Can (Salafi) jihadi insurgents politicise and become pragmatic in civil wars? Social movement restraint in Ahrar al-Sham in Syria

ABSTRACT

Most research on jihadi groups examines their violent radicalisation. Insurgents that politicise in civil wars and become more pragmatic without renouncing violence are less understood. This article defines jihadi groups’ politicisation as the development of realistic tactical and strategic objectives, durable alliances with other actors including foreign states and non-state armed groups, and normalisation of their interactions with the population. This article argues that politicisation is not merely the outcome of armed groups’ independent ideological revisions. Politicisation results from a combination of several factors that restrain jihadi insurgents in civil wars. In Syria, the empirical analysis of Ahrar al-Sham demonstrates that the group was restrained by (1) its decentralised organisational structures and (2) interactions with other actors including other insurgents, the population, and foreign states. This article is based on extensive field research conducted in Syria and Turkey with Syrian insurgents across the spectrum.

KEYWORDS:

• Syria
• jihad
• civil war
• islam
• social movement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Interviews with the interviewees who are explicitly referenced agreed to be named. Their interviews were fully transcribed by the author. More extensive quotes are referred in another publication by the author in Drevon and Haenni (2021).

2. Range of interviews with Syrian Islamist insurgents and independent Islamists between 20,166 and 2021, Istanbul and Idlib.

3. Interviews conducted in Istanbul between 2016 and 2020.

4. Interviews with HTS’s leadership, including Abu Abdullah al-Shami and Abu Muhammad al-Jolani. July 2019, August 2020, December 2020, Idlib.

5. Interviews with multiple former prisoners, including Rami Dalati and Abu al-‘Abbas al-Shami, two Islamist prison leaders closer to AaS’s leadership. July 2016, January 2017, Istanbul.

6. Interviews with several AaS’s leaders, including Iyyad al-Sha’ar, conducted between 2016 and 2019 in Istanbul.

7. See, for instance, a map of insurgent territorial control in 2015: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Situation_in_Syria_(August_2015).svg.

8. Multiple interviews with HTS leaders. July 2019, August 2020, December 2020, Idlib. See also Atoun (2016).

9. Interviews with several AaS leaders.

10. Interviews with several AaS leaders conducted between 2016 and 2019 in Istanbul.

Additional information

Funding

This research was financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF);Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung;

Notes on contributors

Jerome Drevon

Jerome Drevon is a research associate at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva and senior analyst on Jihad and Modern Conflict at the International Crisis Group (ICG). He was previously an advisor for Non-State Armed Groups at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Jerome is particularly interested in armed groups’ trajectories in armed conflicts, which he has researched extensively in both Egypt and Syria. Jerome focus specifically on the transformation of armed groups into more pragmatic and mainstream political actors. His first book on jihadi groups’ strategic developments in Egypt is forthcoming at Oxford University Press.