Out of the Mountains (39 page)

For their part, the rebels lacked military experience, but what they did have was an urbanized population with good functional knowledge of technology. Libya didn't have a gun culture like that of, say, the tribal areas of Pakistan, Somalia, or Yemen.
134
Most anti-regime fighters, except for military defectors, had little background in weapons or tactics for urban fighting. They were unemployed youth, shopkeepers, teachers, mechanics, bus drivers, civil servants, sports fans, and so on—and one of the main tasks of rebel leaders was to train these city dwellers and forge them into a unified force.
135
They never truly achieved this: by the end of the war there were dozens of local autonomous guerrilla groups fighting the regime, collaborating loosely (at best) with the rebel council. Weapons were scarce, and here the skills of the urban population came into their own: workshops sprang up in liberated areas, with vehicles and weapons being modified or made from scratch. Rebel mechanics welded helicopter rocket pods onto trucks, rigged vehicles with homemade armor plating, and mounted anti-tank guns, heavy machine guns, and anti-aircraft cannon onto pickup trucks to create Somali-style technicals. They dismantled and reused damaged and captured regime weapons and vehicles, and modified mines and RPGs with high explosives for use against urban strongpoints.
136
Access to urban industrial facilities and an urban population with basic technical skills was essential to this effort.

Weapons weren't the only kind of technology the rebels were able to repurpose. A network of rebel supporters evaded the regime's attempts to block the Internet and cellphones by smuggling Thuraya satellite phones, thumb drives, and CD-ROMs of geospatial, humanitarian, and intelligence information into and out of the country. During the siege of Misurata in summer
2011
, for example, fighters used Google Earth data on CD-ROMs, in combination with iPhone compass apps, to adjust rocket fire in the city's streets. “After a rocket was fired, a spotter confirmed the hit, reporting that it had landed, for example, ‘
30
yards from the restaurant.' They then calculated the precise distance on Google Earth and used the compass, along with angle and distance tables, to make adjustments.”
137
Others—including children—used Google Maps and smartphones to mark regime sniper positions, which NATO strike planes then engaged from aircraft carriers offshore. In this sense, the same factors that helped create the rebellion—a connected, tech-savvy, radicalized, underemployed youth population in Libya's crowded, marginalized, and overstressed cities—also helped the rebels strike hard at the regime when the time came.

The proximate trigger for the uprising, of course, was Libyans' awareness of successful revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. Thus the Libyan revolution can be seen in part as a spillover from these uprisings, enabled by digital connectivity across the region. After the end of the Libyan war, another spillover occurred: many mercenaries recruited by Gaddafi, who had fought hard for the regime and lost, returned to their countries of origin. As well as fighters from Niger, Burkina Faso, and Chad, these included Tuareg fighters from Mali, some of whom had lived in Libya ever since a failed uprising against the Malian government in the
1960
s.
138
Up to five thousand more Tuaregs were recruited by the regime in February
2011
, many joining at recruiting centers in several Malian cities.
139
Once the regime fell, these fighters moved back into northern Mali, where they sparked a resurgence of the Tuareg separatist insurrection. This, combined with an al Q
 
aeda–linked radical movement and a military coup in February
2012
, triggered the collapse of Mali's democratic government and prompted yet another military intervention in Africa, this time led by France, in early
2013
.

The other major impact of the war in Libya is still being felt, across the eastern Mediterranean, in Syria.

Social Netwar: Syria 2011–13

As mentioned earlier, the war in Syria is going on as I write, and its outcome—after two years of fighting, a million refugees crowded into squalid camps in neighboring countries, millions of displaced persons within Syria, and eighty thousand killed and counting—remains in doubt. Syria represents a huge escalation in violence, scale, and scope over previous uprisings in the Arab Awakening, as far beyond the conflict in Libya as Libya was beyond the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. To do justice to the Syrian uprising would require a full-length study, and I don't propose to discuss it in detail here—only to highlight aspects that are directly relevant to our examination of future conflict environments.

The Syrian war began, like the other uprisings, as a series of peaceful protests. These first broke out in the southern city of Daraa on March
15
,
2011
, a few days before NATO began its intervention in Libya. Daraa was experiencing significant stress: decades of neglect and mismanaged resources contributed to an unprecedented and severe drought, and there had been am influx of population into the city's outlying districts over the past few months.
140
Syria has lost half its available water supply over the past decade, in part because of mismanagement and urban growth, in part because of changing weather and rainfall patterns. As a result, water is rationed in all of Syria's cities, the water system in most towns is operating right at the limit of its capacity, and disturbances in water supply can have immediate destabilizing effects.
141
As noted in Chapter
1
, water supply is one of the most challenging aspects of urban governance, and the influx of a large number of displaced people, seeking water, into a city already rationing its water supply represents one of the most severe possible stresses on a city's metabolism. In Syria's case, this was an added burden on top of the demands of roughly
1
.
5
million Iraqi refugees, many of whom moved to the Sayyida Zeinab neighborhood south of Damascus as the Iraq war worsened after
2004
. “Although political repression may have fuelled a steady undercurrent of dissent over the last few decades, the regime's failure to put in place economic measures to alleviate the effects of drought was a critical driver in propelling such massive mobilizations of dissent . . . Syrian cities [served] as junctures where the grievances of displaced rural migrants and disenfranchised urban residents meet and come to question the very nature and distribution of power.”
142

The immediate trigger for the protests was the arrest and beating of three teenage boys, inspired by protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere, who tagged a building with anti-regime graffiti. Several hundred people rallied to demand the boys' release, and the protests turned violent after security forces fired on the crowd.
143
Riot police killed more than four hundred protestors, particularly targeting mourners at protestors' funerals, in the first three months of clashes in Daraa alone. They attempted to seal off Daraa from the outside world, but as in the other uprisings, thousands of demonstrators across the country subsequently took to the streets, and the demonstrations quickly spread to towns across Syria in March and April
2011
. Activists used cellphones and social media to connect with each other and with international supporters, and human networks linked urban dwellers in Damascus and Aleppo (Syria's two largest cities) to people in rural areas experiencing unrest. By early May, hundreds had been killed or detained in massive riots, and the army had deployed tanks and thousands of troops in Homs and Daraa to suppress what was now morphing into an armed uprising.
144

Pro-regime militias, known in Syria as
shabiha
, “ghosts,” committed massacres in several towns, and secret police arrested (and in many cases tortured, killed, or “disappeared”) dissidents across the country as the conflict escalated in May and June.
145
The
shabiha
, in a pattern that mirrors the other examples we have explored, were drawn largely from gangs of marginalized street youth, criminal networks, and organized thugs who operated in poor, marginalized “garrison districts” in Syrian cities and often had close patron-client relationships with regime officials. As the uprising escalated, the
shabiha
became a key irregular auxiliary force, which the regime regularly employed in order to intimidate the population.
146

Learning from the experience of the Egyptian and Libyan regimes, the Syrian government under President Bashar al-Assad quickly offered a series of compromises and concessions, but none of these offers to relax regime restrictions and introduce limited democratic freedoms was enough to appease the protestors. Assad initially left the Internet and phone networks up and quickly mobilized an Iranian-supported Electronic Army to harass activists, hack opposition websites, and undermine anti-regime cohesion by spreading confusing messages.
147
More sophisticated than the government in Egypt, the Syrian regime had created an extremely effective system of wiretapping, cellphone interception, and Internet surveillance, and so the security forces' instinct at first was to allow unrestricted use of these tools as a way of gathering information on the protestors. When protestors began using cellphones to post updates on Twitter, however, and using cellphone cameras to gather and broadcast images of regime brutality, this caught the security services by surprise, forcing a rethink.
148

Over the preceding decade, there'd been an explosion in digital connectivity and information access in Syria. Hafez al-Assad, Syria's dictator from
1971
until his death in
2000
, had enforced extremely tight restrictions on information and connectivity—allowing no international media, satellite television, cellphones, or Internet access whatsoever.
149
However, his son and successor, Bashar al-Assad, was something of a computer geek, taking an active role as the head of the Syrian Computer Society after his brother Basel died in
1994
. On his accession as president in
2000
, Bashar al-Assad initially made efforts to modernize Syria, tolerating a limited amount of political dissent during a short-lived period known as the Damascus Spring, and opening up electronic connectivity to ordinary Syrians, to include satellite and cable television, cellphone networks, and open Internet access.
150

Despite occasional crackdowns—the regime banned YouTube, for example, in April
2007
after the site uploaded a clip of President Assad's wife, Asma, with her underwear exposed in a gust of wind
151
—Syrians generally had excellent access to digital connectivity, and Internet penetration and cellphone usage rates in Syria were vastly higher than in any other country affected by the Arab Awakening. According to World Bank data, between
2002
and
2012
, Syrian cellphone usage rates “shot up by
2
,
347
percent (by contrast, they increased by
83
percent in the US during the same time period). This was almost double that of similarly repressive environments in Egypt and Tunisia at the time. What is perhaps even more incredible is Syria's Internet penetration growth rates, which shot up by
883
percent, greater than Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia (for comparison, Internet penetration only increased by
27
percent in the US during the same time period).”
152

But by June
4
,
2011
, the regime was forced to suspend Internet access in an attempt to stanch the flow of damaging images and video clips documenting regime brutality, which were being posted on the Internet and broadcast on satellite television. Another reason for the ban on land-based Internet may have been that this enabled the regime's security services to detect who was still using satellite-based Internet in the country, and thus to locate and target dissidents and guerrilla groups.
153
As in the other uprisings, when the regime banned the Internet, Syrians improvised mesh networks, smuggled videos out to Lebanon to be uploaded there, and jury-rigged their own satellite uplinks (a traditional pastime—under Hafez al-Assad's ban, the Syrian army had run a lucrative side business in black market sales of satellite dishes so that people could access banned satellite television channels).
154
At the same time, international activists (including Anonymous, once again, with #OpSyria) and a network of diaspora supporters and social media networks stepped into the breach.

By July, cities across the country—including Damascus, Aleppo, Daraa, Idlib, Homs, and Hama, together representing almost
40
percent of Syria's population of just under
21
million—were experiencing violent unrest. Protestors were arming themselves, guerrilla groups were forming, and the regime had lost control of many outlying towns and cities. As in Libya, a civilian democracy movement was emerging in parallel with a diverse armed resistance that included jihadist groups, secular nationalists, ethnic separatists, military defectors, and tribal groups. On the ground in Syria, leaders of armed groups rapidly marginalized and overshadowed the unarmed pro-democracy movement as the violence spread, emphasizing the importance (which we noted in the last chapter) of coercive means as the underlying enabler for competitive control over populations: armed groups could always outcompete unarmed groups at the coercive end of the spectrum of control, and thus rapidly became dominant on the ground.