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THE PLIGHT of CIVILIANS in the SYRIAN CIVIL WAR: a COMPARATIVE APPLICATION of MASS KILLING LITERATURE to STATE and NON-STATE ACTORS Freya Jamison I

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THE PLIGHT of CIVILIANS in the SYRIAN CIVIL WAR: a COMPARATIVE APPLICATION of MASS KILLING LITERATURE to STATE and NON-STATE ACTORS Freya Jamison I 76 NOWHERE TO TURN - THE PLIGHT OF CIVILIANS IN THE SYRIAN CIVIL WAR: A COMPARATIVE APPLICATION OF MASS KILLING LITERATURE TO STATE AND NON-STATE ACTORS Freya Jamison I. INTRODUCTION Tree-year-old Aylan Kurdi shocked the world in early May 2016, when im- ages of the Syrian toddler’s drowned and lifeless body went viral on global media. In the words of British-Somali poet Warsan Shire, “no one puts their children in a boat / unless the water is safer than the land.”1 For many Syrians, risking everything to fee their war-torn homes is the only hope for enduring the country’s bloody civil war. For far too many more, feeing is not an option, and the best chance for survival is keeping one’s head down and hoping not to be noticed by any of the belligerents. It is clear that civilians have born the brunt of atrocities in the civil war that has plagued Syria since 2011; what is not clear is why. Te intentional targeting of Syrian noncombatants is a well-established practice of both the government forces commanded by President Bashar al-Assad and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Te second part of this paper provides an overview of civilian causalities in the Syrian Civil War. Part three examines the literature on the reasons for mass killing and applies these theo- ries to the actions of the Assad government and the Islamic State. Part four reviews the literature on mass killing on the individual level and how it relates to the Syrian confict. Part fve summarizes the gaps in mass killing scholarship. I conclude that the government’s massacres serve a military purpose as a rational counterinsurgency tactic, but the existing literature falls short of explaining the rewards ISIL gains from the strategy. Te literature succeeds, however, in providing a framework for understanding the motivations of individual perpetrators in both state- and non-state contexts. II. MASS KILLING AND THE SYRIAN CIVIL WAR In March 2011, Arab Spring protestors took to the streets of Damascus and other major Syrian cities, demanding democratic reform from the government of Syr- ian President Bashar al-Assad. Government security forces responded by fring upon and illegally detaining protestors. By early April, protestors escalated their demands from reform to regime change, and chants of “the people want the fall of the regime” echoed throughout the nation. By July, activists and army defectors formed the Free Syrian Army (FSA) to fght the regime’s highly organized army. Clashes between the two militaries continue today, despite a UN-led ceasefre attempt in early 2016. Te Syrian rebels are exceedingly fractured, and the confict is further complicated by the Freya Jamison is a fourth year at Dartmouth College majoring in Government and Middle Eastern Studies. Freya hails from Olympia, WA, and is interested the protection of human rights during and immediately following war. Eventually, she hopes to pursue a career in international humanitarian law. Tis paper was originally written for Professor Benjamin Valentino’s government seminar, “Te Causes and Prevention of Genocide and Mass Killing.” Nowhere to Turn - The Plight of Civilians in the Syrian Civil War 77 involvement of foreign backers on both sides and the opportunistic participation of Salaf jihadist groups, ISIL and its afliate, the al-Nusra Front. Sustained fghting has taken an incredible toll on the civilian population of Syria. Estimated total casualties range from 300,000-470,000. Of that number, at least 86,692 were civilian deaths, according to numbers recorded by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) between March 2011 and August 2016.2 SOHR reports that about one ffth of civilian casualties were children under the age of 18. Both sides have been accused of manipulating casualty statistics, and Lebanese daily al-Akbar asserts that some insurgent deaths were wrongly counted as civilians.3 In a joint report released in early 2016, the Syrian Center for Policy Research and UN Development Programme described a national death rate of about 10 people per thousand with an additional 1.88 million wounded, meaning approximately 11.5% of the Syrian population has been killed or injured in war.4 Te fghting has dispro- portionately disrupted civilian lives: an estimated 7.5 million Syrians are internally displaced and more than 4 million currently seek refuge in other countries.5 Acts committed by both government forces and jihadi rebels qualify as mass killing, defned by Valentino as “the intentional killing of a massive number of non- combatants.”6 Te UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria found that both government forces and the terrorist group ISIL committed and (as of the report’s publication in February 2016) continue to commit crimes against humanity against Syrian civilians; these crimes included the use of indiscriminate air and ground assaults, siege tactics, and targeting hospitals and schools in violation of international humanitarian law.7 In 2013, Assad and his forces used chemical weapons against civilians. In 2016, the United Nations declared that ISIL’s actions against the Yazidi minority, including mass killing, kidnapping and rape, constitute genocide. U.S. Secretary of State John Ker- ry went further to say, “In my judgment, [ISIL] is responsible for genocide against groups in areas under its control including Yazidis, Christians, Shia Muslims... and in some cases also against Sunni Muslims, Kurds, and other minorities.”8 Sporadic reports also accuse other rebels and the FSA of intentionally targeting civilians, but the opposition is so disorganized that it is difcult to attribute these actions to a certain leader, and the scale of any atrocities of this kind is much smaller than those commit- ted by government forces and ISIL. III. LITERATURE REVIEW – WHY LEADERS COMMAND MASS KILLING Teories that explain the mass killing of civilians generally fall into three main camps: mobilization around cleavages, regime type or political stability, and atrocities as the byproduct of war. Tey point to diferent motivations for the leaders ordering murderous policies: ideology, power, or military necessity. For some scholars, one-sid- ed killing is the only way to resolve intractable societal cleavages, while theorists on the opposite end of the spectrum believe killing is avoidable when there are checks on leaders’ power and societies celebrate, rather than fear, diversity (both domestically and internationally.) 78 Freya Jamison Te frst set of theories blame psychological cleavages or entrenched ethnic hatred for mass killing. Tis explanation claims that humans are adept at sorting themselves around perceived diferences. Tese diferences – whether constructed in the mind or more defnite (like as skin color or religion) – inspire populations to mur- der members of the “outgroup” in incredible numbers. In “Killer Species,” Richard Wrangham tracks this tendency to evolutionary biology, noting that humans, like genetically similar chimpanzees and wolves, organize to form alliances against other members of the same species.9 He observes that killing is most likely when resource competition is ferce and the operation is low-risk, implying that modern massacres occur when aggressors feel they can forcibly take limited resources from the out-group at a low cost to themselves. Psychologist Ervin Staub explains identity-based violence by generalizing the frustration-aggression theory of individual psychology to the na- tional level, arguing that in societies plagued by “hard times,” such as economic de- pression, war, or other intense social pressure, threatened groups target an out-group to collectively scapegoat.10 He cites the case of Nazi Germany, which blamed the Jews for the economic downturn leading to World War II as a supporting example. For Scott Straus, some nations are more susceptible to mobilizing cleavages than others. He contends that groups undertake mass killing when they perceive a “fundamental and imminent” threat to their core political project or political future.11 Straus ar- gues that “pre-crisis ‘founding narratives’ shape how elites understand and respond to threats,” and that violence is more likely when the apparent threat derives from a group excluded from the country’s founding narrative.12 Scholars from the mobiliza- tion around cleavages camp commonly cite Rwanda’s 1994 genocide and mass killing in Yugoslavia in the early 1990s as instances where perpetrators from a single ethnic group victimized members of another group on the sole basis of ethnicity. Tese scholars ofer an important warning: elements of identity, such as eth- nicity, race, and religion can (and have) been used to delineate groups in confict. Tey neglect, however, to explain the internal calculation of potential perpetrators deciding whether to participate in violence, and rely instead on the assumption that not only is diversity visible and existent, but that identity lines are salient enough for people to take up arms for, risking their lives and stability. Tey also fail to present a unifed hypothesis for the path from divided societies, to prejudice, to confict; Straus argues that prejudice and “othering” is present but latent and surfaces in times of crisis, while Staub would posit that discrimination can become a coping mechanism for difcult times. Finally, identity-based theories do not explain cases where mass killing occurs within a national or ethnic group, such as within communist regimes.13 It is plausible that Staub-style “othering” can occur among subgroups of a generally homogenous
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