Some have stopped self-identifying as bedouins although they preserve some version of the social structure. Many of the people who still self-identify as bedouins are settled in cities. Even though they may have a few sheep, they are no longer economically dependent on herding livestock.
Nomadism exists, although I prefer the term mobile herding. The exclusively nomadic lifestyle is very rare now. Almost all self-identified bedouins have a home somewhere, if only for the winter. Perhaps another 50 percent kept some sheep around their home or allowed them to be group herded. For example, a group of brothers could hire someone to move a flock that belongs to seven or eight different people.
How have Hafez and Bashar al-Assad dealt with the bedouin communities? Many bedouins were forced to settle in the s, during the period of major land reforms under the Baath Party. That was before Hafez al-Assad took power in , but it continued through the early years of his reign. Many moved into the cities and took up new ways of life.
So you had bedouins from the villages around Salamiya east of Homs, for example, who moved to Homs, Hama, and Aleppo, ending up in particular districts. The Baba Amr district in the southern suburbs of Homs City was one such place.
It was largely populated by people who self-identified as tribesmen belonging to the Hassana or the Mawali. In the s and early s, I was allowed to work with the bedouins in Syria because they were not seen as a threat to the government, while some of my friends who wanted to study urban change or demographic issues—anything that smacked of politics—were denied permission. I was even able to book flights with military aircraft to go to Palmyra and meet with the heads of the big tribes.
In the late s, I was told by the minister of health in Syria at the time, Dr Eyad Chatty, that about one million or 4—5 percent of the population were bedouins. But then in the mids, his successor, Dr Maher Husami, actually told me there were no longer any bedouins at all in Syria. However, I also spoke to tribal leaders who I knew well, mainly around Salamiya east of Homs and in Damascus.
They all agreed that a lot of Syrian bedouins had stopped self-identifying as such in the first decades of Baath Party rule, but then from the mids, self-identification as bedouin had started to grow more common again. That was at a time when Hafez al-Assad was trying to encourage Syrians from bedouin backgrounds who had moved to Jordan or Saudi Arabia to come back and invest in the economy. If you look at the representation in parliament, there had always been the quota for bedouins.
Six seats were set aside for representatives of particular tribes, which meant that around 3 percent of parliament was of bedouin origin. But what we saw happening during the later years of Assad family rule was that there were more and more representatives elected beyond those six, including from other tribes.
In the elections, around 12 percent of the parliamentarians self-identified as being of bedouin origin. At the turn of the century, when Bashar al-Assad took over, the government began to encourage some of the so-called common tribes to take a more active role in the Baath Party. For example, by , I had noticed that some of the leaders of the Mawali and Hadidiyin tribes were becoming very wealthy. Now they were using their wealth to transition into the Baath Party. How would you describe the role of the bedouin communities during the current conflict?
You have some tribes that are with the government and some that are with the opposition. Some government officials are recruited on the basis of their tribal support. The current minister of defense, General Fahd Jassim al-Freij, is a member of the Hadidiyin from the Hama region, and there are several other officials like him in the Baath Party, army, and parliament. On the other hand, I think much of the early armed uprising in Daraa, Homs, Deir Ezzor, and other places was a result of local tribesmen seeking to protect their neighborhoods.
They either had weapons already or got access to them through their contacts abroad. Generally speaking many of the asil tribes in the Aneza confederation seem to lean to the opposition, although there are always exceptions to the rule. The common non-asil tribes are often split, because the government has for so long pitted different lineages against each other.
Now you have rival groups within the same tribes that have chosen different sides in the uprising. It is never simple. Generally speaking, however, you can say that the Aneza tribes are historically close to the Saudi ruling family and have international networks that have made them less dependent on the Assad regime.
Now that you have Saudi Arabia funding the opposition and sending weapons and so on, this has of course drawn many of them closer to the opposition. Some tribal leaders moved into politics during the uprising. I mentioned earlier that he was a strong leader who had gathered Hassana members around him.
In , he was one of the first people to stand up in Homs and demand justice and rights. His allies set up a website and some of his cousins and others went to Saudi Arabia to seek aid and mobilize their relatives. He is an example of a modern tribal leader of a kind that has been very important in the uprising. Some prominent opposition leaders have also had a tribal background. Ahmad al-Jarba , for example, was the president of the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces , the main exile leadership of the opposition, between July and July He is a tribal sheikh and a relative of one of the most important Shammar leaders in modern history, Ajil al-Yawar, whose grandson Ghazi al-Yawar was briefly president of Iraq during the U.
Nowadays, the tribal leaders in Syria seem to have retreated from overt opposition politics to some extent. You do not hear that much about them anymore. Even so, they are still very important in their communities and work really effectively at the local level. Yet relationships within tribes have been completely transformed when compared to generations past.
Tribes, as they have traditionally been understood, cannot form the basis for political projects in Syria. Although their structure has not changed, tribes no longer occupy a paramount position in the political and social life of local communities. The conflict that began in has had a devastating effect on local communities throughout Syria, and the effect has been particularly acute among communities of tribal background in eastern Syria.
Radical groups such as the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra now known as Jabhat Fatah al-Sham have rooted themselves in these regions, often adding a tribal dimension to their own makeup.
The fighting in which these groups have engaged has, thus, involved tribal identities and loyalties, thereby damaging social cohesion, isolating local communities from one another, and further dimming the prospect of solidarity along tribal lines. Many tribal leaders have been displaced from their lands, while violence and the emergence of radical Islamic groups have forced the members of tribes who have remained in eastern Syria to focus on immediate local concerns for their security and survival.
This has encouraged competition between major political actors in their dealings with the tribes. When one actor has promoted its agenda with one leader of a tribe, rival actors have countered this by manipulating neighboring tribes, or other leaders in the same tribe.
The political life of tribal communities in Syria has been deeply influenced by a central authority since the s, when the Ottoman Empire began establishing a more permanent administrative base in eastern Syria as part of the second wave of the Tanzimat reforms.
A number of semi-settled tribes received fertile land along the Euphrates and Khabour Rivers, which they farmed in exchange for paying taxes on a percentage of their total harvest, while their sons were exempted from military service. Even those tribes that were not settled were affected by the increasing penetration of imperial power.
The Ottoman authorities established police stations and forts in areas where tribes had previously moved freely.
They lent out their troops to one side or the other in intertribal feuds and provided payment to tribal leaders, encouraging competition for Ottoman patronage. Under the French Mandate, the central authorities expanded their control. However, by the mids, the French sought to restructure tribal society entirely.
They paid subsidies to tribal leaders, allotted grazing and property rights to various tribes, prohibited tribe members from carrying weapons in settled areas, and forced them to pay taxes. These encroachments reduced the control of tribal leaders in two ways. The increased security brought about by the expanding state lessened the need for tribes to engage in collective action for their own protection, diminishing the necessity for tribal leaders to coordinate self-defense.
And state subsidies to tribes meant tribal leaders became less dependent on the obedience of tribal members for their power and began to rely more on their own ability to dispense patronage. The effects of these changes were exemplified by the Hassana tribe, which is based in central Syria near the city of Homs.
The tribe has long enjoyed an elevated status because it is part of the historically powerful Aneza tribal confederation and has kin linkages to the Al Saud family that rules Saudi Arabia. During the years of the French Mandate, the state also made a select few of the tribal leaders very rich by turning them into major landholders.
As the authorities sought to register the owners of all land in the country, and many individual tribal members and peasants were eager to avoid the taxation that might accompany registration, tribal leaders placed entire villages in their own name.
For example, the head of the Hassana, Sheikh Trad al-Milhem, amassed over twenty villages registered in his name alone. With the departure of the French from Syria in , these advantages were curtailed, which relegated tribal leaders to being intermediaries between the independent state and tribal members. In , the Syrian government canceled the Law of the Tribes, which had given independent legal status to the nomadic tribes, including the right to bear arms.
The Syrian regime allowed the leaders a greater degree of influence over local communities of tribal background and granted them certain privileges. The Baath under Hafez al-Assad, however, returned authority to tribal leaders by giving them informal control over their communities and stepping up their appointments to parliament.
The former was descended from slaves of leaders of the Afadlah tribe while the latter was the son of a vegetable seller. Like many Baath leaders, they were part of a first generation of Syrians from the national periphery to receive a modern education.
By contrast, soon after Assad assumed the presidency, two leaders of the Afadlah tribe gained parliamentary seats. Unofficial arrangements granted tribal leaders influence in less straightforward ways as well. This was particularly true in the policing of serious crimes. While the police would intervene for petty crimes, they would generally not do so in cases of murder or rape, leaving tribal and clan leaders to address these cases themselves.
That year, an executive decision to privatize all state farmlands allowed tribal leaders who had lost their vast landholdings to land redistribution during the s to regain and expand the property they had owned. The clientelistic relations that benefited tribal leaders provided little advantage to average Syrians of tribal background. Services in areas where they live were, and still are, notoriously underdeveloped compared to the rest of Syria, and they receive fewer lucrative public administration jobs than other parts of the country.
In , there were residents per doctor in Damascus Governorate and 1, per doctor in Raqqa Governorate. The privileges granted by the Syrian state under Hafez and Bashar al-Assad to tribal leaders were part of a mutually beneficial exchange. The regime would provide status and material benefits to loyal tribal leaders, who in turn would facilitate the compliance of populations under their control.
Because the intermediary position occupied by tribal leaders between the state and local populations of tribal background was a valuable one, the Assad regime made tribal leaders compete for this role. That is why, far from being uniform blocs, tribes were often characterized by rival claims to leadership.
Frequently, these internal struggles for power could have far-reaching political, and even geopolitical,implications. Within a tribe, one particular family lineage always produces its leader, or sheikh.
This lineage, referred to as the sheikhly family beit al-mashaykha or beit al-ashira , has an elevated status within the tribe. Those members tended to have personal, often financial, connections to the regime and its securityservices. In recent years, the competition between two branches of the sheikhly Milhem family of the Hassana tribe has illustrated such dynamics.
However, this arrangement began breaking down when a member of the Milhem family challenged Abdel Aziz for the parliamentary seat in and was defeated. The stakes of competition for the seat were raised in the elections, when Abdel Karim, the nominal leader of the tribe, challenged his uncle Abdel Aziz for the seat. This competition took on a broader geopolitical dimension. Both branches of the Milhem family had built relations with the Syrian and Saudi states.
This included marrying into the same families as Saudi royal family members. Following voting in the elections, a dispute erupted between the branches of the Milhem family over who had won the seat.
To prevent any violence, the Syrian regime sent members of the elite Republican Guard to Homs to organize a reconciliation. As relations were warm at the time between Syria and Saudi Arabia which had supported both Abdel Aziz and Abdel Karim in their campaigns , the regime removed the winner of another seat from his position and handed it to Abdel Karim, allowing Abdel Aziz to retain his seat.
However, relations between Syria and Saudi Arabia deteriorated rapidly in , due to strong suspicions that the Assad regime had a hand in the assassination of the Saudi-aligned Lebanese former prime minister Rafik al-Hariri. This would have consequences for the leadership of the Hassana sheikhly family.
In the parliamentary elections of , the Syrian regime declined to make a second seat available for a Milhem, as it had done earlier.
While both branches of the Hassana had relations with the Saudi royal family, the branch under Abdel Aziz maintained closer ties with Syrian security figures. The authorities declared that Abdel Aziz would keep his seat, while Abdelilah would not be awarded a parliamentary seat. The resulting tensions within the Milhem family continued to have effects after the uprising.
Abdelilah left for Saudi Arabia soon after being denied a seat. He declared his support for the uprising from the beginning and repeatedly appeared on television to express his views, doing so initially from Turkey and later from Saudi Arabia. This tension within the Milhem family put two conflicting aspects of contemporary Syrian tribes on display. While the legacy of tribal rules continued to shape the dispute by allowing only members of the sheikhly family to be involved in the contest for leadership, those leaders were not in a position to advocate for the interests of the tribe, let alone for individual members of the tribe as part of a tribal society.
Instead, they were locked in a struggle for a position afforded them by the state before the uprising. They ultimately had to appeal to state authorities to resolve their dispute, before closely aligning with the Syrian state or the Saudi state after This showed how a parochial matter within a Syrian tribe could take on regional dimensions when tribal politics fed into interstate rivalries. The governorate is home to 1.
The combination of oil resources and the consolidation of radical groups in the area pushed segments of individual tribes into conflict with one another, demonstrating the shifting foundations of tribal identitiesandstructures. In late and throughout , peaceful demonstrations gave way to armed resistance against the Assad regime.
By the end of , however, protracted violence and competing interests began to fracture the loosely organized armed opposition, and prospects for a swift cessation of hostilities faded. FSA factions, as well as any other group attempting to represent the armed opposition politically, were unable to control individual fighters pursuing personal enrichment.
The absence of a central state authority allowed these individuals to expand their resources by capturing army checkpoints; seizing government weapons, industrial equipment, and oil wells; and securing external funding. Entrepreneurial fighters were soon able to command the loyalty of combatants and local communities independently ofFSAstructures. By early , much of Deir Ezzor Governorate had fallen out of the control of the Syrian regime.
Local armed groups began to form, some to defend their locality and others to participate in the broader revolutionary campaign against the regime. Deir Ezzor is in many ways exceptional, an extreme case of the breakdown of tribal solidarity leading to acts of violence among members of the same tribe. Yet the role of outside actors in escalating intratribal conflict exhibits continuities with the past, and the changes brought about by the protracted conflict parallel those occurring in other Syrian regions.
At present, radical Islamic groups control Deir Ezzor Governorate, and the conflict there is principally being fought over oil. This threatens to break social ties that previous rounds of state penetration had only gradually altered.
As the frequency of conflict between local populations in Deir Ezzor increased after , tribal identities and leaders added a degree of complication to realities in the area. The tribal background of these communities made it easy to escalate conflict along tribal lines. At the same time, because state power had displaced tribal structures in the decades prior to the uprising, communities of tribal background were left without a traditional leadership in place to mediate and lower tensions. These dynamics are exemplified by the interactions between residents of two towns in Deir Ezzor Governorate, al-Quriah and al-Ashara, each with its own military force and tribal identity.
One local armed group, the Qaqaa Brigade Liwaa al-Qaqaa , was centered in al-Quriah, a town whose residents came from the Qaraan clan. Members of the Qaraan clan held Saoud al-Nijris, an influential member of the Bohasan clan, based in the neighboring town of al-Ashara, responsible for masterminding the killing.
Complicating matters, Nijris was a member of a sheikhly family from the Aqeedat tribal confederation, 22 of which both the Qaraan and the Bohasan are a part. A sharia council created to resolve disputes, comprised of local tribal leaders and religious jurists, mediated the dispute. The commission eventually cleared Nijris, and he was released. Saoud al-Nijris later recalled that members of Jabhat al-Nusra, the FSA, and some tribal notables attempted to intervene, but failed to halt theshelling.
In between the arrest of Nijris and the attack on al-Ashara, an unidentified supporter of Nijris made the following comments on a pro-uprising onlineforum:. The supposed revolution of the people of al-Quriah the Qaraan was nothing but a Qaraani revolution for most of them , so it proclaimed the names of the Qaraan and al-Quriah and did not call for freedom. Previously, Bashir was a member of the Syrian parliament and represented the country in parliamentary delegations to the Gulf.
According to Kassar al-Jarrah, a cousin of Fares, all the Egaidat tribal leaders in Syria have called to express solidarity with the defected ambassador — despite historical rivalry.
The old tensions and competition have disappeared after his honourable act. Jarrah added that at least 15 large families from the tribe have Qatari citizenship and many of his relatives are naturalised citizens of Gulf states, some of them serving in their armies.
Members of these tribes in the Gulf customarily extend visits to their relatives in Syria and mediate in disputes. Intermarriage ties also exist between these tribes, including between members of Saudi Arabia's ruling family and the Nijris clan in Deir Ezzor.
The Nijris tribal chief, Sufough al-Nijris, often visited his royal relatives in Riyadh. Religious affiliation is another factor that can strengthen these links.
Salafism is noticeably growing in tribal areas, mainly because members of these tribes have worked and lived in the Gulf, particularly in Kuwait , Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
Gulf money has been used to build mosques in tribal areas, in response to recent campaigns to turn people to Sufi and Shia Islam. The leader of the largest council representing opposition in Deir Ezzor, for example, is a Salafi cleric who had lived in Qatar since the military campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria. The tribes have been neglected, sidelined and exploited by the Baathist regime in Damascus for decades but in a democratic Syria that will certainly change.
Members of the tribes inside and outside the country are organising themselves and have certain expectations when the regime falls.
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