The Social Life of Syrian Diplomacy: Transnational Kinship Networks of the Asad Regime

ABSTRACT

This article uses original ethnographic data to document the kinds of informal diplomacy conducted by members of a transnational kinship group embedded in both the Syrian and the Russian regimes. As such it provides a rare ethnographic perspective on international relations of strongmen regimes in Syria and Russia. Relatively few studies have explored relationships of cooperation between modern political regimes which are mediated by transnational kinship networks. Rather than approaching transnational kinship networks as instrumental channels that states use to achieve their purposes, the article argues that this network has been able to colonise the Syrian state, by deploying violence on an urban scale and maintaining high-ranking diplomatic connections on a transregional scale. It also argues that such networks should not be understood by negation, as the absence of formal institutions, or as an alternative to the ‘real channels’ of diplomacy. From the perspective of the autocratic Asad regime, they have arguably provided a more durable infrastructure, through a period of global ideological change and regional realignment, than Baathist political institutions and diplomatic cadres.

KEYWORDS:

• Strongmen
• diplomacy
• transnationalism
• Asad regime
• Syria

After a decade of war, reconstruction projects are now a critical part of Bashar al-Asad’s efforts to re-assert his sovereignty over the country which he almost lost. Having depended on Vladimir Putin for the military interventions which kept him in power, he now depends on him in his plans for reconstruction. The regime’s own coffers are drained by war, and U.S. sanctions on its other military ally Iran have put its finances under further pressure. With a pariah status in the West, Asad has also looked east for support, receiving business delegations from China, a political ally. Another way in which Asad is seeking to rebuild and reassert sovereignty is by re-engaging with the Syrian diaspora in these countries, calling expatriate capital and labour to return and participate in reconstruction efforts. This article seeks to read these intensifying interactions between Syria, Russia and China not through the zoomed-out lens of geopolitics, but ethnographically, through an account of a transnational kinship network that connects the three territories and that provides a social basis for the proliferating ties between them. The kinship network in question styles itself as a ‘clan’ (‘ashira) and hails from the countryside around Aleppo. Since the 1980s it has been one of the local actors to which the Asad regime outsourced functions of the security state, and in 2011–2012 it was one of the actors that repressed dissent against the regime. But ‘the clan’ has also spread across borders, entering the domains of politics and commerce in Russia and China. This article argues that this network is not only a local partner in enforcing the regime’s security interests in and around Aleppo; it also constitutes a transnational medium through which the relationships between the Asad regime and its military and political allies have been articulated for over two decades.

Relatively few studies have explored relationships of cooperation between modern political regimes in the Middle East and transnational kinship networks. Most studies of transnational networks in the region have focused on sectarianism and labour migration. Numerous studies have documented the role of sectarian networks in conducting religio-political ideas across borders: whether Afghan Shia networks transmitting Khomeini’s revolutionary ideas and financing into Iran (Adelkhah and Olszewska 2007), pilgrims and religious scholars conducting the influence of Iran’s ayatollahs into Iraq and beyond (Barzegar 2008), or networks of migrant labourers conducting conservative Islamic ideas and influence from the Gulf into migrant-sending countries such as Syria and Egypt (Karakoç, Köse, and Özcan 2017). Extended cross-border kinship networks have been recognised as an important feature of transnationalism in the region (Shami 2000). Yet they tend to be invoked by scholars either as a social form that threatens the sovereignty of nation states by undermining their power to police borders, or as a social resource that individuals fall back on in the absence of state provision and protection (El Dardiry 2017). Scholars studying Syria have highlighted the relations of cooperation between states and extended kinship networks which identify as ‘tribes’ (al-qaba’il) or ‘clans’ (‘asha’ir), but have focused on the national rather than transnational scale. In Syria, the French colonial administration recruited Bedouin forces to secure oil pipelines from Mosul (Chatty 2010). After independence, even while the Baathist state officially sought to eradicate the backwardness of ‘tribalism’, Hafez al-Asad relied upon coopting tribes to stem the flow of arms from Iraq to Syria during his confrontation with the Muslim Brotherhood in 1979–1982 (Rae 1999). The role of ‘clans’ (‘asha’ir) has become more critical since the start of the Syrian uprising in 2011, as some clan leaders have mobilised militias on behalf of the Asad regime (Ismail 2018; Dukhan 2014).

Yet while these studies have documented the significance of extended kinship groups to projects of state formation and control in the region, they have rarely studied these relationships at the transnational scale. This article aims to address this lacuna by documenting the kinds of informal ‘diplomacy’ conducted by a member of one such clan among the Syrian diaspora in China, and the diplomatic influence enjoyed by another clan member as an Aleppo-born official of the Russian state. It argues that members of his clan have since 2011 not only acted as agents of Bashar al-Asad’s regime, but have sought to position themselves increasingly openly as a de facto part of the Syrian state. Second, it argues that his transnational network has in some cases underpinned and strengthened the diplomatic and military alliance between the Syrian and Russian states. It has facilitated the insertion of the Russian military into Syrian state and society, as seen in the role of Russian officers in supervising customs and trade flows at Syrian ports, and in the settlement of a Russian military class in Syrian cities and their intermarriage with local families (Anderson 2019). Focusing on the relationship between political regimes and transnational networks, therefore, illuminates a critical but neglected dimension of the Syrian conflict: the ongoing reconfiguration of the Syrian state and its changing social basis.

Two related theoretical perspectives underlie these arguments. First, I avoid the assumption that spatially expansive networks are merely instrumental channels that states and their political elites use to achieve their purposes. Increasingly, scholars study the state as itself a configuration of multi-scalar networks, rather than as a set of formal institutions that are conceptually prior to and practically independent of the social networks that constitute them (Brenner 2001; Dicken et al. 2001; Bulkeley 2005; Jessop 2009; Glick Schiller 2015). This perspective makes it easier to account for the fact that, at a moment of political crisis after the 2011 uprising, the leaders of an extended kinship network who had established multi-scalar relations of power – deploying violence on an urban scale and maintaining high-ranking diplomatic connections on a transregional scale – have been able to further colonise the Syrian state. Second, rather than approaching transnational networks only at the scale of the state, I approach them as the social basis for transformations in the wider regional and transregional order. In this, I draw on the work of Serkan Yolacan (2017), who argues that the Azerbaijani diaspora were able to tie together constitutional debates and political movements in Tsarist Russia, Qajar Iran and the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century by drawing on their capacity to be ‘local in multiple domains at once’. The two clan members I portray below evince a similar capacity. My analysis therefore ‘jumps scale’ (Van Schendel 2002), approaching their kinship network, whose members are embedded in both the Syrian and Russian states, not as the agent of any single state, but as one substrate of a transregional political formation – a long-standing Russian-Syrian diplomatic and military alliance which underpinned the Russian military intervention in Syria in September 2015.

Perspectives on informal diplomats and strongmen: the Syrian case

Syria offers a different model of the relationship between strongman leadership, global economic integration, and transnational political networks, from others analysed in this volume. Unlike Turkey and India (see Yolacan, this volume, and Mathews, this volume), Syria is not ruled by a populist strongman who came to power by brokering neoliberal global integration in the 1990s. In 1990s Syria, Hafez al-Asad, the incumbent autocratic strongman, kept Syria on a political path which ensured that the country remained an exception to the global economic integration being pursued by regimes in Turkey, Jordan and Egypt. This did not mean that the country was completely internationally isolated, however. Commercial, educational and in some cases military ties to Russia and other formerly Soviet states persisted after 1991. The economic elites who emerged in Syria in this period did so in part by benefiting from politically managed commerce with post-Soviet Russia. The legacy of Soviet patronage remained a critical resource for Syria’s autocratic regime as it sought to control and coopt social forces through the 1990s and after the accession of Bashar al-Asad in 2000.

As in Russia, so too in Syria official ideology shifted significantly over this period: from Baathist socialism, to a post-Baathist ‘social market economy’. Yet the political alliance between the two regimes remained relatively durable. It has also continued to shape Syria’s fate over the last decade, as the Russian military intervention in 2015 kept the Asad regime in power during the civil war. While Russian intervention was undoubtedly driven by realpolitik strategic considerations, this article suggests that the durability of the relationship has also been mediated by informal diplomatic ties of kinship, which connect a politically and economically powerful loyalist clan in Syria to a senior diplomat in the Kremlin. As Lutfi (this volume) argues, such political and diplomatic networks should not be understood by negation, as the absence of formal institutions, or as a second-best alternative to the ‘real channels’ of diplomacy. From the perspective of the autocratic Asad regime, they have arguably provided a more durable infrastructure, through a period of global ideological change and regional realignment, than Baathist political institutions and diplomatic cadres.

While the recent proliferation of informal diplomats can fruitfully be understood as a ‘network society’ (see the Introduction to this volume), the Syrian case also shows that the genealogies of network societies are diverse; those that remain politically salient today are not simply a function of late twentieth-century capitalism and information technologies (Castells 2010), nor were they necessarily configured by the forms of mobility that re-emerged with the end of the Cold War (Appadurai 1996). The informal diplomatic infrastructure described in this paper emerged out of a history of Soviet and then post-Soviet Russian patronage of Syria – an overarching geopolitical ‘umbrella’ relationship under which numerous educational, professional and commercial networks and even political careers have taken shape, which in turn have structured continuities between the Soviet and post-Soviet eras.

The Syrian case also contributes to the discussion of strongmen and informal diplomats, by showing that informal networks of diplomacy are not simply tools wielded by all-powerful strongmen, but can themselves colonise and redefine the state at critical moments, especially when these networks straddle the domains of business, diplomacy and paramilitary force. This article offers ethnographic glimpses of the ability of this loyalist clan to operate simultaneously across these various different domains, and as a result to position itself towards the centre of the Syrian regime as it is reconfigured through the conflict. During the recent contestation of Syria’s autocratic rule, the Syrian regime has relied on this clan to mobilise its forces and suppress dissent through coercive means in and around the key battleground of the city of Aleppo. The regime has rewarded the clan’s leaders with lucrative contracts and opportunities for political brokerage. The clan has also acted as informal arm of the regime in the diaspora, recognised as a key constituency and potential economic and political base for a regime that is under international pressure (Baeza and Pinto 2016). The ethnography opens with an account of how a prominent member of the clan has engaged in informal diplomacy among the Syrian merchant diaspora in China, where he has sought to discipline political loyalty and broker access to Syrian citizenship.

‘We are all shabiha': political loyalty in the diaspora

On 5 September 2017, Syria played Iran in a football world cup qualifier – a match that was watched avidly both within Syria and in diasporas around the world. Syrian participation in the world cup was politically contentious. For opponents of the regime, it implied a worrying normalization of the status of Bashar al-Asad’s status, and a tolerance of the war crimes committed by his government. For supporters, it was a welcome sign of the rehabilitation of the Syrian regime in the eyes of the wider world, after its expulsion from the Arab league at the start of the conflict. In both perspectives, this sporting competition was a site of significance in international diplomacy. Some fans, building on the interpretation of the event as a symbol of Syria’s re-insertion into the international community, had engaged in their own kinds of ‘everyday diplomacy’ (Marsden, Ibañez-Tirado, and Henig 2016) by making and sharing memes over the internet. The ‘Damascus Now’ Facebook page carried images of young Syrian men around the world standing next to their female non-Syrian friends, both holding up messages of support for the national team: ‘we support the Tigers of Qasiyun and are waiting for you in … Russia, Denmark, Sweden … ’

Abd Salam was one member of the Syrian diaspora who had participated in this everyday diplomacy. When the match was broadcast, he was sitting in a small coffee shop with his friend Raid in downtown Yiwu, a city of 2 million in China’s commercially vibrant Zhejiang province, and the site of large wholesale market that attracted importers from around the world. Since 2007 Abd had been making regular visits to Yiwu, to purchase car parts which he distributes to wholesalers across Syria. He was now in his mid-thirties and making a good living as an international trader. Earlier that day he taken a photograph of his supplier in Yiwu’s main wholesale market, a Hui Muslim called Suleiman. In the photograph, Suleiman holds an A4 sheet of paper with a message of support in Arabic for the Syrian football team: ‘We support the Tigers of Qasiyun and are waiting for you in China’. Around 10pm, as he was sitting in the café waiting for the match to start, Abd posted the image on the ‘Damascus Now’ Facebook page. A few moments later, a flurry of welcoming comments appeared on the page. As we watched the messages and images buzzing in from Syrians around the world, Abd scrolled up the Facebook page to show me a picture of a Syrian pilot in the cockpit of a fighter jet as he flew above Dair al-Zur. The pilot too was holding up a hand-written poster cheering on the Tigers of Qasiyun. The Euphrates valley is just visible in the shot thousands of feet below him. ‘Amazing’, Abd says, ‘he is hitting Daesh in Dair al-Zur and still thinking of the Syrian team (al-muntakhab al-Suri)’.

Six hours previously, a Syrian regime military advance had broken a siege on central Dair al-Zur, where the Islamic State had surrounded an army base. Abd’s Facebook feeds alternated chat about the match and news about the military advance. In his mind, the two issues merged seamlessly. For him, cheering on the national team and the regime’s military advances were both tests of political loyalty; he expressed derision and hostility at the idea of Syrians who failed to cheer on the national team. Moreover, both kinds of advance fitted the single narrative which he told to members of the Syrian diaspora in China. In this account, the country had now reached its watershed moment: the ‘problems’ had virtually ended, those displaced into the diaspora were returning, a new era of accountable governance and a vibrant reconstruction economy was beginning; in short, it was time to come home.

Abd belonged to a ‘clan’ (‘ashira) which consisted of several thousand men and which claimed membership of a larger Arab tribal confederation that stretched into Iraq. While the most prominent clans in Syria’s tribal confederations traced their origins ultimately to the Arabian peninsula, Abd traced the origins of his clan to a tribe which had arrived from Iraq ‘over a hundred years ago’ and settled in a village to the south of Aleppo. Since leaving the village ‘around fifty years ago’, they had established a base in the district of Nayrab Gate, a quarter of Aleppo that served as an interface between the city’s urban markets and rural hinterland beyond and that had long been a site where rural migrants entered the city and established residences (Hivernel 2006). In Aleppine society in the years before the conflict, the name of his clan had been seen as a recruitment ground for the state and particularly its coercive arms. One member of an old urban merchant family identified this clan in 2008 as one of those ‘which provide the state with MPs, officers, security, army, police, and judges’. In the 1980s, leading members of this clan, including Abd’s father, had developed close relationships with the state’s security apparatuses. Hafez al-Asad, confronting an Islamist challenge to his rule in 1979–1982, had coopted the heads of rural clans to monitor movements in the Syrian steppe, stem the supply of weapons from Iraq, and prevent members of the Muslim Brotherhood taking refuge in the steppe (Rae 1999; Chatty 2010). Some had been rewarded with money, vehicles and positions in Parliament.

Having been empowered politically and economically through its informal association with the security state since the 1980s, some sections of his clan had also been drawn into the ambit of urban merchant society, where they sought to invest profits in urban real estate and the import trade into Aleppo. His clan’s facebook page reported in 2018 that the clan was ‘one of the oldest that settled the land of Aleppo from the south and is one of the first clans that entered the world of trade through the old markets of Aleppo’. Since 2007, trade had taken Abd to China, where he had established a highly profitable business importing car parts into Syria. In 2009, a senior member of an established urban merchant family in Aleppo said that, ‘the old families don’t control trade any more, it is all new families, from the countryside (al-rif)’. Abd belonged to a section of the clan which moved from Nayrab Gate in the poorer south-east of the city, to wealthier districts such as Furqan and Mohafaza in the West, where they sought to ‘integrate’ with established merchant families. Abd said that in 2007 he had ‘moved the whole family from Nayrab Gate to Mohafaza. I went from a poor area to a classy area (mintaqa raqiyya) – in order to integrate with the Aleppines (al-Halabiyyin), with the merchants (al-tjar) there’.

The upwardly mobile social trajectory of the clan’s leaders depended on their proximity to Syria’s security state. Under Bashar al-Asad, the regime had continued its policy of outsourcing parts of the security field in Aleppo to local clans (Dukhan 2014). Abd said that leading members of his clan had also worked as state contractors in public construction works, with lucrative deals to extract phosphates, build roads, maintain water systems and manage litter collection. After 2011, some clan leaders in Aleppo became involved in mobilizing groups to repress dissent during anti-regime protests and activism. Ismail (2018, 83) reports that members of one pro-regime clan in Aleppo were alleged to have ‘paid thousands of fighters … to confront protestors during the 2011 uprising’. Abd also reported that his own clan too had been active in repressing anti-regime protests and had been rewarded for doing so. A government Minister, he said, had recently intervened in an attempt to appoint Abd as the President of the Contractors’ Union in Aleppo. Abd saw this as ‘gesture of thanks’ for the clan’s mobilization against opponents of the regime, and an attempt to maintain the clan’s support.

Since 2011, pro-regime militias in Syria have been referred to as shabiha. Prior to 2011, the term had mostly been used to refer to ‘gangs of thugs surrounding the influential bosses’ of smuggling networks (Ismail 2018, 84; see also Saleh 2014). Later, the term was applied to other clans including ‘several clans in Aleppo [who] wielded similar power’ (Ismail 2018, 85). The origins of the term are contested, although some relate it to the term shabah or ghost, in a reference to the model of Mercedes associated with these gangs (Ismail 2018, 84). Among civil society groups and across much of Syrian society, the term has pejorative connotations, implying thuggishness and predation. Some Syrian writers and civil society activists have argued that the predation and ‘transgression against the rights and property of others’ (Ismail 2018) signified by the term shabiha constitute the inner logic of the Syrian regime itself and not just of the informal networks that it has coopted in order to extend the reach of its security state (see Saleh 2014). Given these pejorative connotations, it is worthy of note that in 2017, Abd took the term and applied it to all ‘supporters’ (mu’ayyidin) of the regime. One evening as I walked with Abd and Raid to meet a Syrian trader from Damascus whose brother had expressed sympathy for the opposition, Abd exclaimed, ‘we are all shabiha’. I was taken aback that he identified himself with a term used to refer to extra-judicial militias who had targeted opposition activists. A young Yemeni trader walking with us to the café was also similarly surprised. Abd explained, ‘it means anyone who supports (ayy mu’ayyid) the regime’. The Yemeni trader interjected, ‘I thought it meant … ’ and his voice trailed off. Abd resumed, laughing, ‘no, it means anyone who supports the regime’.

His surprise was understandable: it was unusual to identify all ‘supporters’ of the regime with loyalist militias. Several Syrians in Yiwu identified themselves in conversation as supporters of the regime, but they were not militia members and would not identify themselves as shabiha. In fact, many had travelled to China to avoid being conscripted into the Syrian military, which indicates that they would not willingly fight in the regular army let alone in militias. And while they might present themselves as ‘among the supporters of the regime’, they presented their support as a matter of ‘opinion’ (al-ra’y). Fadi, a 22-year-old from Damascus who worked in his uncle’s export office in Yiwu, told me after I had witnessed a tense conversation between him and another export agent who opposed the regime, that many Syrian families were divided on the issue. He said,

it is a matter of opinion – I have my opinion, he has his. I think things are better with the regime – you have seen the chaos otherwise – someone else thinks that they are better without. Maybe I convince him, maybe he convinces me.

In framing the issue as a matter of opinion about social goods and the better route to achieve them, rather than as a question of life-and-death loyalties, he left room, at least nominally, for civility and discussion. By contrast, in applying the term shabiha to all supporters of the regime, Abd left no room for nuance or grey areas of negotiation and compromise: one was either shabiha or the ‘opposition’.

In widening shabiha to be a blanket term for political support for the regime, Abd was not only rejecting its pejorative connotations, but also positioning his own clan as an exemplar of post-conflict citizenship. If his informal diplomacy sought to mark the inauguration of the future Syrian polity, he positioned his own clan as first among equals in the social body of regime-supporters. At stake was a share in the reconstruction economy. He said that if he had been appointed as President of the Contractors’ Union, then,

any construction project would need to go through me. I could have direct contact with the governor of Aleppo, with the Prime Minister … Aleppo now is going to be rebuilt. Skyscrapers, the works. There is a lot of money to be made. They are looking for investors, from China, Iran, Russia. I can help investors – I have good relations with the government, I can open doors, discuss with them, get what is needed. I am thinking now to see if I can find a Chinese company here that might be interested, and take a cut.

He saw the start of a post-conflict era as an opportunity for him and his clan to move further towards the centre of the Syrian state. He positioned himself not just as a mediator of citizenship in diaspora, but as a future broker of reconstruction contracts. The political crisis of the Syrian state was in his eyes an opportunity to enhance the status of the clan, to position it not as a dependent network rewarded for their ‘service’ to the security state with money and contracts, but as vital mediators who controlled access to state resources and privileges and were thereby able to shape the state in their own image.

Abd emphasized not just his clan’s proximity but their infiltration of the state. He said that after they had moved from their village south of Aleppo and established a base in Nayrab Gate,

there are 120,000 of us in the clan. We entered the state – the army, police, intelligence, judges, lawyers – and went into trade, and took concessions (munaqasat) to build roads and do construction projects for the state. We went into all parts of the state, like a mafia, we have people in each domain. Like a mafia – but not a criminal mafia. There are parts who do illegal things, but a minority. The state cannot do anything against us, it is afraid’.

He relayed anecdotes to illustrate they were not subject to mere state officials but were implicitly part of the regime elite, saying ‘if an officer stops me for doing something wrong driving, and asks to see my ID card, when he sees the name of the clan, he will just give it back and tell me not to do it again’. In describing the weightiness of their name in this way, he positioned the clan not as an instrument utilized and rewarded by state elites, but as a nexus of influence and networks at the heart of the post-conflict state.

‘You left by the smuggling route?': brokering Syrian citizenship in yiwu

One evening, in a café in an Arab district in downtown Yiwu, I was sitting with Yahya, a young man from Aleppo who had fled to China after being arrested by the Syria regime for avoiding military service, and who had subsequently managed to arrange clerical work in a trading office in Yiwu. We got chatting to Abd at the neighbouring table, who guessed from Yahya’s accent that he hailed from what had been an opposition-held area in the East of Aleppo. ‘You should come back’, Abd told him during one of our conversations.

People as long as they have nothing against them are coming back. Things have changed a lot … Now people will rebuild the country. Already it is different. If any officer or governor is corrupt, people will say so openly on Facebook … and he will be removed from office. Now we have an excellent governor in Aleppo. People who have gone to Britain, France, Germany, China, they are coming back, they have seen what life is like, that the state supports the people.

Scholars of diplomacy have recently sought to beyond a statist perspective in which ‘diplomacy is the special preserve of … the foreign ministry and their authorised agents’ (Constantinou 2013), highlighting that a range of actors are involved in fashioning relations across political boundaries and that ‘the diplomatic world has been far richer than notions of interstate professional diplomacy allow for’ (Constantinou 2013; see also Mattern 2005; McConnell, Moreau, and Dittmer 2012; Beier 2009). In this case, the political boundaries which Abd sought to work across were those separating the regime from a Syrian diaspora which had fled the war. Ensuring the inclusion of diasporas within the Syrian polity was the formal remit of a specific government Ministry. The Ministry of Expatriate affairs had been established under Bashar al-Asad in 2002 to mobilise the economic capital and political support of Syrian diasporas around the world and integrate them into the nation state under the new regime. From the regime’s point of view, the task of harnessing support of diaspora only became more critical after 2011. The regime had sought to find political support and leverage where it could, and to attract the return of entrepreneurial energy and capital to support the Asad state (Baeza and Pinto 2016).

Yet Yahya was not easily convinced. He was one of several hundred young Syrian men who had escaped the conflict and who were waiting out the conflict in Yiwu. They had joined a broader merchant community in the city. Syrian traders had been present in Yiwu since the late 1990s, along with others from across the Arab world and other parts of Eurasia and Africa, when the city first began to attract significant numbers of international importers. Numbers had increased in the mid-2000s, after the Syrian regime relaxed restrictions on imported consumer goods and Chinese suppliers made more credit available. Yiwu then became an important venue for Syrians wishing to try their hand at import. Some visited for short periods, of two or three weeks, to provision themselves with goods for export, while others established export offices and maintained a presence in the city throughout the year. Abd was one of those who had established lasting social connections in Yiwu: he had visited on average twice a year since 2007, and had established a social network including Chinese manufacturers in the city; in previous years he had even taken a year’s lease on a flat in downtown Yiwu. With the Syrian uprising and outbreak of conflict in 2011, Yiwu saw a third wave of Syrians migrating to the city as individuals sought to avoid being drawn in to an increasingly brutal conflict. Most were, like Yahya, men of fighting age of seeking to escape military service. Their arrival considerably increased the size of the diaspora; some estimate that between 2011 and 2017, the number of Syrians in Yiwu increased to two-and-a-half thousand. Their political orientations too were mixed, with longer-established resident merchants and younger more recent arrivals both maintaining attitudes both for and against the regime.¹

Many maintained scepticism or outright opposition towards the regime. Yahya hailed from what had been an opposition area in East Aleppo. During the conflict he had continued to move between Aleppo and its eastern opposition-held hinterland, smuggling food and petrol into the city until he been caught by the regime, arrested and beaten for avoiding military service. When Abd urged Yahya to recognise the regime’s beneficence and return home, claiming that many had already made the journey back, Yahya could not keep himself from protesting that he hardly expected people to return when their homes had been destroyed. Abd pushed his point ‘they are already coming back. This month, 1500 families from Saudi Arabia, 3500 families from Turkey … If your home is there, and the troubles have finished, will you stay in that country, and beg?’

Yahya had been able to leave Syria after a family friend had bribed the regime for his release, and then arranged him a position in a trading office in Yiwu. He had extracted him from Syria through an opposition-controlled border area and then facilitating his passage to China via Turkey. Because of route through which he had departed the country, and because the regime with Russian support was now in the ascendant, Yahya’s citizenship like that of other young men in the diaspora was now in limbo. In our first encounter, Abd’s friend Raid raised this issue with Yahya, asking him ‘did you leave Syria through the smuggler’s route (tariq qashaq)?’ Abd followed up:

you didn’t get a regime exit stamp? You went through Turkey, got a Free Syrian Army stamp? I would recommend you go back, through Turkey, and then exit the legal way [through the regime], showing them your residence permit here … 

He relayed the following anecdote,

I met someone here who was afraid as he had left through Turkey, but didn’t have an official exit stamp. I told him to come with me to Beirut. We went through and saw the colonel in the passport office. I said, ‘I am Abd Haj Siddiq from Aleppo; this is my friend I met in China who hasn’t got an official exit stamp’. He looked at his passport and asked by way of joke why he was helping the Free Syrian Army and not the regime. Then he tore up his passport and gave him a new piece of paper with a stamp. With that, and his ID card, he could apply for a new passport. He was so happy, he took me out for a meal in Damascus!

In telling this story, Abd claimed quasi-consular status, portraying himself as someone who was able to mediate between internationally mobile people and the state and to renegotiate Yahya’s relationship with the regime. The Syrian regime has long used informal networks to mediate the state, with clientelistic networks in extending throughout society and functioning as a means of brokering access to state resources (Rabo 2005; Cunningham and Sarayrah 1993). Yet Abd’s claims of informal diplomacy went beyond this, implying that he enjoyed more power than a consul, because he was apparently able to bypass official rules and make himself into the effective arbiter of the citizenship of those who were in limbo, at a time when post-conflict citizenship was up for redefinition. He claimed to have connections he could use to bypass the normal processes and institutions of the state, positioning himself not so much as an agent of the regime who was enforcing Asad’s will, but rather as a semi-independent third party able to mediate between the state and its diaspora. This self-positioning improved his own standing, and needs to be understood in relation to the relatively low prestige enjoyed by regime-affiliated clans within some broader tribal groups. Haian Dukhan (2014, 11) quotes one tribal figure as saying, ‘Hafez al-Assad spent decades side-lining the traditional tribal sheikhs by creating a new system of chiefdom of newly appointed sheikhs who had close ties to the intelligence service’; another figure from an opposition-aligned tribe referred to ‘the sheikhs that the regime created’ and to the ‘shame’ that they bore for ‘playing the regime’s game’ (Dukhan 2014). Against this background of low prestige and stigma, Abd sought to position himself and his kinship network not as pawns controlled by Asad and doing the regime’s bidding, but as an independent agent and broker of influence.

Diplomacy at other scales: the Russian-Syrian alliance

The Asad regime has under both Hafez al-Asad and Bashar al-Asad sought to coopt the leaders of clans such as Abd’s, incorporating their spatially expansive networks as informal arms of the security state, both in and around cities and across the Syrian steppe. Their cross-border networks can also be useful for ‘diplomatic’ purposes, as an entry point into foreign states and diasporic societies. But Syria’s strongmen leaders were not unique in seeking to leverage spatially expansive networks in this way. In the post-Soviet era, strongmen leaders in Russian state have also exploited transnational networks as informal channels of diplomatic power and as entry points into foreign states and societies. What is striking is that the Russian state has employed a member of Abd’s clan for this purpose, as a ‘bridge’ to the Middle East. According to Abd, a close blood relative of senior members of the clan is a senior official of the Russian state. This individual has played a key role in Russia’s ethnic diplomacy in the region, used to manage relations with both Arab leaders in the Gulf, and the Chechen diaspora in Syria, Jordan and Iraq. Since the Russian military intervention in Syria in 2014, he has appeared in Aleppo, the town of his birth, as a spokeperson for Russian policy and a coordinator of humanitarian aid. Thus he evinces the capacity to be ‘local in multiple domains at once’, as Yolacan (2017) notes of the Azerbaijani diaspora which tied together political movements in Tsarist Russia and the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century. Like him, he operated fluently across Russian and Levantine domains. Having argued above that members of his clan have since 2011 sought to position themselves increasingly openly as a de facto part of the Syrian state, I now shift scale and suggest that this informal kinship network has strengthened the diplomatic and military alliance between the Syrian and Russian states.

Abd’s senior relative grew up in Aleppo and graduated from Damascus University, before taking a further degree at Leningrad University in the 1980s. He had gained Russian citizenship and entered the Russian diplomatic service in 1991, where he rose through the ranks of the Chechen Department for Foreign Affairs. He worked as a businessman for three years during the 1990s, later becoming the Chief of Staff to the Chechen President in 2003, and Deputy Prime Minister of Chechnya and Akhmat Kadyrov’s Middle East envoy in 2004. At the time, he was identified in the Russian media as having Chechen roots, and his appointment was seen in the Russian media as an attempt by Kadyrov to win over the Chechen diaspora in the Levant and Iraq during the Russian campaign in Grozny (Nezavisimaya News, 24 October 2003). This diplomacy included measures to highlight the shared Chechen spiritual and diasporic geography that connected Russia to both Syria and Jordan: establishing a Kadyrov Islamic Institute in Damascus for Chechen migrants, refurbishing the Syrian grave of the founder of the Qadiriyya Sufi order in Chechnya, organizing cultural and religious tours for Syrian Chechens wishing to visit Chechnya, and exchanging delegations of religious dignitaries between the two countries. In 2008, he was appointed as Deputy Chair of the Russian Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee. He was then identified in the Russian media as an Arab Muslim from the Quraysh tribe, and was tasked with seeking Arab investment for Chechnya (Infox Russia, 23 October 2008; Lenta Russia, 23 October 2008).

While Scalice (this volume) highlights the ability of informal diplomats to cross ideological divides because they operate a distance from the state and offer deniability, in this example, it is a chameleon-like public identity, rooted in a transnational career trajectory, which underpinned diplomatic effectiveness. His flexible public identity (he has been identified in the Russian press as a Jew as well as an Arab Muslim and a Chechen) suggest that his usefulness to the diplomatic agendas of strongmen leaders in Russia consisted in his ability to insert himself into transnational ethnic and religious networks beyond the Russian state. The more influence that he wielded in these wider networks, the greater the respect he commanded within the centres of Russian diplomacy. Indeed, his ability to tap into these networks appeared to have fuelled the acceleration of his career, and his move from formal diplomatic posts in the Foreign Ministry to the domain of the political elite, as Deputy Prime Minister of Chechnya, Russian Senator and Chair of the Council of Foreign Relations for the Russian Senate. His career, and the Kremlin’s increasing reliance on transnational ethnic and religious networks to project its influence abroad, coincided with what has been seen as a post-cold war informalisation of Russian diplomacy in the Middle East. This development has seen Chechnya emerge as a platform for projecting Russian influence into the region, at the expense of Russian Foreign Ministry in Moscow. Chechen political leaders have been seen as informal but critical agents of Russian diplomacy in this process; and diasporic religious and ethnic networks the basis on which they assert their usefulness to Moscow as brokers of influence, and their standing within the broader Russian polity. The appointment of Abd’s senior relative to the Russian Senate was seen as a coup for Ramzan Kadyrov, who since becoming Chechen President in 2007 had been seeking to assert Chechnya’s role as Russia’s bridge to the Arab Islamic world. In this way, Kadyrov sought to assert himself as a diplomatic broker – not as an official arm of the Russian foreign ministry, but as a de facto broker of Moscow’s foreign relations (Intersection Project, 11 April 2017; Ekspert Online, 26 November 2008).

Russian strongmen, then, used ‘Chechen’ diplomats through the 1990s and 2000s to foster diplomatic ties with Syria, Jordan and Iraq. In this, they were following a well-established pattern. The Soviet Union used Muslims from the Caucasus as bridges of cultural diplomacy to the Middle East, Africa and Asia between the 1950s and 1970s (Kirasirova 2011). In the 1980s, the USSR increasingly foregrounded the Muslim background of these informal diplomats, and used them to make claims about religious freedom in the Soviet Union (Nunan 2011), largely in order to respond to the increasingly Islamic sensibilities of Middle Eastern publics after the Iranian revolution (Yolacan 2017). After the Russian assault on Grozny in 1999–2000, and through the war against Islamist separatists which lasted until 2009, these imperatives took on a renewed salience, as Yeltsin and then Putin in Moscow, as well as Kadyrov in Grozny, sought to garner the support of the Chechen diaspora in the Middle East, and to maintain relations with the leaders of conservative Islamic regimes in the Gulf. Russian diplomats with the ethnic and religious capital to speak to and for the Chechen diaspora were in demand.

While Russia declared the Chechen war finished in 2009, the proclamation of an ‘Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant’ in April 2013 had by 2015 attracted up to 1500 Russian jihadist fighters to the region. In 2018, Abd’s senior relative came into the public eye as a mediator arranging the repatriation of the wives and children of Chechen Islamist fighters whom the Russian authorities wish to return from Syria and Iraq. According to Rambler News, some of the women returned in this way had been arrested and imprisoned on their return to Russia for their involvement in jihadi organisations (Rambler News, 23 July 2018). Russian media described him as ‘play[ing] the role of mediator in the process of bringing the families of the Chechen fighters with the Organisation of the Islamic State in Syria’ (Enab Baladi Online, 30 January 2018). His boss Kadyrov announced that DNA tests would be used to ‘determine the affiliation’ of children who had been born in the Middle East, in order to facilitate their ‘unhindered export to Russia’ and to ‘give children the citizenship of the Russian federation’ (Rambler News, 28 May 2018). A few months earlier, Abd had claimed around to be able to broker the return of Syrian citizens in the diaspora who had been displaced by the conflict in the Levant.

The apparent resemblance of the two men’s modes of diplomatic agency is remarkable. Even if on the face of it the two men acted on behalf of different states, the echoing of their diplomacies suggests a close alignment between these strongmen regimes’ modes of operation. Of course, the two men enjoyed different formal statuses and acted at different scales. Abd’s senior relative brokered the return of Russian nationals from Syria and Iraq not as an apparently freelancing merchant in relation to a handful of individuals, but as the head of a Chechen humanitarian organization, named after the Chechen politician Akhmat Kadyrov. Yet as the head of this organization, he has also appeared in Aleppo, the town of his birth, as a spokeperson for Russian policy and a coordinator of humanitarian aid, shortly after the Syrian regime with the support of clan militias and Russian forces regained control of the east of the city. The networks and trajectories of the officials and para-officials of two different states appear to cross one another, as their modes of operation appear to synchronise between domains of formality and informality. Meanwhile, wider social connections proliferate: since the Russian military intervention in Syria in 2015, dozens of Russian military officers have settled in Syria, overseeing trade flows at Syrian ports and marrying into local families (Anderson 2019). The Russian presence in Syria is usually analysed as an expression of Russian geopolitical interests, of ensuring access to the Mediterranean and its desire to maintain an imperial status. Yet the diplomatic and military alliance between the Syrian and Russian states also has a proliferating social basis. One part of this is the extended kinship network glimpsed in this article.

Conclusion

This paper has contributed to an expanding body of literature on the continuing relevance of clans to state power in Syria, by documenting and analysing the ways in which members of one pro-regime clan network have participated in multiple forms of diplomacy on behalf of strongmen regimes. It has advanced two theoretical perspectives for considering the relationship between strongmen and informal diplomats. Rejecting the theoretical proposition that spatially expansive networks such as kinship clans or other transnational networks are merely the tools of strongmen that powerful leaders deploy to achieve their own objectives, it argues that at moments of crisis, informal networks can shape diplomacy and diplomatic messages in their own image, and seek to become a de facto part of the state. They depend not on formal credentials to be able to do so, but their ability to bypass formal institutions. They are more likely to be able to assert the value of informality when they are not just diplomatic actors but are also embedded in multiple social fields, such as informal business, military and political activity, which are critical to the power of strongmen regimes. At moments of crisis, the value of these informal activities to strongmen regimes may increase, enabling informal networks to translate capital from one field to another and to make claims of quasi-stateness. Abd manoeuvred closer to the centre of state as the regime came to rely on the paramilitary strength of his clan at a time of conflict. He was also empowered as a quasi-state actor by the fact that his ‘informal’ kinship network provided a channel into the heart of the Russian state as a time when the Syrian regime had become acutely militarily dependent on its geopolitical patron.

The second theoretical proposition is that we should not always think of informal diplomatic networks as the tools or agents of a single state. Their transnational and socially embedded nature may make them appealing agents to multiple states. As well as increasing their bargaining power vis-à-vis weaker states, this can also render them into channels that tie states together into durable alliances, and enable them to act at the local level as a coherent unit. While the idea of the strongman leader implies an ethos of competitive nationalism and thus a clear separation between nation-states, the nature of transnational networks which can be embedded in more than one state at a time can complicate such a picture. The salience of such networks may lead us to widen our identification of who the protagonists are in international relations, even in an age of ascendant nationalisms. The wider significance of these networks comes into view when we ‘jump scale’ (Van Schendel 2002), moving away from a state-centric perspective on informal networks which focuses on their participation in processes of individual state formation, and understanding them instead as part of the social basis for the transformation of wider regional and transregional orders (Yolacan 2017).

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Ameem Lutfi, Nisha Mathew and Serkan Yolacan for perceptive comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 Framework Programme research and innovation programme 669 132 – TRODITIES, ‘Yiwu Trust, Global Traders and Commodities in a Chinese International City’.

Notes

1 On Yiwu as a global commercial hub, see Marsden (2016, 2017). On the history of Syrian networks in Yiwu, see Anderson 2018).