The Kurdish Protection Units in Northern Syria: A Deviant Case of Peaceful Cohabitation between Foreign Fighters and Local Civilians?

Abstract

Interactions between foreign combatants and local populations during civil wars are often conflictual. Existing research underscores how trans-national insurgents typically behave more violently than domestic fighters toward civilians. Nevertheless, most research has focused on relations between local rebels and civilians, showing how the type of endowments that rebels exhibit determines the pattern of behavior toward civilian populations. Only recently has the impact of foreign fighters caught the attention of scholars. The consensus in the existing literature is that trans-national insurgents are typically more violent toward civilians than local rebels: they have neither ethnic nor linguistic kinships, there is no mechanism of accountability on foreign fighters, and, usually, they have more extreme religious or ideological beliefs compared to locals. Contrary to the general view, the Kurdish YPG/YPJ appears as a deviant case since it has exhibited low levels of civilian victimization. The presence of foreign fighters in its ranks seems not to affect this trend. Relying on primary and secondary sources, the article argues that the YPG/YPJ’s inclusive ideology, daily practices, and the organizational measures that the Kurdish leadership has adopted in dealing with foreign combatants in the ranks have resulted in lower levels of violence toward civilians.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Joseph Young, Ariel Koch, Shashi Jayakumar, Fabrizio Coticchia, and the two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and support.

Disclosure statement

There has been no conflict of interest in publishing the article.

Notes

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2 Alex P. Schmid, “Challenging the Narrative of the “Islamic State”,” International Centre for Counter-Terrorism: The Hague, June 2015, https://icct.nl/app/uploads/2015/06/ICCT-Schmid-Challenging-the-Narrative-of-the-Islamic-State-June2015.pdf.

3 Vicken Cheterian, “ISIS Genocide Against the Yazidis and Mass Violence in the Middle East,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 48, no. 4, (2021): 629-641.

4 Bakke, “Help Wanted? The Mixed Record of Foreign Fighters in Domestic Insurgencies,”; Moore, “When Do Ties Bind? Foreign Fighters, Social Embeddedness, and Violence Against Civilians,”; Doctor, and Willingham, “Foreign Fighters, Rebel Command Structure, and Civilian Targeting in Civil War”; Doctor, “Foreign Fighters and Conflict-Related Sexual Violence.”

5 Martha Crenshaw, “Transnational Jihadism & Civil Wars,” Daedalus, The Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences 164, no. 4, (2017): 60.

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7 Amnesty International, “We Had Nowhere Else to Go’. Forced Displacement and Demolitions in Northern Syria,” Amnesty International, October 2015, https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde24/2503/2015/en.

8 Un Human Rights Council, Human Rights Abuses and International Humanitarian Law Violations in the Syrian Arab Republic, 21 July 2016-28 February 2017, 2017, available at https://ohchr.org/en/hr-bodies/hrc/iici-syria/documentation.

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11 Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, trans. Anthony F. Roberts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

12 Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence, 52.

13 Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence, 21.

14 Jeremy M. Weinstein, Inside Rebellion. The Politics of Insurgent Violence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

15 Weinstein, Inside Rebellion, 203.

16 Gerring, “What is a Case Study and What Is It Good For?,”; Gerring, Case Study Research; Levy, “Case Studies: Types, Designs, and Logics of Inference.”

17 Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence, 21.

18 Weinstein, Inside Rebellion, 48.

19 Weinstein, Inside Rebellion, 47.

20 Reed M. Wood, “Opportunities to Kill or Incentives for Restraint? Rebel Capabilities, the Origins of Support, and Civilian Victimization in Civil War,” Conflict Management and Peace Science 31, no. 5, (2014): 461-480.

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23 Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence.

24 Weinstein, Inside Rebellion.

25 David Malet, Foreign Fighters. Transnational Identity in Civil Conflicts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013, 9).

26 Bakke, “Help Wanted? The Mixed Record of Foreign Fighters in Domestic Insurgencies.”

27 Gilles Kepel, Jihad. The Trail of Political Islam (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002); Charles R. Shrader, The Muslim-Croat Civil War in Central Bosnia: A Military History, 1992-1994 (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2003).

28 Ben Rich, and Dara Conduit, “The Impact of Jihadist Foreign Fighters on Indigenous Secular-Nationalist Causes: Contrasting Chechnya and Syria,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 38, no. 2, (2015): 113-131.

29 Vera Mironova, From Freedom Fighters to Jihadists. Human Resources of Non State Armed Groups (New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

30 Moore, “When Do Ties Bind? Foreign Fighters, Social Embeddedness, and Violence Against Civilians.”

31 Doctor, and Willingham, “Foreign Fighters, Rebel Command Structure, and Civilian Targeting in Civil War.”

32 Doctor, and Willingham, “Foreign Fighters, Rebel Command Structure, and Civilian Targeting in Civil War.”

33 Doctor, “Foreign Fighters and Conflict-Related Sexual Violence,” 79.

34 Victor Asal, and David Malet, “Nobody More Terrible than the Desperate: Conflict Conditions and Rebel Demand for Foreign Fighters,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, (2021), https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2021.1961715; Anna Speckhard, and Ahmet S. Yayla, ISIS Defectors: Inside Stories oif the Terrorist Caliphate (Mclean, VA: Advanced press, 2016).

35 Tricia Bacon, Grace Ellis, and Daniel Milton, “Helping or Hurting? The Impact of Foreign Fighters on Militant Group Behavior,” Journal of Strategic Studies, (2021), https://doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2021.1982702.

36 Balcells and Stanton, “Violence Against Civilians During Armed Conflict: Moving Beyond the Macro- and Micro-Level Divide.”

37 Balcells and Stanton, “Violence Against Civilians During Armed Conflict: Moving Beyond the Macro- and Micro-Level Divide,”: 56.

38 Bakke, “Help Wanted? The Mixed Record of Foreign Fighters in Domestic Insurgencies,”; Moore, “When Do Ties Bind? Foreign Fighters, Social Embeddedness, and Violence Against Civilians,”; Doctor, and Willingham, “Foreign Fighters, Rebel Command Structure, and Civilian Targeting in Civil War”; Doctor, “Foreign Fighters and Conflict-Related Sexual Violence.”

39 Laia Balcells and Stathis N. Kalyvas, “Did Marxism Make a Difference? Marxist Rebellions and national Liberation Movements,” paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, September 2-5, 2010; Amelia Hoover Green, “The Commander’s Dilemma: Creating and Controlling Armed Group Violence Against Civilians,” Journal of Peace Research 53, no. 5, (2016): 619:632; Amelia Hoover Green, The Commander’s Dilemma: Violence and Restraint in Wartime (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; Kay Thaler, “Ideology and Violence in Civil Wars: Theory and Evidence from Mozambique and Angola,” Civil Wars 14, no. 4, (2012): 546-567.

40 Ralph Sundberg, and Erik Melander “Introducing the UCDP Georeferenced Event Datased,” Journal of Peace Research 50, no. 4, (2013): 523-532; Stina Högbladh “UCDP GED Codebook version 21.1,” (Department of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala University, 2021).

41 Moore, “When Do Ties Bind? Foreign Fighters, Social Embeddedness, and Violence Against Civilians.”

42 Bakke, “Help Wanted? The Mixed Record of Foreign Fighters in Domestic Insurgencies,”; Doctor, and Willingham, “Foreign Fighters, Rebel Command Structure, and Civilian Targeting in Civil War”; Doctor, “Foreign Fighters and Conflict-Related Sexual Violence,”

43 Sundberg, and Melander “Introducing the UCDP Georeferenced Event Datased,”; Högbladh “UCDP GED Codebook version 21.1.”

44 Gerring, “What is a Case Study and What Is It Good For?,”; Gerring, Case Study Research; Levy, “Case Studies: Types, Designs, and Logics of Inference.”

45 Levy, “Case Studies: Types, Designs, and Logics of Inference,” 13.

46 Francisco Gutiérrez Sanin and Elisabeth J. Wood, “Ideology in Civil War: Instrumental Adoption and Beyond,” Journal of Peace Research 51, no. 2, (2014): 214.

47 Weinstein, Inside Rebellion; Stefano Costalli and Francesco N. Moro, “The Patterns of Ethnic Settlement and Violence: A Local-level Quantitative Analysis of the Bosnian War,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 34, no. 12, (2011): 2096-2114.

48 Livia I. Schubiger and Matthew Zelina, “Ideology in Armed Groups,” PS: Political Science & Politics 50, no. 4, (2017): 950.

49 Francesco N. Moro, “Organizing Emotions and Ideology,” PS: Political Science & Politics 50, no. 4, (2017): 944.

50 Stefano Costalli and Andrea Ruggeri, “Indignation, Ideologies, and Armed Mobilization,” International Security 40, no. 2, (2015): 131.

51 Stefano Costalli and Andrea Ruggeri, “Indignation, Ideologies, and Armed Mobilization,” International Security 40, no. 2, (2015): 131.

52 Jonathan Leader Maynard, “Ideology and Armed Conflict, ” Journal of Peace Research 56, no. 5, (2019): 635-649.

53 Victor Asal, Richard Legault, Ora Szekely, and Jonathan Wilkenfeld, “Gender Ideologies and Forms of Contentious Mobilization in the Middle East,” Journal of Peace Research 50, no. 3, (2013): 315.

54 Thomas Hegghammer, “The Rise of Muslim Foreign Fighters: Islam and the Globalization of Jihad,” International Security 35, no. 3, (2010): 53-94.

55 Malet, Foreign Fighters.

56 Jason Fritz, and Joseph K. Young, “Transnational Volunteers: American Foreign Fighters Combating the Islamic State,” Terrorism and Political Violence 32, no. 3, (2020): 449-468.

57 Sarah E. Parkinson, “Practical Ideology in Militant Organizations,” World Politics 73, no. 1, (2021): 60.

58 Abdullah Öcalan, The Political Thought of Abdullah Öcalan (London: Pluto Press, 2017); Damian Gerber, and Shannon Brincat, “When Öcalan met Bookchin: The Kurdish Freedom Movement and the Political Theory of Democratic Confederalism,” Geopolitics 26, no. 4, (2021): 973-997.

59 Cemil Boyraz, “Alternative Political Projects of Territoriality and Governance during the Syrian War: The Caliphate Vs Democratic Confederalism,” Geopolitics 26, no. 4, 1095-1120.

60 Henry Tuck, Tanya Silverman, and Candace Smalley, ““Shooting in the Right Direction”: Anti-ISIS Foreign Fighters in Syria & Iraq,” Institute for Strategic Dialogue, August 2016, https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/ISD-Report-Shooting-in-the-right-direction-Anti-ISIS-Fighters.pdf; Fritz and Young, “Transnational Volunteers: American Foreign Fighters Combating the Islamic State,”; Shashi Jayakumar, “Transnational Volunteers Against ISIS,” International Centre for the Study of Radicalization, August 2019, https://icsr.info/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/ICSR-Report-Transnational-Volunteers-Against-ISIS.pdf; Arial Koch, “The Non-Jihadi Foreign: Western Right-Wing and Left-Wing Extremists in Syria,” Terrorism and Political Violence 33, no. 4, (2019): 669-696; Goran Larsson, “Those Who Choose to Fight the Islamic State: Autobiographical Accounts on Western Volunteers,” Terrorism and Political Violence, (2021), https://doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2020.1837118.

61 Karim Franceschi, Il Combattente. Storia dell’italiano che ha difeso Kobane dall’Isis (Milano: Bur, 2016); Karim Franceschi, Non Morirò Stanotte. Un comandante, la sua squadra e la caduta dell’Isis (Milano: Bur, 2018); Claudio Locatelli, and Alberto Marzocchi, Nessuna Resa. Storia del combattente italiano che ha liberato Raqqa dall’Isis (Torino: Piemme, 2018); Lorenzo Orsetti, Scritti dalla Siria del Nord Est (Roma: Red Star Press, 2020).

62 In a personal conversation, Ariel Koch noted that building trust is important since former foreign fighters might face legal problems and they might be restrained in sharing their experiences. Moreover, contrary to jihadist foreign fighters, broader samples to retrieve data or contacts for qualitative interviews do not exist. In the case of the YPG/YPJ, participating in it is not considered illegal by all countries, and security agencies do not all track individuals who joined these units. As reported in a personal conversation with Professor Joseph Young, the United States does not consider the YPG/YPJ as a terrorist organization and it is not illegal to join them.

63 Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, trans. Anthony F. Roberts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

64 Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, trans. Anthony F. Roberts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

65 Genevieve Casagrande, “The Road to Ar-Raqqah: Background on the Syrian Democratic Forces,” Institute for the Study of War, November 2016, https://css.ethz.ch/content/ethz/special-interestgessciscenter-for-securities-studies/resources/docs/ISW-The%20Road%20To%20ar-Raqqah%20IS%20FINAL.pdf.

66 Doruk Ergun, “External Actors and VNSAs,” in Violent Non-state Actors and the Syrian Civil War, ed. Özden Zeynep Oktav, Emel Parlar Dal, Ali Murat Kurşun, 149-172. Cham: Springer, 2018.

67 Berkan Öğür, and Zana Baykal, “Understanding “Foreign Policy” of the PYD/YPG as a Non-State Actor in Syria and Beyond”, in Non-State Armed Actors in the Middle East, ed. Murat Yeşiltaş, Tuncay Kardaş, 43-75. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

68 Foreign fighters’ motivations are usually different from local combatants. On local recruitment see Stathis N. Kalyvas and Matthew A. Kocher, “How “Free” is Free Riding in Civil Wars?: Violence, Insurgency, and the Collective Action Problem,” World Politics 59, no. 2, (2011): 177-216; Weinstein Inside Rebellion; Kristin Eck, “Raising Rebels. Participation and Recruitment in Civil War” (PhD diss., Uppsala Universitet, 2010); Kristin Eck, “Coercion in Rebel Recruitment,” Security Studies 23, (2014): 364-398; Mironova, From Freedom Fighters.

69 Nathan Patin, “The Other Foreign Fighters: An Open-Source Investigation into American Volunteers Fighting the Islamic State,” Bellingcat, August 2015, https://bellingcat.com/app/uploads/2015/08/The-Other-Foreign-Fighters1.pdf.

70 Patin, “The Other Foreign Fighters: An Open-Source Investigation into American Volunteers Fighting the Islamic State,” 19.

71 Tuck, Silverman and Smalley, Shooting in the Right Direction”: Anti-ISIS Foreign Fighters in Syria & Iraq.”

72 Tuck, Silverman and Smalley, Shooting in the Right Direction”: Anti-ISIS Foreign Fighters in Syria & Iraq,” 22.

73 Tuck, Silverman and Smalley, Shooting in the Right Direction”: Anti-ISIS Foreign Fighters in Syria & Iraq,” 27.

74 Fritz and Young, “Transnational Volunteers: American Foreign Fighters Combating the Islamic State.”

75 Jayakumar, “Transnational Volunteers Against ISIS.”

76 Koch, “The Non-Jihadi Foreign: Western Right-Wing and Left-Wing Extremists in Syria.”

77 Koch, “The Non-Jihadi Foreign: Western Right-Wing and Left-Wing Extremists in Syria,” 23.

78 Patin, “The Other Foreign Fighters: An Open-Source Investigation into American Volunteers Fighting the Islamic State,” 19.

79 Malet, Foreign Fighters.

80 Larsson, “Those Who Choose to Fight the Islamic State: Autobiographical Accounts on Western Volunteers,”

81 Larsson, “Those Who Choose to Fight the Islamic State: Autobiographical Accounts on Western Volunteers,” 13.

82 Weinstein, Inside Rebellion.

83 Gutiérrez Sanin and Wood, “Ideology in Civil War: Instrumental Adoption and Beyond,” 214.

84 Parkinson, “Practical Ideology in Militant Organizations,” 60.

85 For the complete reference and list of individuals, https://milanoinmovimento.com/internazionale/mediooriente/combattenti-italiani-e-delle-ypg-ypj-in-memoria-di-giovanni-hiwa-bosco.

86 Franceschi, Il Combattente. Storia dell’italiano che ha difeso Kobane dall’Isis; Franceschi, Non Morirò Stanotte. Un comandante, la sua squadra e la caduta dell’Isis; Locatelli, and Marzocchi, Nessuna Resa. Storia del combattente italiano che ha liberato Raqqa dall’Isis; Orsetti, Scritti dalla Siria del Nord Est.

87 Joseph Young is Professor in the Department of Justice, Law & Criminology at the American University in Washington, DC.

88 Ariel Koch is a postdoctoral researcher at the Lauder School of Government Diplomacy and Strategy, at The Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), Herzliya, Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR), London, UK, and a member of The Middle East Network Analysis Desk at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University in Israel.

89 Shashi Jayakumar is Senior Fellow in the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS) at the Nanyang Technological University of Singapore.

90 Franceschi, Il Combattente, 10.

91 Orsetti, Scritti dalla Siria, 40.

92 Interview with a former Italian foreign fighter, 3 June 2020.

93 Interview with a former Italian foreign fighter, 7 June 2021.

94 Interview with a former Italian foreign fighter, 16 June 2021.

95 Interview with a former Italian foreign fighter, 24 June 2020.

96 Interview with a former Italian foreign fighter, 31 August 2021.

97 Interview with a former Italian foreign fighter, 21 June 2021.

98 Boyraz, “Alternative Political Projects of Territoriality and Governance during the Syrian War: The Caliphate Vs Democratic Confederalism.”

99 Özçelik, “Explaining the Kurdish Democratic Union Party’s Self-Governance Practices in Northern Syria, 2012-2018.”

100 Burcu Özçelik, “Explaining the Kurdish Democratic Union Party’s Self-Governance Practices in Northern Syria, 2012–2018.”

101 See note 8 above.

102 Bakke, “Help Wanted? The Mixed Record of Foreign Fighters in Domestic Insurgencies,”; Moore, “When Do Ties Bind? Foreign Fighters, Social Embeddedness, and Violence Against Civilians,”; Doctor, and Willingham, “Foreign Fighters, Rebel Command Structure, and Civilian Targeting in Civil War”; Doctor, “Foreign Fighters and Conflict-Related Sexual Violence.”

103 Therése Pettersson, Shawn Davies, Amber Deniz, Garoun Engström Garoun Engström, Nanar Hawach, Stina Högbladh, Margareta Sollenberg Magnus Öberg, “Organized Violence 1989-2020, with a Special Emphasis on Syria”, Journal of Peace Research 58, no. 4: 814–815.

104 Interview with a former Italian foreign fighter, 25 June 2020.

105 Interview with a former Italian foreign fighter, 31 August 2021.

106 Interview with a former Italian foreign fighter, 7 June 2021.

107 Interview with a former Italian foreign fighter, 16 June 2021.

108 Interview with a former Italian foreign fighter, 21 June 2021.

109 Interview with a former Italian foreign fighter, 24 June 2020.

110 Interview with a former Italian foreign fighter, 25 June 2020; Interview with a former Italian foreign fighter, 6 July 2020; Interview with a former Italian foreign fighter, 31 August 2021.

111 Interview with a former Italian foreign fighter, 6 July 2020

112 Interview with a former Italian foreign fighter, 25 June 2020

113 Interview with a former Italian foreign fighter, 29 June 2021.

114 Interview with Professor Joseph Young, 17 November 2021.

115 Interview with a former Italian foreign fighter, 31 August 2021.

116 Interview with a former Italian foreign fighter, 31 August 2021.

117 Interview with a former Italian foreign fighter, 29 June 2021.

118 Interview with a former Italian foreign fighter, 7 June 2021.

119 His name has been spelled variously, as Gunter Hellsten, Gunter Helsten, Guenther Hellstein, Guenter Hellstein, Guenter Helstein.

120 Interview with a former Italian foreign fighter, 31 August 2021.

121 Weinstein, Inside Rebellion.

122 Bakke, “Help Wanted? The Mixed Record of Foreign Fighters in Domestic Insurgencies”; Moore, “When Do Ties Bind? Foreign Fighters, Social Embeddedness, and Violence Against Civilians.”

123 Interview with Professor Joseph Young, 17 November 2021.

124 Balcells and Kalyvas, “Did Marxism Make a Difference? Marxist Rebellions and national Liberation Movements,”; Hoover Green, “The Commander’s Dilemma: Creating and Controlling Armed Group Violence Against Civilians,”; Hoover Green, The Commander’s Dilemma: Violence and Restraint in Wartime; Thaler, “Ideology and Violence in Civil Wars: Theory and Evidence from Mozambique and Angola.”

125 Ariel Koch, “The New Crusaders: Contemporary Extreme Right Symbolism and Rhetoric,” Perspective on Terrorism 11, no. 5, (2017): 13-24; Koch, “The Non-Jihadi Foreign: Western Right-Wing and Left-Wing Extremists in Syria.”

126 Matthew Feldman, “Christianism: The Elephant in the Extremism Room,” Fair Observer, July 01, 2021, https://www.fairobserver.com/politics/matthew-feldman-religious-extremism-christianity-history-violence-christianism-news-37281/.

127 Saleyhan, Siroky, and. Wood, “External Rebel Sponsorship and Civilian Abuse: A Principal-Agent Analysis of Wartime Atrocities.”

128 Bakke, “Help Wanted? The Mixed Record of Foreign Fighters in Domestic Insurgencies,”; Moore, “When Do Ties Bind? Foreign Fighters, Social Embeddedness, and Violence Against Civilians,”; Doctor, and Willingham, “Foreign Fighters, Rebel Command Structure, and Civilian Targeting in Civil War”; Doctor, “Foreign Fighters and Conflict-Related Sexual Violence.”

129 Sundberg, and Melander “Introducing the UCDP Georeferenced Event Datased,”; Högbladh “UCDP GED Codebook version 21.1.”