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The Lasting Relevance of the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Case of Syria

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by Etfa Khurshid Mirza

Unexploded barrel bombs allegedly dropped by government helicopters are pictured here in Idlib, Syria in 2015 (Image credit: Getty Images)

 

A history of conventions, agreements, and treaties runs throughout human civilisation. The 19th and 20th Centuries witnessed a rise in such conventions, thereby paving the way to cap burgeoning conflicts globally. Yet, despite such mechanisms being implemented, the world still witnesses many of the deadliest wars, with toxic chemicals being a primary weapon of choice. The poison gasses of the Great War and the atomic bomb that settled the Second World War left many casualties in its wake; with the former compelling world leaders to negotiate a new convention that sought to prohibit the deployment of Chemical Weapons (CW). 


Being largely non-binding, an ongoing effort to ban the use of CW can be discerned since at least the 17th Century. It is only starting from the late 19th Century onwards that formal agreements were made between states. The Hague Declaration of 1899 banned the use of asphyxiating or deleterious gasses such as nitrogen or noble gases. Then, in 1907, the Hague Convention on Land Warfare banned the use of poisonous weapons. The Geneva Protocol signed of 1925 further prohibited the use of poisonous gases and bacterial methods of warfare. In so doing, these Hague conventions laid out the rule of war and the prohibition of CW in war; while the Geneva conventions sought to protect the victims of war. This was followed by the Convention on Prohibition or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons in 1980 which prohibited conventional weapons that were deemed to be inhumane. Nonetheless, despite such efforts, chemical weapons (CW) were still used during conflicts.

 

Between the two World Wars, the use of CW was reported in many conflicts: Spain used chemical weapons in Morocco during the Rif War between 1923 to 1926 war. Italy, in turn, deployed chemical weapons to Libya in 1930 and again to Ethiopia in 1935, all resulting in heavy casualties. Since 1945, millions of casualties were caused by such means. After the Second World War, despite acquiring nuclear weapons, the US and the former Soviet Union continued the development of CW. The US used anti-plant agents in the Vietnam War of 1961-73, while Egypt used chemical weapons during the Yemen war of 1963-67. Iraq similarly aimed its CW capabilities towards the Kurds during the Iran-Iraq War of 1988. 

 

Extensive use of CW in various conflicts despite the earlier agreements signed as part of the Hague and Geneva Conventions necessitated the formation of a comprehensive treaty that can cap the production, use, and stockpiling of such toxic weaponry. Therefore, negotiations for the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) began in early 1968. While initially developing at a protracted pace, these talks eventually gathered momentum after the Iran-Iraq war of 1988. This war, however ironically, also generated interest among Middle Eastern countries for the acquisition of CW. This sentiment ultimately expedited the negotiations, leading to the conclusion of CWC in 1992. The CWC formally entered into force in 1997, with its implementation monitored by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).


The CWC aims to ban chemical weapons in terms of their development, production, stockpiling, and use. It is the most comprehensive disarmament treaty to date having 193 member states. Since its formation, the most important cases of use of CW were reported in Syria. In 2012 and 2013, the Assad Regime used these weapons against opposition forces, killing around 1,400 civilians. The use of chlorine gas in attacks has also been documented during attacks in 2017 and 2018. Already in 2014, the OPCW sent its Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) to the country to investigate whether CW were used in Syria and if so, to determine the type of weapons used. 


Since then, the OPCW’s FFM has investigated over eighty suspected attacks and collected evidence in sixteen of those attacks. Still, it is important to note that the FFM does not carry the mandate to investigate which party holds the responsibility. To determine which party is to be held accountable the OPCW-UN Joint Investigation Mechanism (JIM) was established in 2015. This mechanism concluded that the Syrian government was responsible for four CW attacks, while the Islamic State (IS) was responsible for two. Despite such useful insights, however, the JIM findings were unfortunately challenged by Russia; and after its veto in the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) regarding its extension, the JIM ceased to exist. 


In March 2019, another Investigation and Identification Team (IIT) was finalised after repeated attempts by the U.S and other states to carry out investigations based on shreds of evidence and to determine responsibility for CW use by the Syrian Arab Republic. The IIT initiated its investigation in June 2019 and focused on the events for which FFM had ascertained the use or likely use of CW by the Syrian government but had not yet reached a final conclusion. The IIT published its first report: ‘Addressing the Threat from Chemical Weapons Use’ on 8 April 2020, acknowledging that the Syrian government has used CW against its people.


The three key events specified in the report occurred after the Syrian accession to the CWC. Before, in 2016, the OPCW confirmed the destruction of all CW declared by Syria. The incident of 24 March 2017 was the first such event that established the use of sarin gas in Syria after it had acceded to the CWC. On the Syrian city of Ltamenah, three different attacks were carried out, on 24 and 30 March, a fighter jet of the Syrian Arab Air Force dropped M-4000 aerial bombs containing sarin and on 25 March a Syrian military helicopter flying from Hama airbase dropped cylinders containing chlorine gas. 


Sarin is a nerve agent, whereas chlorine is a legal industrial gas; yet both their usage as CW is a war crime. The IIT based its conclusions from the information gathered through interviews, analyses of samples obtained from attacked sites, remnants of ammunition, and other relevant material. The team also expressed its concern that the Syrian government did not cooperate in its investigation and denied access to several sites. As such, the IIT concluded that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the Syrian government had used CW on its citizens in the attacks carried out in March 2017.


Following the findings of this report, the Executive Council of OPCW, which consists of forty-one members from five regional groups, decided the use of CW in Syria through voting on 9 July 2020. The Council condemned the use of CW by the Syrian government in 2017 and as per paragraph 36 of Article VIII of the CWC, the Syrian government is required to declare all the relevant details of the used CW mentioned in the report and all other CW that it possesses with details of production facilities, as well as resolve all of the remaining issues regarding the previous declaration within ninety days. If it fails to comply, the Council will take appropriate action against the Syrian government as per paragraph 2 of Article X11 of the Convention. 


Considering its activities towards destroying chemical weapons and as the overseeing body for the CWC, which is considered the most successful disarmament treaty to date; the OPCW is playing a significant role as a watchdog. In recognition of its efforts; it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2013. The role of the OPCW is becoming more pertinent with the growing chemical industry and its use in both civil and military applications and, therefore, can play an active role in assisting the state parties for the legislation and effective enforcement in its implementation. Decisions in respect of CWC implementation for long-term governance are also needed. However, technological developments and political interests are increasingly pressuring the treaty. Timely measures and special efforts are presently required to counter these challenges and to prevent the future use of chemical weapons anywhere in the world taking lessons from the use of CW in the past and, most recently, in Syria.

Etfa Khurshid Mirza is a Research Fellow at Centre for Aerospace & Security Studies (CASS), Pakistan. Her area of specialisation is Nuclear and Strategic Affairs. She can be found on Twitter @sky_limiter.

 

War’s Invisible Killer: We Must Not Forget Populations Affected by Conflict during COVID-19

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by Charlotte Hooker

A Syrian boy poses for a picture during an awareness workshop on coronavirus at a camp for displaced people in Atme town in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province (Image Credit: Aaref Watad/AFP)

 

Governments across the globe are acting on the informed assumption that deaths related to COVID-19 will rise so long as the number of cases exceeds the capacity of domestic healthcare services. The necessary response is compulsory social isolation and strict hygiene measures. In China, Europe, and the US, public places have been closed, mass gatherings banned, and public awareness campaigns have been initiated to offer guidance on how to wash one’s hands effectively. But in war-torn countries, where governments and healthcare systems have collapsed, running water is scarce, and soap is an unaffordable luxury, these measures are near impossible to implement. COVID-19,  just like the countless diseases before it, will “ruthlessly exploit the conditions created by war.” Without a collective global response that accounts for the needs of conflict states and its displaced populations, the consequences of COVID-19 could be catastrophic.

The connection between war and disease is well documented in history. Before the 20th Century, combatants were more likely to die from disease than they were from battle wounds. In the Crimean War, for example, British soldiers died from sickness almost eight times more than they did from conflict-induced injuries (Pennington, 2019). As medicine advanced and basic hygiene practices improved, the emergence and spread of infectious disease amongst combatants was curbed considerably. However, this did little to contain the influenza pandemic of 1918–1919. The pandemic coincided with the mass migration of soldiers back to their home countries and resulted in the death of between 20 million–100 million people worldwide. This highlighted the burden that war placed on the health of civilian populations, which has only worsened as densely populated urban settings have become the primary hosts of major hostilities (Haraoui, 2018).

In Syria, healthcare services became an integrated part of the conflict. Between 2011 and 2014 alone, 57% of public hospitals were damaged and 160 doctors were jailed or killed. Vaccination coverage fell from 91% in 2010 to 45% in 2013 contributing to the re-emergence of polio, measles, and cutaneous leishmaniasis in Syria and neighbouring countries, particularly amongst displaced populations. COVID-19 presents the greatest threat to these people.

According to the UN High Commission on Refugees, there are currently 70.8 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, most of whom live in deplorable living conditions. On the Greek island of Lesbos, the Moria refugee camp “has one water point for every 1,300 people and one toilet for every 200 people,” says Apostolos Veizis, Director of Medical Operational Unit at Doctors Beyond Borders for Greece. In Idlib, refugee camps in north-western Syria, there are 1.4 doctors per 10,000 people, only 100 adult ventilators and fewer than 200 intensive care unit beds. Fatima Um Ali, a Syrian refugee, and her family have avoided death on multiple occasions since fleeing the Syrian conflict, “but what now,” she says, “we are going to be afraid of [COVID-19].” Without running water and soap, and no chance of isolating her family of 16 in the crowded settlements of Idlib, it will be difficult for Fatima’s family to dodge death once more.

Displaced populations are often dependent upon humanitarian assistance for survival. This is because healthcare services in conflict zones have long since collapsed, and any remaining government regime usually lacks funds or geographic reach to mobilise the necessary health, food, or economic resources. Bangladesh, for example, relies upon youth activists to educate Rohingya refugees from Myanmar on the importance of proper hygiene. Even in camps that are better off, conditions are ripe for COVID-19 to run rampant. According to Muriel Tschopp, Jordan Country Director at the Norwegian Refugee Council, the quasi-lockdown in Jordan in response to COVID-19 has grounded all Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), preventing them from providing daily service assistance, and reducing cash opportunities for refugees as local organisations are forced to halt business.

That is not to say that action has stopped entirely. In a recent interview, Muriel Tschopp explains that they have been using existing mechanisms, such as their database of refugee contact details, to contact those living in temporary settlements to provide guidance on how to limit the spread of disease. Similar action has to be taken by other NGOs. Doctors Beyond Borders representatives explain that they have been working with displaced peoples living in the camps to ensure the populations have access to information that will prevent disease spread and reduce panic. But this is not enough.

What is required is an international commitment to the protection of basic needs and care of conflict-affected populations. In a virtual press conference on March 23, 2020, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for “an immediate global ceasefire in all corners of the world.” Warring parties in some states, including Yemen and Cameroon, have agreed to the ceasefire in order to allow focus on the fight against COVID-19. This is a good start. Now, states across the world must mobilise funds to support the provision of basic resources such as water sanitation systems, hygiene kits, and food over the coming months, with immediate effect—if there is one lesson the world can learn from the 1918 flu, it is that early and sustained action saves lives.

Some believe that it is the duty of the government to prioritise its own citizens. The Trump Administration is proposing a USD$3 billion cut in funding for global health programmes, including halving its funding for the World Health Organisation who currently leads the fight against COVID-19. But if we turn our focus inward, and let fear be used as ammunition to stigmatise those who are not ‘one of us,’ we will have failed the test of humanity. A failure to address the basic needs of conflict-affected populations will mean thousands of needless deaths and this will not be contained to displaced populations. Disease knows no borders, so the only way to prevent the spread across temporary settlements, neighbouring states, and beyond is to ensure universal preparedness. A collective global response that accounts for all human life is crucial in the fight against COVID-19. The world has come together in the past to fight common evils. We can do it again.

Charlotte is studying for a MA in International Relations at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. Prior to postgraduate study, Charlotte studied Politics and Economics BSc at the University of Southampton where she was awarded the highest dissertation mark in the discipline. During her undergraduate studies, she completed a Year in Employment at Ofgem, supporting work on domestic energy policy. Her research interests include space security, cybersecurity, energy security and the role of industry in the fight against climate change, and the international political economy and security implications of a rising China.

Franchise Jihad: The Role of the Bedouin for ISIL in Sinai

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by Joseph Jarnecki

A snapshot of life for civilians in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula – a region wracked by conflict between Sinai’s ISIL affiliate and Egyptian security forces (Image Credit: 2017 CGTN)

The fall of Baghouz – the last bastion of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) – was meant to mark the end of the US-led coalition’s war. Instead, the battle was yet another milestone in the evolution of the self-appointed Caliphate. Stripped of contiguous territory, the pseudo-state now pursues its global Jihad by franchising its own brand of militancy to those groups it established, supported, or co-opted whilst at its height.[i]

The grouping Wilayat Sinai (WS) – or “Sinai Province” – which operates in Egypt’s easternmost region, the Sinai Peninsula, is an exemplar franchise. Swearing allegiance to ISIL in 2014, the group originally coalesced in 2011 from a diverse array of militant outfits under the name Ansar Bayat al-Maqdis (ABM – “the Partisans of Jerusalem”).[ii] Spearheading Sinai’s militant activity since its founding, WS’s campaign alone has inflicted over 1,200 casualties on security forces since 2014, leading Human Rights Watch (HRW) to classify the Peninsula as host to a Non-Intentional Armed Conflict (NIAC).[iii] Appreciating this context then, a broadened understanding of the enabling factors behind WS is fundamental to tackling both intra-Egypt militancy and the next steps of ISIL.

In this article, I will highlight the harmful nature of regime governance and its targeting of Sinai’s majority Bedouin population. Historic marginalisation of the Bedouin by Cairo, I believe, has been crucial to creating a climate in which WS could emerge and thrive.

Sinai’s Bedouin population: a rough outline of tribal land (Image credit: 2017 Discover Sinai and 2009 Clinton Bailey)

The return of Sinai and the reincorporation of the 15-20 Bedouin tribes whose lands criss-cross the Sinai/Israel/Palestine border in 1982 was a hollow victory for those Bedouin who gathered intelligence and facilitated Egyptian espionage whilst under Israeli occupation.[iv] The Cairo government pushed a narrative that quickly branded the Bedouin as Israeli ‘collaborators’ for taking available economic opportunities whilst under Israeli rule.[v] This perception has since been institutionalised and cements Egyptian nationalist sentiment wherein Bedouin identity is synonymous with primitiveness, criminality, and terrorism.[vi] A comment made by an Egyptian security official operating in Sinai that ‘the only good Bedouin is a dead Bedouin’ typifies this attitude.[vii]

Perceptions of Bedouin as “non-Egyptian” – emphasised by Cairo – then legitimise discriminatory policies which formalise the Bedouin as second-class citizens and Egypt as the Bedouin’s ‘fourth colonizer’.[viii]  Strategies reflecting this perception include the confiscation of over 200,000 acres of tribal land since Egyptian reoccupation, stripping the Bedouin of access to an agrarian livelihood.[ix] Meanwhile, this stolen land is given to Nile Valley settlers – as part of government plans to ‘Egyptianise’ Sinai [x] – or sold to state-linked tourism developers in South Sinai, promoting an industry in which Bedouins are barred from participating.[xi] Moreover, beyond the private sector, the Bedouin are excluded from the security forces and until 2007 were unable to vote.[xii] Both these measures exemplify the contempt with which the Bedouin are held by the government. Specific day-to-day governance in Sinai extends this contempt to broader securitisation of the Bedouin (wherein speech acts by the Egyptian government transform Bedouin communities from political constituencies into security threats)[xiii] with arbitrary mass arrests and forcible disappearances becoming ‘part of daily life’.[xiv]

Many Bedouins who are disaffected with government and are cut adrift from legitimate economic opportunities have in desperation turned to clandestine alternatives. Tribes, especially those with strong Gazan links and with lands which straddle the Israeli-Egyptian border now smuggle arms, drugs, and, more infrequently, militants. The 2008 escalation between Hamas and Israel as well as the imposition of an Egyptian supported embargo of Gaza has only increased this activity. Estimates now put the annual revenue from smuggling at $300 to $500 million [xv] and in just 2008 an expansion of smuggling and its related activities shrunk the estimated formal and informal unemployment rate of Rafah – a large North Sinai town – from 50% to 20%.[xvi]

As a result of smuggling, ‘sophisticated and heavily armed gangs’[xvii] have emerged which provide economic opportunities and a chance of retaliation against the security forces. At the same time, because of their inability to provide similar incentives, tribal leaders have lost influence, especially over ‘new generations of disgruntled youth’.[xviii] These gangs smuggle for WS who have used ISIL’s funds and its ideational authority to source sophisticated weaponry and recruit approximately 1,500 combatants.[xix] Some of these fighters are young Bedouins who work the smuggling lanes and are either radicalised or lured by the chance to get back at security forces.[xx] Examples of WS Bedouin are few, however, with the ISIL affiliate being mostly composed of deserters from Egyptian security forces, ‘persistent local insurgents,’ and foreign veteran insurgents.[xxi] The prevalence of the last category within WS means local guides and boltholes, crucial to operating an insurgency that relies on asymmetrical information to combat superior armed forces, are needed and are most easily sourced from amongst the Bedouin.

In the  ‘880 attacks between the beginning of 2014 and the end of 2016’ [xxii] carried out by WS, Bedouin assistance has been indispensable, providing local knowledge without which the militant’s hit-and-run tactics would fail in the face of an estimated ‘500:1 [military] power’ imbalance.[xxiii] Their provision of auxiliary support by procuring weapons and personnel whilst also acting as guides and maintaining safe havens demonstrates the true cost of their marginalisation for the Egyptian government.

Despite the generation’s worth of persecution faced by the Bedouin, the current status quo does not have to continue. The relationship between the Bedouin, even those in charge of smuggling operations, and WS is not positive. Replicating ISIL strategies, WS has sought to seize areas and enforce their interpretation of Islam.[xxiv] To this end, they operate ‘multiple detention sites where they interrogate detained civilians,’ including Bedouins.[xxv] Additionally, extensive attacks on Sinai’s Christian population ostracise some Bedouin like the Jebeliya tribe, who has deep-rooted historical links to Sinai’s Christian orthodox population. Moreover, a WS crackdown on cigarette and marijuana smuggling damages relations with those same Bedouin smugglers on whom they rely.[xxvi]

In light of this, the door is not closed for a rapprochement between Bedouin tribal leaders and Egypt’s government, though the intricacies of this process will require careful handling. The first step must be to reincorporate Sinai as an integral part of Egypt’s identity and to acknowledge the Bedouin’s place within the Peninsula. By legitimising their status as citizens and bringing arbitrary arrests to an end, the government may win over those Bedouin who are on the front-line of insurgent violence. Reconciliation with the Bedouin, however, will also require an end to their economic exclusion from agriculture and tourism. As Bedouins integrate within the legitimate economy, WS will be deprived of the auxiliary support on which they must rely to survive.  Whilst Sinai only offers a snapshot into the future of ISIL, it is an important one. A central lesson the conflict offers is that when a franchise of ISIL emerges, we must look beyond its links to the self-appointed Caliphate and examine the unique structural conditions which facilitate its existence where it arises.

Joseph is a third-year BA student in International Relations at the King’s War Studies Department. His main areas of focus are conflict and (in)security in the Middle East and North Africa, particularly Egypt, and on theories of subjectivity within International Relations. His dissertation project aims to incorporate these areas of interest when investigating how critical military studies – specifically its reappraisal of militarism – contribute to analyses of formerly colonised spaces. Before joining King’s Joseph interned with the Huffington Post and established a school magazine on a diverse range of subjects. You can follow him on Twitter @Jarnecki.

[i] Michael Hart, ‘The Troubled History of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula’, International Policy Digest, 2016 <https://intpolicydigest.org/2016/05/30/the-troubled-history-of-egypt-s-sinai-peninsula/> [accessed 10 June 2019].

[ii] Iffat Idris, Sinai Conflict Analysis (Britghton: Institute of Development Studies, 2 March 2017), p. 3 <https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/123456789/13052> [accessed 29 May 2019].

[iii] Human Rights Watch, ‘If You Are Afraid for Your Lives, Leave Sinai!’: Egyptian Security Forces and ISIS-Affiliate Abuses in North Sinai (Human Rights Watch, 2019), pp. 2 & 35 <https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/egypt0519_web3_0.pdf>.

[iv] Sahar F. Aziz, ‘Rethinking Counterterrorism in the Age of ISIS: Lessons from Sinai’, Nebraska Law Review, 95.2 (2016), 308–65 (p. 322).

[v] Oliver Walton, Conflict, Exclusion and Livelihoods in the Sinai Region of Egypt (Governance and Social Development Resource Centre, 20 September 2012), p. 7 <http://www.gsdrc.org/docs/open/hdq834.pdf> [accessed 6 November 2019].

[vi] Sahar F Aziz, De-Securitizing Counterterrorism in the Sinai Peninsula (Washington and Doha: Brookings Institution, April 2017), pp. 13–14 <https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/de-securitizing-counterterrorism-in-the-sinai-peninsula_aziz_english.pdf> [accessed 3 June 2019]; Idris, pp. 8–10.

[vii] Wikileaks, Internal Security in Sinai–an Update (Egypt Cairo, 14 March 2005) <https://search.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/05CAIRO1978_a.html> [accessed 1 August 2019].

[viii] Angela Joya and Evrim Gormus, ‘State Power and Radicalization in Egypt’s Sinai’, The Researcher: The Canadian Journal for Middle East Studies, 1.1 (2015), 42–40 (p. 52).

[ix] Sahar F. Aziz, p. 327.

[x] Joya and Gormus, p. 55.

[xi] Idris, p. 10.

[xii] Walton.

[xiii] Ole Wæver, Securitization and Desecuritization (Centre for Peace and Conflict Research Copenhagen, 1993).

[xiv] Human Rights Watch, p. 3.

[xv] Idris, p. 10; Sahar F Aziz, p. 3.

[xvi] Sahar F. Aziz, p. 337.

[xvii] Walton, p. 6.

[xviii] Sahar F. Aziz, p. 328.

[xix] Hart.

[xx] A Batrawy, ‘Egypt’s Most Extreme Hardliners in Sinai Revival’, Associated Press, 2012 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/10392343>.

[xxi] Omar Ashour, ISIS and Wilayat Sinai: Complex Networks of Insurgency under Authoritarian Rule, DGAP Kompakt (Berlin: Forschungsinstitut der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik, 2016), p. 8 (p. 6) <https://www.ssoar.info/ssoar/bitstream/handle/document/54270/ssoar-2016-ashour-ISIS_and_Wilayat_Sinai_Complex.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y&lnkname=ssoar-2016-ashour-ISIS_and_Wilayat_Sinai_Complex.pdf>.

[xxii] Omar Ashour, ‘Sinai’s Insurgency: Implications of Enhanced Guerilla Warfare’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 42.6 (2019), 541–58 (p. 546) <https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2017.1394653>.

[xxiii] Ashour, ISIS and Wilayat Sinai: Complex Networks of Insurgency under Authoritarian Rule, pp. 5–6.

[xxiv] Human Rights Watch, p. 9.

[xxv] Human Rights Watch, p. 37.

[xxvi] Idris, p. 4.

 

Feature – Shabiha in Syria and Titushki in Ukraine as Elements of Authoritarian Control

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by Daria Platonova

15 July 2019

“Titushki” on their way to Mariinskiy Park (Image credit: Unian)

Introduction

Incumbent authoritarian regimes[1] can use a variety of tools to protect the status quo and their hold on power. Among those tools is the deployment of groups of armed civilians to disperse political protest that threatens to dislodge the regime and disrupt that status quo. A comparison can be drawn between the Syrian Shabiha and Titushki in Ukraine as elements of the regimes’ responses to political protest. Shabiha in Syria was a complex phenomenon described in most general terms as numbers of pro-Asad[2]  individuals who attacked anti-government protestors from March 2011, at the start of the Syrian uprising, and then became “pro-state … militias, which acted in an auxiliary capacity to government forces”.

Titushki in Ukraine were groups of individuals reportedly hired by state actors, including local elites, to attack Euromaidan protestors[3] in Kyiv and Ukrainian regions from November 2013 to January 2014. In this article, I demonstrate the similarities and differences between the provenance of and the deployment purposes of Shabiha and Titushki. Through this comparison, I argue that the systematic use of these groups is in function of the regime’s strength and the ruler’s expectations about the regime’s viability.

The similarities between the regimes of Yanukovych and al-Asad

The attempts made by Viktor Yanukovych to introduce an authoritarian regime in Ukraine resembles Bashar al-Asad’s consolidation of an already existing authoritarian regime which he inherited from his father, Hafez al-Asad. Both presidents cultivated a patronage system based around a specific minority group. Yanukovych relied on the Donetsk clan, originating from his home region of Donetsk, and the political-economic conglomerate of the Party of Regions, also originating from Donetsk.

Similar processes of over-concentration of patronage took place under Asad, who came to rely on “Alawi familial, tribal and communitarian base” and, specifically, on the Asad-Makhlouf family clan. Like Asad, who increasingly surrounded himself by an increasingly narrow clique of supporters, Yanukovych later in his presidency drew upon the support of his real and metaphorical family.

File photo of Syrian President Bashar Assad, right, with his brother Maher, left (Photo credit: AP)

Both presidents recognised the importance of the security service in maintaining their regimes, with Asad inheriting a vast security apparatus and a strong army from his father. Yanukovych attempted to build a strong security force, appointing his supporters to the key position of the Head of the Security Service of Ukraine and investing heavily in a special police force Berkut.

Bashar al-Asad followed arising challenges to his regime through by imprisoning challengers and severely restricting and repressing civil society. In Ukraine, Yanukovych imprisoned his key rival, Yuliya Tymoshenko, from a competing network of Batkivshchina Party, while exercising increasing control over the Ukrainian media and opposition groups. Viktor Yanukovych’s rule was the ultimate culmination of the domination of eastern Ukrainian forces in Ukrainian politics, which, on the surface, created an expectation that the regime was going to stay. Asad’s strong reliance on the Alawite minority inherited from the three-decade long rule of his father created similar expectations.

We would therefore expect that if in Ukraine the regime was truly authoritarian, as described by many analysts, it would have responded to the challenge of the Euromaidan similarly to how Asad responded to the Syrian uprising, that is: with severe and more or less systematic repression. However, how Shabiha and Titushki were deployed demonstrates that the regime in Ukraine was not truly authoritarian. The major flaw in the regime was that it did not believe in its own durability.

Shabiha in Syria

The Shabiha who came to prominence in March 2011 started as Popular Committees – volunteer vigilante groups originating in Latakia and Homs, who wanted to keep their neighbourhoods free from anti-government protestors. Not unlike Titushki in Ukraine, they consisted of volunteers “who were often unemployed young men” and were initially armed with basic equipment such as sticks. Similarly to Titushki, the motivations to join these Popular Committees and then Shabiha varied widely. Nakkash documented motivations ranging from pragmatic-economic concerns to strong feelings of hostility towards the Sunni community.

However, as Asad’s regime was much more cohesive and held strong expectations about its own durability compared to Yanukovych’s regime, shabiha became one of the key elements of Asad’s strategy to salvage the regime. As Michael Kerr argues, the regime’s “civil war strategy was simply to survive, militarily, at any cost”.

Thus, throughout the province of Homs at least, Shabiha quickly came to be used strategically and systematically by Mukhabarat (security service) to prevent anti-regime mobilisation throughout spring to summer 2011. They were involved in killing protestors from the start, such as on 26 and 27 of March 2011 in Latakia and Baniyas. It was reported that Shabiha were numerous numbering 10,000. Shabiha later morphed into “armed paramilitary group or militia with links to the army, the secret service or the Ba’ath Party”.

Families gathered around bodies of victims killed by violence that, according to anti-regime activists, was carried out by government forces in Tremseh, Syria (Photo credit: AP)

In contrast to Titushki, Shabiha came to be strongly identified with the state in Syria. Lund, for example, writes on shabiha formations as being directly sanctioned and legitimised by the state when the protests began in March 2011: “the state encouraged the formation of local gangs, often composed of Alawis or other minority groups that felt threatened by the Sunni-dominated uprising”. Not only that, Shabiha came to be identified with the wealthy business owners in the local communities. Nakkash writes on a proud owner of a real estate business, in charge of about 200 Shabiha, who stated that “they “should be thankful for what I am doing”.

As the protests evolved into an insurgency, Asad’s regime mobilised a vast array of minorities, such as Christians and Shi’a, into Shabiha militias. The sheer diversity of pro-regime militia movement and the advent of the “National Defence Forces” drawing on shabiha demonstrated that, through a systematic and open recruitment and deployment of Shabiha, the regime created strong and durable expectations about itself.

Titushki in Ukraine

The use of Titushki in Ukraine demonstrated a highly unsystematic and reactive nature of Yanukovych’s regime. As mentioned above, Titushki were groups of young men, reportedly hired by the government to disperse Euromaidan protests. They were named after Vadym Titushko, a professional athlete, who was hired to and eventually prosecuted for attacking journalists in Bela Tserkva, near Kyiv, in May 2013.

Titushki were often members of local boxing and fight clubs, and it was reported that coaches and entire clubs participated in the attacks on the Euromaidan, especially in Kyiv. Titushki not only dispersed protestors but also damaged their equipment and vehicles. Like their Syrian counterparts, there were those who held strong Anti-Maidan convictions and considered Euromaidan protestors to be “traitors and hooligans”.

Vadym Titushko in Kyiv, 18 May 2013 (Photo credit: Umoloda)

Here however the similarities between Shabiha and Titushki end and reveal the fatal flaws in Yanukovych’s regime. The major flaw of the regime was the lack of belief in its own durability. Unlike in Syria, where Shabiha came to consist of a broad variety of minorities, Titushki in Ukraine were groups of young unemployed people who were easily coopted due to their lack of employment. Reports claimed that titushki were being paid for attacking Euromaidan protestors because many of them were unemployed. According to these reports, some were paid 100 US dollars per day, with an additional fare for beatings.

In Ukrainian regions, such as Kharkiv region, Titushki were deployed to intimidate protestors rather than kill them, which signified that the regime seriously questioned its repressive capacity. Cataloguing of Euromaidan protests using opposition and pro-government press in Kharkiv and Donetsk cities indicates that the deployment of Titushki was highly unsystematic compared to what was taking place in Syria. In Kharkiv, half of the Euromaidan protests were followed by Titushki attacks; in Donetsk, this number was even less.

If in Syria, the attacks were deadly from the start, in Ukrainian cities, followed a gradually more violent trajectory, which however never became systematically deadly: in Kharkiv, for example, first, Titushki attacked property of the Euromaidan protestors, then the groups of “unknowns” – a label which often described Titushki – attacked individual organisers, and then they began attacking entire groups of protestors using more sophisticated equipment. In Donetsk, most Euromaidan protests were followed by verbal attacks and highly unsystematic violence by Titushki. All this was taking place before the Titushki attacks in Ukrainian regions suddenly tapered off in late February 2014, just before Yanukovych’s flight. Additionally, Titushki were not as well-equipped as their Syrian counterparts.

Finally, as if to demonstrate that the regime was afraid of itself and unsure of its own survival, it is impossible to trace with certainty who hired Titushki at the regional level. In Kharkiv city, there was only indirect evidence implicating the incumbent supporters of Yanukovych, the mayor Hennadiy Kernes and the governor Mykhailo Dobkin. For example, they issued a number of ambiguous statements, endorsing Titushki, but there is no systematic evidence that they hired them. Only after the “Russian Spring” protests were in full swing, the Ministry of the Interior of Ukraine released some evidence that titushki were hired by a local oligarch Serhiy Kurchenko. This was after Kurchenko fled Ukraine.

Conclusion

In this article, I have argued that if an authoritarian regime is truly authoritarian, one of the elements of political protest control, such as the use of armed civilians, should be systematic, violent and clearly linked to the state. Through the comparison between the use of Shabiha in Syria and Titushki in Ukraine, I have demonstrated the true nature of Yanukovych’s rule and questioned whether it was truly authoritarian. More specifically, I have shown that the highly unsystematic deployment of Titushki and their unclear links with the state actors demonstrate that Yanukovych’s regime either did not believe in its own viability or failed to implement the lessons of the Orange Revolution. In this way, one can characterise Ukraine as a highly fluid polity where no regime can truly stabilise itself.

Daria is a PhD student at King’s College London. Her research focuses on violence and the unfolding of conflict across several regions in eastern Ukraine, 2013 – 2014. She also leads one of the Causes of War seminars in the War Studies Department. Prior to joining King’s, she worked as a teacher. She graduated with a degree in History from the University of Cambridge in 2011. Her broader interests include European history, war studies, and interdisciplinary methods.

[1] While the authoritarian nature of Bashar al-Asad is not in doubt, we can consider Viktor Yanukovych’s regime as a regime with authoritarian tendencies. Hafez sought to build an authoritarian state – Kerr, intro 10, History of autocratic rule there 174, adaptable autocrats

[2] I used the standardised spelling of Asad, instead of Assad, as found in Kerr, M. and Larkin, C. (eds) The Alawis of Syria: War, Faith and Politics in the Levant (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2015).

[3] Euromaidan was at first a political protest against Viktor Yanukovych’s refusal to sign the EU Association Agreement. It later evolved into a general protest against Yanukovych’s government demanding its resignation.

 

Where Evil met its End

by

by Miles Vining

7 June 2019

(Miles Vining)

Our relief group provided humanitarian assistance to people fleeing the last stronghold of ISIS in Baghouz, Syria. In Feburary and March 2019 we fed over 25,000 and treated over 4,000 wounded. These were mostly ISIS families, a number of which were in critical condition from the fighting and air strikes in the city. Our positions were from the frontline on the bluffs above the Euphrates River east of the city back to the IDP collection points in the desert. While at these forward positions of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), there were numerous SDF casualties incurred from ISIS positions in the valley.

A month after ISIS was defeated, we entered the city of Baghouz. Our first venture was down the bluffs where we had previously taken cover. Underneath them we found the dugouts and cut-outs that numerous fighters had occupied during the battle. Evidence of airstrikes against them was clearly visible with the busted Kalashnikov rifles and twisted hulks in the craters that spanned the walking path next to the Euphrates. Civilians flooded through this path as did ISIS fighters. We found improvised ISIS claymores (complete with cloth carrying handles), and satchel charges held together by transparent tape strewn haphazardly on the ground, as if their former owners decided to ditch them in a hurry. Pointed out by some SDF fighters were the skeletal remains of a dead fighter, his now sun-bleached spine poking through the collar of his camouflage caliphate-issued fatigues. His skull was several feet from him, between the severed body lay the “black standard”, a nylon square of a flag with the caliphate’s slogans stencil-painted on it.

After our walk, we drove to the centre of the town of Baghouz, now completely empty of any life apart from the SDF forces that were stationed in it. During the battle, the area was filled with vehicles of all conceivable types, multiplying the size of the tiny hamlet of Baghouz by at least a factor of ten. Baghouz was a tiny town that become surrounded by a huge tent city during the battle. But in reality, we were only seeing a tiny city centre that had what was essentially a Syrian version of an enormous trailer park that developed around it. Everything and everyone that could be loaded onto a moving vehicle and driven from Raqqa to this little obscure corner of Syria was there, forming the likes of a tent and vehicle city that easily rivalled most music festival campouts in the United States and Europe.

Although we could not walk through the largest of the tent cities due to ongoing clearing operations, we were able to visit that small centre of Baghouz itself. Many of the bodies had been buried, but you could still smell them. And if you happened to have a stuffy nose, the swarms of flies left no doubt in anyone’s mind as to the amount of death and destruction that had occurred here. As we carefully picked our way through buildings and grass spaces once crawling with the remnants of the so-called Islamic state, we did not get the impression of a sort of deathly zombie land or ghost town. If anything, it seemed more like a town that might have had a hurricane come through and everyone simply left in a hurry, waiting somewhere else to come back and restart. There was not a feeling of sinister evil that one might have expected to be omnipresent in the very air molecules.

Then came the suicide belts and vests. We found them in refrigerators, tucked between bushes, strewn across dirt dugouts where families had lived. Poking out from beneath discarded clothes in the empty houses, there was even one sitting in the corner of a rooftop where we paused to eat lunch. One rough estimate we had was that we came across some component of a suicide vest every twenty meters or so. One surprise discovery was an IED manufacturing tent in an open field, components and raw materials still waiting to be stuffed into vests or satchel charges. As if the operator had suddenly realised a late-night soccer game was already twenty minutes into the broadcast and he needed to catch the play, never to return. Upon geospatial analysis of the coordinates of the site, we found out that the tent had been erected in late January. Another discovery was that of a clinic tent complete with sheet metal shelving units still stacked with unopened medicine boxes and vials. This location had apparently caught fire as evidenced by the charred remains of equipment and the burnt down canvas covering. Eerily and straight out of a horror movie was a medical reclining chair, bent upwards at an angle among the black ash of what was left of the tent.

We found so much ordinance among the various sites that at times it was comical. RPG warheads had been shattered to pieces and were laying in puddles as if a part of some olive drab toy kit that had bounced out of a toddler’s hands. Spent shell casings lay strewn among numerous houses, while more PG7 warheads were even completely intact. The SDF had been collecting discarded ordnance since the battle’s conclusion, with piles and piles of captured materiel in the courtyard of one of the houses, but there was still so much more to be picked up. There are many metrics for determining the evil that ISIS became during its reign of terror. Numbers of civilians killed or enslaved, prisoners tortured or beheaded. One of our post-caliphate metrics in Baghouz was stumbling upon suicide belts. Just like how fleeing passengers on a ship are handed life preservers, so did the last of the caliphate’s residents got handed suicide belts. But unfortunately to many in the West, the so-called Islamic State is already becoming a fading memory of a terrorist organization that tried and ultimately failed in its attempt at Islamic utopia. Hopefully what we found on the ground in Baghouz can be a reminder to those that this monster of a creation was tangible evidence of the evil that can still manifest itself among us today.

Miles Vining is a volunteer relief worker behind SDF lines in Baghouz.