958 to 1961, the Ba’ath party became the country’s new rulers. After years of infighting within the party and a disastrous war with Israel in 1967, an officer from the air force hailing from rural Latakia, Hafez al-Assad, finally came to power.

Only a few years after Assad’s ascendence, an Islamist uprising erupted in Syria led by the Muslim Brotherhood. Established in 1928 by Hassan al-Banna in Egypt, the Brotherhood brand quickly spread throughout the region. In Syria, the Brotherhood became rather regional, with its primary centers of power being Aleppo, Hama, and Damascus. The Brotherhood in Aleppo largely appealed to the region’s feudal aristocracy and landowners, who had their traditional powers stripped from them by the Ba’athists and their agrarian reform policies. The Brotherhood’s conservative message resonated with them in the face of Hafez’s socialist leanings, even if he was often described as being part of the Ba’ath’s right wing.

Though the Brotherhood in Damascus did not pick up arms, the Aleppo and Hama wings of the organization did, leading to a brutal crackdown. In 1980, Hafez sent the Syrian army into Aleppo to clear out the Brotherhood, massacring anyone who stood in the way or lived in the wrong neighborhood. Local militias were formed and troops stayed in the city until things eventually cooled down. The uprising was eventually defeated in Hama, which Hafez subjected to ground and air bombardment before “cleansing” the city of Brotherhood fighters in 1982. The government’s onslaught killed thousands and destroyed many of the city’s neighborhoods.

From then on, Aleppo continued to be a peripheral region of Syria, with the authorities in Damascus ever distrustful of those hailing from the city and its countryside. However, things seemingly were to change for the better in 2000, when Hafez died, and his son, Bashar, took power. The new heir to the throne immediately embarked on neoliberal reforms to open Syria up to the global economy. However, these policies only really benefitted the elite of Damascus and Aleppo, neglecting the country’s rural regions. Even the elite of cities in Aleppo’s countryside, such as al-Bab and Manbij, gained little from this economic liberalization.

Additionally, a severe drought and famine swept Syria in the late 2000s, leading to a massive influx of rural people to “informal settlements” and slums on the outskirts of Syria’s major cities. In Aleppo, like other places, this trend began in the 1960s, as people from the countryside trickled into the city to find work and opportunity. These new neighborhoods formed a belt that stretched across Aleppo’s outskirts, with the city’s new residents largely finding jobs in its many factories and businesses. The drought of the late 2000s, however, dramatically accelerated this process. The Ba’athists’ pro-natalist policies did not help either.

Finally, in 2011, the Arab Spring swept the Middle East, and Syria quickly began to experience the waves of revolution.

The Syrian Revolution in Aleppo

(Warning: This section will include graphic imagery)

The last section was essentially the Wikipedia version of modern Aleppine history (thus the lack of citations), but this section will be a bit more in-depth, though I will try to avoid too granular as much as possible.

Either way, protests in Syria began at the beginning of 2011, but demonstrations against the regime did not become a national movement until mid-March when demonstrations spread to the entire country. In Aleppo, these early demonstrations against the government were small and were overshadowed by opposition activities in other regions, primarily Daraa in the south.

However, opposition activity did begin, with protests seemingly occurring at Aleppo’s Grand Umayyad Mosque in the Old City. Though it is hard to confirm the video, it shows men chanting “there is no God but God” after what looks like Friday prayers on March 25.

At the same time, pro-government protests in the city also occurred, such as one on March 24, with demonstrators chanting “Allah, Syria, and Bashar only.”

Both are difficult to verify, but, generally speaking, pro-government protests were held by public sector workers, allegedly due to coercive practices. This is not to say that there was not authentic support for the government in Aleppo, but it would be difficult to say how supportive the city would have been of the regime overall.

March 26 saw a pro-government demonstration in Manbij, a large city in the Aleppo countryside.

What’s interesting here is that Manbij falls outside of the regime’s usual base of support and power, which would have been upwardly-mobile merchants, business owners, and factory owners in Aleppo and Damascus alongside those in or working with Syria’s feared security services.

However, in April, protests against the regime in Aleppo (and across the country) began to increasingly proliferate, with more of the countryside showing signs of supporting the revolution. Protests also seemingly began at Aleppo University, which, being one of Syria’s main universities, would have been a hub for students from across the country.

Protests would continue to grow throughout the month. On April 25, the army was sent into the southern city of Daraa, placing a brutal siege on opposition neighborhoods. This only enflamed the situation, with anti-government protests breaking out in many of the poor and working-class Sunni neighborhoods of Aleppo. As I said in the last section, many of these people would have had strong familial connections to the countryside, being recent migrants to the city.

In this video from April 29, also a Friday, protesters in Saif al-Dawle, a neighborhood that was relatively middle class (though still possessing working class elements), chant “with blood, with soul, long live Daraa.”

The situation continued to escalate through May. The government tried to dissuade protests via carrots and sticks, promising reform but cracking down on open protest against the regime. Toward the end of the month, Sheikh Ibrahim Salqini, the Sunni Mufti of Aleppo and dean of theology at Damascus University, said that it was wrong to believe that Aleppo was quiet, though he said that he was in favor of calm and reform. Indeed, media reports from this period often described Aleppo as “quiet,” which, in comparison to other parts of the country like Daraa or Homs, was true, but that did not mean that anti-regime sentiment was not growing like it was elsewhere.

As the situation progressed, the government began relying on pro-regime thugs, often called Shabiha, to quell protests, though I will talk a bit more about this in the media section. In this video, reportedly from April 27 (a Friday), Shabiha allegedly from the Berri family (again will talk about this more) yell at worshippers in a mosque in Saif al-Dawle.

By June, security forces were becoming increasingly active throughout the country, with a checkpoint at Aleppo’s primary entrance appearing on satellite imagery from June 26, though it was likely erected earlier.

July was when a new phenomena in the Syrian Revolution began to proliferate: the formation of armed opposition groups consisting of army defectors. At the end of July, the Free Syrian Army, a fluid and loose coalition of officers who defected from the army, announced their existence. Fighting would slowly spread across the country. Groups would form in the Aleppo countryside around this time, though they did not start launching serious attacks against government forces until the next year.

In August, as an unfortunate sign of things to come, al-Qaeda’s leader in Iraq, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, secretly dispatched seven men to Syria to establish an al-Qaeda affiliate in the country. Those men would go on to create Jabhat al-Nusra, which would become one of the most powerful rebel groups in Syria, though they kept a low-profile through the rest of 2011. The regime also had issued prisoner releases which largely favored Salafists, often described as Islamic radicals, who had been held in Syria’s infamous Sednaya Prison outside Damascus. Many of these former prisoners would also go on to form rebel groups like Ahrar al-Sham and Suqour al-Sham, mainly in the Idlib region (which was once considered part of Aleppo’s hinterlands).

Protests and the proliferation of armed groups continued, and, on August 18, US President Barrack Obama said for the first time that Bashar al-Assad should “step aside,” placing additional sanctions on him and his regime. Only a few days later, the Syrian National Council (SNC), based in Turkey, would declare its existence. The SNC sought to unify the opposition behind it and present itself as Syria’s rightful government in exile. The timing implied that the SNC would be backed by the US.

In September, Sheikh Ibrahim Salqini died, with a massive protest erupting at his funeral at Aleppo’s Grand Umayyad Mosque. This demonstration was seemingly one of the biggest the city had seen so far, with security forces swiftly cracking down.

More government checkpoints began to sprout up around Aleppo, as the regime increasingly feared for its security. The situation continued to escalate with more armed groups forming in the countryside. In November, Sheikh Tawfiq Shihab al-Din formed the Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement in the Western Aleppo countryside, which would become one of the most powerful rebel groups in the area. Anti-government protests also spread to the poor and largely Kurdish slums of Achrafieh and Sheikh Maqsoud on the city’s northern outskirts.

Some small attacks against government forces seemingly took place in December, but it has been difficult to verify or find details. By January 2012, the army was launching raids into villages in Western Aleppo. In this video, the army seemingly enters the village of Abzimo near Atarib, though it is hard to make out.

At this time, rebel activity in Aleppo was seriously constrained by a lack of weapons. In this video, dated to January 15, a group of men calling themselves the Ababil Battalion issue a warning for Shabiha in Aleppo, though they only seem to possess a handful of rifles. Their leader says he is a Lieutenant, implying that he has defected from the army, and their emblem implies some relationship with the Free Syrian Army.

Later in January, Nusra officially announced its existence in Syria. In the beginning of February, the government’s security presence in the Western countryside continued to expand, with a checkpoint being established to the West of Atarib, though it would be moved to the east of the town later in the month.

February 10 would dramatically mark the beginning of serious clashes in the Aleppo region, as Nusra launched a twin car-bombing attack in Aleppo city, hitting two major security stations. At this point, anti-government protests had become a regular occurrence, with soldiers often firing on unarmed demonstrators. In this video, also dated to February 10, regime forces at the Salheen station in Aleppo’s Marja neighborhood appear to shoot at nearby demonstrators. This police station, which was also a primary base for Shabiha from the Berri family.

A few days later, regime forces clashed with Free Syrian Army units in Atarib. In this video, clashes can be heard and black smoke can be seen rising from several locations.

The rebels would quickly withdraw from the town, but that did not stop the regime’s rampage. This video shows some of the destruction in the town and seemingly a group of regime tanks stationed in it.

Snipers also took position on top of the Atarib’s municipality building located just off the main road in the town center.

This trend of establishing a garrison of troops alongside snipers and tanks in the center of major towns would continue as the fighting escalated. It also should be noted that rebel activity in Atarib likely came from the nearby Idlib region, as there was much cooperation between groups in these areas. Regime forces also seemingly entered Azaz, a major town on the Turkish border and part of the the main economic corridor linking Aleppo to Turkey.

By the end of the month, regime forces were launching raids against many of the major towns along the Aleppo-Azaz road, including Anadan, Hrayton, Tel Rifa’at, and Bayanoun, which supported the revolution. Anadan and Tel Rifa’at (as well as neighboring Mara’a) had been Brotherhood “strongholds” in the 1980s, supporting the Islamist rebels. At the beginning of March, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, which had both supported the revolution and were clandestinely facilitating cash and arms flows into Syria, established the “Istanbul Room” in Turkey to better coordinate their support for the rebellion via a prominent Lebanese politician.

Into March, attacks on government forces in both Aleppo and its countryside quickly expanded, with the regime responding by increasing security in the city and sending more troops into the western and northern countryside, which both border Turkey. By this time, there is evidence that the regime had began to deploy attack helicopters to support its ground forces, as shown in this video in Anadan for instance, though there are earlier examples.

Rebels, who had been dislodged by government forces in Idlib, moved into the northern Aleppo countryside in force, being able to effectively deny regime forces from entering many villages and towns off the main road to Turkey. At the beginning of April, the government launched a large-scale offensive into the northern countryside to dislodge the rebel presence there, sending thousands of troops supported by tanks and attack helicopters. This video, dated to April 8, shows government forces on the main road as they pour into the area.

At this point, rebel influence can be depicted in the area like this, with dark green indicating a rebel presence, light green indicating a general opposition presence, and red indicating government checkpoints or where government forces moved in during the offensive:

At the time of this major operation, the government and opposition had negotiated a cease-fire starting on April 12. Though the regime hoped it could stomp out the rebel presence in the northern countryside before the cease-fire took effect, it failed, as the rebels stubbornly maintained their ground.

Though the cease-fire did hold to some degree, it did not stop government reinforcements from moving into the northern countryside or insurgent attacks on security forces in Aleppo city. Indeed, opposition sources claimed that regime forces resumed their offensive in the countryside around April 24. At this point, the rebels still did not possess the capabilities to defend against large armored incursions by government forces, eventually having to pull back from the areas along the main road. However, this would soon change.

The Syrian National Council and members of the Muslim Brotherhood managed to acquire $20 million worth of weapons from Libya, as the fall of Muammar Qaddafi led to the opening of his military’s vast arms depots. These weapons then traveled from Libya to Turkey before making their way into northern Syria. This infusion of cash and weapons quickly led to results on the battlefield. On May 19, rebels managed to briefly capture the government checkpoint entering Atarib, as depicted in this video.

On the same day, Atarib-based rebels claimed to attack government forces in Sarmada, just over the administrative border with Idlib and near the Bab al-Hawa border crossing with Turkey. In this video, rebels can be seen carrying RPGs, which were sorely needed to disable government tanks.

Though the rebels had to soon withdraw after government forces moved into the area, they launched another devastating attack on regime troops near Atarib on May 21. As a small convoy of government forces moved between Atarib and the Bab al-Hawa Crossing, rebels ambushed them and destroyed the entire convoy. This video shows rebels in a nearby tree-line launching their attack.

The tank leading the convoy was destroyed. I will not attach the videos showing the resulting casualties of government forces, but many were killed in the ambush.

Government reinforcement entered the area the next day, but they also came under rebel attack. This video shows another seemingly disabled tank in Atarib.

By the end of the month, the army was moving armor into Aleppo city as its forces were increasingly coming under attack in the countryside, with rebels making advances around Azaz, al-Bab, and Kafr Halab. By June, the situation for government forces was looking bleaker than ever, as protests in Aleppo city increasingly became more intense in the wake of the Houla massacre on May 25, which was perpetrated by pro-regime forces. By the beginning of June, shops across the poor neighborhoods of the city were announcing general strikes, disrupting government claims that it had the situation under control.

By the end of June, rebels were advancing across the countryside, capturing government bases outside the town of Daret Izza and looting their weapon stores. By the beginning of July, rebels captured Atarib, with the regime almost completely abandoning the western countryside, only really maintaining its presence at the Sheikh Suleiman base between Daret Izza and Qubtan al-Jebel and along the road that connected Aleppo with a large base to the east of Atarib (Base 42). In only four or so months, thanks to foreign support, rebels went from being highly disorganized bands of men with small arms to an effective insurgent force capable of capturing large towns and defending against regime incursions. July is also when rebel forces began to prepare for what they likely hoped would be the ultimate showdown with the regime: a full-on assault on Aleppo city.

Under the tutelage of Turkish intelligence and bankrolled by Qatari funds, a relatively unknown man from Mara’a in the northern countryside named Abdel Qader Saleh would unite over a dozen rebel groups to form Liwa Tawhid. Utilizing Brotherhood networks, Qatari funds, and personal charisma, Saleh’s group would prepare to storm Aleppo in coordination with rebels based around Damascus in a climactic plan to overthrow the regime and bring the Syrian Revolution to its conclusion.

The rebels were apparently hesitant to enter Aleppo in force, as the city did not fully support the rebellion. Though regular large protests had become common, they were almost exclusively held by the city’s poor and working-class residents who lived in the city’s peripheral neighborhoods. The middle and upper classes were, at best, still ambivalent. Small protests did occur in wealthier neighborhoods, but, nevertheless, the revolution was largely a revolution of the poor and rural. Aleppo’s business elite had seemingly grown skeptical of the regime, but its support for the revolution was by no means concrete, though some large businessmen did seemingly defect to the opposition. Either way, Turkish intelligence seemingly forced the issue, though such claims must be taken with a grain of salt.

In the lead-up to the rebel offensive on the city, rebel units began to make their presence in the city more visible, with evidence that armed men clashed with security forces on July 6. One week later, a Friday as always, more definitive evidence of a rebel presence in Aleppo city appeared. In this video, uploaded on July 13, men with small arms can be seen near the Saleheddine Mosque in the Aleppo neighborhood of Saleheddine.

The moment of truth was fast arriving. Nonetheless, the regime launched another offensive into the northern countryside, specifically into Azaz and surrounding areas, in mid-July. However, this would prove to be a serious mistake. On July 18, a car bomb attack in Damascus killed several high-level government officials and members of Bashar al-Assad’s inner circle, including Defense Minister Daoud Rajha, Deputy Defense Minister Assef Shawkat, and former Defense Minister General Hassan Turkmani.

Soon after, the rebels moved into into Damascus and Aleppo, seemingly in a move to swiftly end the war in a rebel victory. As regime forces collapsed in the countryside, losing control of Azaz and Manbij, Tawhid began moving into Aleppo city via the Sheikh Najjar industrial area, likely using backroads. Starting on July 20, Tawhid units captured the neighborhoods of Sakhour, Tariq al-Bab, and Hanano, some of the poorest neighborhoods of the city. They also moved into the towns along the main road to Turkey, capturing the Bayanoun checkpoint and Hrayton police station. Additionally, armed men, seemingly associated with rebel groups originating in Atarib, asserted their presence in Saleheddine, Bustan al-Qasr, and Sukkari. Government forces responded by indiscriminately bombarding the neighborhoods in which rebel forces were present, killing countless civilians and spurring mass displacement.

This map (roughly) shows the situation in the city from July 20 to 23

As the rebels took over neighborhoods throughout Aleppo’s eastern neighborhoods, they launched attacks against some of the government’s most crucial security infrastructure in the city, namely the State Security branch in al-Muhafaza, the Military Court in al-Jamiliyeh, the Police Headquarters, and the Ba’ath Party HQ near Sa’adallah Al-Jabri Square, which are show below.

On July 28, the government launched a counterattack, focusing on Saleheddine, but it made little progress. Regime forces withdrew from most of its positions in the countryside, massing them along Aleppo’s outskirts. This video, posted on July 28, depicts dead government soldiers and destroyed armor on the highway between Saleheddine and Hamdaniyeh.

The exact location is here:

Government forces continued to build up on along the city’s outskirts. By August 8, when government forces launched another counteroffensive into the city, rebels had taken control of almost all of eastern Aleppo and captured the road between the city and Turkey, excluding the Minigh Airbase and two Shiite villages just north of Anadan.

The government counteroffensive did manage to push rebel forces back slightly, taking part of Saleheddine and Saif al-Dawle and dislodging rebels from the security infrastructure in the city center they had tried to take control of. So that this post does not turn into a massive history of the battle of Aleppo, I will leave things here. The battle would grind on for another four years, with battle lines in the city changing only slightly during that time. The government, supported by Iranian-backed militias and Russian air cover, eventually captured all of eastern Aleppo in December, 2016, ending the battle of for the city. The war in Aleppo’s countryside continues to this day, with the current lines of control looking like this:

What the Media Got Wrong

The media misrepresented the situation in Syria and Aleppo in a variety of ways. In this section I will discuss misunderstanding’s revolving how foreign support affected the rebellion. Then, I will talk about the Shabiha, sectarianism, ethnic, and tribal dynamics.

Regarding the impact of foreign support and influence, those who support the government often overplay its significance while those in the opposition generally downplay it. The reality is a bit murkier. As should be clear from my timeline, the rebels would simply not have been able to make the gains that they did in the Aleppo countryside without a significant flow of weapons and cash into northern Syria. Granted, many rebel units were self-funded, as streams of foreign support, at least in the early days, favored groups and individuals with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Indeed, Liwa al-Tawhid would not have been able to form with such ease, let alone storm Aleppo city, if it were not for substantial infusions of cash, weapons, and logistics from Qatar and Turkey.

However, contrary to the narratives disseminated by the regime and those that support it, this support did not spark the revolution nor was it enough for the rebels to achieve all of the gains that they did. The Syrian Revolution was an incredibly decentralized phenomena. Syria had been one of the most repressive dictatorships in the region for over 40 years, yet opposition movements inside the country managed to bloom throughout 2011 and 2012 nonetheless. Likely due to social media and the widespread belief that the Assad regime would meet the same fate as the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia and the Mubarak regime in Egypt, Syrians, regardless of their connections to a broader national movement, went out onto the streets in search of dignity and freedom. Foreign actors worked to shape the revolution to their respective geopolitical interests, but that does not imply that they started the fire.

Militarily, the support rebels got, although substantial, was not game-changing by any means. Almost all of the heavy equipment rebel forces possessed in 2012 and 2013 — tanks, artillery, and other higher-tech weapons — were pilfered from government bases spread throughout the country. In the summer of 2012 alone, the rebels managed to capture several tanks in Azaz, Anadan, and Aleppo’s Hanano neighborhood. In mid-November they captured Base 46 near Atarib and its significant store of weapons. Rebel then captured the Sheikh Suleiman Base near Daret Izza and the Infantry School in Muslimiyeh, likely propelling further rebel advances more than foreign support did during that period. One of the most important infusion of weapons to the rebels came in the summer of 2013, when Saudi Arabia sent Chinese HJ-8 guided missiles, which aided the rebels in blocking a regime offensive to open a land route between West Aleppo and its northern countryside. The HJ-8’s also helped the rebels capture Khan al-Asal, a suburb west of the city, and the Minigh airbase, which had been under siege for almost an entire year. However, these advances were by no means breakthroughs and had only a minor impact on the larger battlefield.

The more interesting question here then should be, what were the goals of the states sponsoring the rebellion. Individual sponsors not directly connected to the region’s powers, of which there were many, usually had stronger religious and political objectives, though they did not have the same finances or influence that states would have had. In many cases, support for the rebellion was more aimed at putting pressure on the government as opposed to toppling it. The most interesting case, in my opinion, is Turkey. Why, after over a decade of opening up to the Assad regime, did Turkey so dramatically choose to support the armed opposition?

I still do not have a particularly insightful answer. Worries about refugee flows and Turkish irredentist desires to reclaim “lost territories” are interesting but don’t really give a fully satisfying answer. Putting pressure on the regime is one thing, but to what end in this case? As the revolution progressed, Assad increasingly ceded Kurdish-majority areas of Syria to the People’s Protection Units (YPG), a Kurdish militia strongly associated with the PKK, with whom Turkey has fought a long and bitter war. However, the Assad regime’s tacit support for the YPG was, outside of manpower issues the army was facing, in response to its fears that Turkey was fueling the uprising like it had with Hanano’s revolt almost 100 years earlier. Plus, Turkey’s decision to abandon the rebellion against Assad and focus on the YPG only came in earnest in 2016. Again, I cannot produce a satisfying answer.

Regarding the Shabiha, I would first point one to “Shabiha Forever” by Gregory Waters and Kayla Koontz, as it provides an incredibly intricate framework of how pro-government militias in Syria operated and continue to operate. However, for the purposes of this post, I will focus more on the simplifications the media gave regarding the Shabiha, a term that quickly became a catch-all for pro-government forces not directly associated with the Syrian army. In many cases, the media gave the impression that the Shabiha were almost always Alawites sent to put down protests. For context, the Assad family are Alawites, a religious group generally found in the mountainous regions of Syria’s coastal governorates. This misconception was part of a larger trend of overplaying the sectarian nature of the Syrian conflict.

Sectarianism was most pronounced, at least before 2013 (when Iranian-backed Shiite militias entered the battlefield), in Homs and the coastal regions, as these areas are home to many Alawites living alongside a substantial Sunni population. However, in regions like Aleppo, among others, where the presence of Alawites is quite limited, this level of analysis is unhelpful. To haphazardly quote Ghaith Abdul-Ahed, “who were the Ba’athists in Basra?” Though there are some reports to the contrary, the Shabiha in Aleppo were overwhelmingly drawn from poor Sunni populations, in some cases the exact same populations that rose up against the regime in the first place. Better sourced reports often reference the Berri family (sometimes called the Berri “tribe” but this is unhelpful terminology) in Aleppo’s Bab al-Neirab neighborhood as being the backbone of regime plain-clothed enforcers.

And this is true, the regime did draw from the Berri family, and others like the Mido family in Sheikh Said. However, this does not mean that all of the Berri family backed the regime. Though the regime purposefully enflamed tribal, ethnic, or sectarian conflict across Syria, it is impossible to simply “win over” an entire tribe, some of which consist of tens of thousands of members. Different sides in the conflict may have heavily recruited from specific tribes, clans, or families, but one cannot just win the loyalty of an entire social group (what researchers often call solidarity networks) via bribing its sheikh. Historically, the regime did rely on the support of tribal sheikhs to ensure its control of specific regions of Syria, but this actually weakened tribal solidarity, especially when younger members of a specific tribe were inclined toward the revolution.

Like all societies, Syria can be divided along several lines, such as tribe, ethnicity, sect, class, region, generation, and gender. However, none of these things, at least on their own, are all that predicative of individual behavior. Sure, a poor rural Sunni Arab from Aleppo’s countryside would likely be more supportive of the revolution than say a wealthy Christian living in Aleppo city, but these are highly specific circumstances and is already prone to simplifications. What about the distinction between poor rural Sunni Arabs in the northern and western countryside versus poor rural Sunni Arabs from the southern and eastern countryside, where protests against the regime were far less frequent or intense? What about Christians in eastern Syria, though a minority of Syrian Christians, who also worked against the regime?

One can always make generalizations, but they rarely illuminate the underlying dynamics of how conflict functions. The best predictor of one’s political standing in Syria is their direct relationship to the regime itself. Quoting “Shabiha Forever,” the authors cite Ali Jassem’s work on the Shabiha movement in Aleppo, writing that “local militias formed and functioned on the basis of both ‘communitarian and personal networks within the state institutions.’” Though some commentators pointed to Alawites from the coast or Shiites from Nubl and Zahra in the northern countryside, the reality is simply far more complex, and I have not even discussed class distinctions.

None of this to say that sectarianism or tribal affiliations are not important. Rather, it is imperative to point out that they alone do not effectively explain patterns of mobilization on any side of the conflict nor the dynamics of the conflict itself.

On a related note, the media still, to this day, often mischaracterizes the Kurdish-Arab split in the conflict. For instance, the Syrian Democratic Forces, a US-backed coalition between the YPG and anti-ISIS rebel groups, is often erroneously referred to as “the Kurds.” The Syrian revolution fully mobilized Syrian Kurdish society in a myriad of different movements. Kurdish politics and identity, which the Ba’athists had sought to repress, flourished in the wake of the Syrian Revolution. The YPG, though eventually becoming the dominant Kurdish actor in the conflict, began as one of many Kurdish militias. Indeed, Kurds fought for the YPG, for the opposition, for other Kurdish groups, and for ISIS. Over time, yes, Syria’s Kurdish population was pushed toward the YPG and subsequently the SDF, but this completely glosses over the variance found within Kurdish politics.

But, alas, this post is way too long, and I am leaving out so much additional information. Ultimately, I understand that this is all likely very boring and granular to you, dear readers, and I would, frankly, be impressed if you have made it this far. My main goal here was to demonstrate just how complex the Syrian conflict has been, and quite literally what happened in Aleppo and its environs in the first 16 months of a 13-year-long conflict. Revolutions come and go, often failing to achieve what they set out to. The revolution in Aleppo began slowly, perhaps slower than it did in other parts of Syria, but once the ball got rolling there was no stopping it. The city’s future is unwritten, and one never knows what will happen. Perhaps one day, when the Assad family has fallen, Aleppo will once again flourish like it did during many points in its history. We can only hope that we live long enough to see such days.