Eurasia Press & News
In a shaky handheld video uploaded on 2 September to an obscure Facebook page, a man crouching low behind an earth berm films a busy highway.
He mumbles the date and then says, “we are the Men of Light,” before an explosion immediately rips through a passing General Security vehicle in front of him.
The government’s Ministry of the Interior would blame the attack, which killed two security services personnel, on “remnant elements associated with the former regime”.
The video was reportedly filmed in the countryside close to Jableh in the Tartus governorate on the Syrian coast.
It is the first attack publicly claimed by the Men of Light, an Alawite militant group that announced its formation a month earlier. In a statement they released in early September, the group issued a warning to Syria’s new government: “Leave the coast. If you do not listen, the sky will speak.”
This is not the first militant anti-government group to emerge on the coast. In February, Miqdad Fatiha, a former commander in the Syrian Republican Guard, announced the formation of the Coastal Shield Brigade, claiming responsibility for several ambushes on security forces across the coast.
On 6 March, the Military Council for the Liberation of Syria, led by Ghaith Dalla, the Chief of Staff of Maher Al-Assad’s infamous 4th Division, announced its formation, calling for the “liberation” of the Syrian coast from what it called Syria’s “terrorist forces”.
In the days that followed, it launched, alongside the Coastal Shield Brigade, a wide-ranging coordinated attack across the region that overwhelmed the government’s security forces and temporarily wrested the region out of their control.
The uprising was met with a panicked mobilisation of the government’s disparate security architecture, which resulted in wide-ranging sectarian massacres and the killing of around 1,400 civilians, according to a UN report into the violence.
Since March’s massacres, low-level violence has been simmering on the coast, with sectarian killings and kidnappings targeting the Alawite community. A spate of guerrilla attacks, meanwhile, has targeted Damascus’ security services.
The new government has responded by securitising the region. Checkpoints are closely spaced along the primary roads, whilst frequent sweeps of the coastal mountain villages and flying checkpoints are being deployed to catch regime “remnants”.
Yet with violence simmering at a low level, could we be witnessing the emergence of an incipient insurgency on Syria’s coast?
The violence on the coast could be described as a “cottage industry insurgency,” Malik Al-Abdeh, the Editor in Chief of Syria in Transition, explained to The New Arab.
“Lacking an organised hierarchical structure, like other insurgent groups historically, they appear to be composed of disparate armed elements operating in an uncoordinated manner.”
Such insurgents, he argues, are relatively limited in their capacity to organise complicated operations that directly threaten the regime, but they are capable of sporadic violence.
This matches the pattern of recent incidents, which have largely been limited to “random shootings and IED attacks,” Suhail Al-Ghazi, a researcher at the Syrian Archive, told TNA.
Unlike in Druze-controlled Suweida or Syria’s Kurdish-majority SDF-controlled north-east, where armed groups can genuinely challenge the state’s security supremacy, the insurgents on the coast face more limitations.
“During the March attacks, the [Assadist] groups were equipped to control parts of the countryside, but currently, they are not able to control territory,” Al-Ghazi said.
However, this is not without risk in a country wracked with instability and still, ten months after the fall of the regime, struggling to ensure security as kidnapping gangs, revenge killings, and sectarian violence remain widespread.
Abdeh draws a parallel between the low-level violence on the coast and the liminal phase in the Syrian revolution towards the end of 2011. During this period, protesters were beginning to pick up arms against the regime but still lacked the complex financial, military, and political structures that would transform them into an organised opposition.
This came with time as social grievances deepened in response to the flagrant violence the regime deployed in the face of peaceful protests.
There are some resonances with the current situation on the coast, as the socio-economic “conditions for a renewed and sustained insurgency on the coast remain”, says Nanar Hawach, a Senior Research Analyst at the International Crisis Group (ICG).
Whilst Syria’s Alawite community was one of the most poverty-stricken under Assad, analysts agree that their deepening economic dispossession since the fall of the regime is likely a factor driving resentment and militancy on the coast.
Many Alawites are now stuck in a fight for economic survival, as Damascus has sought to reform public institutions. Many of these institutions served a clientelist function to provide jobs and income to the Assad family’s own sect, with it being common for an individual to hold multiple jobs concurrently in different public institutions.
As part of Damascus’ wider fight against corruption and ‘ghost jobs’, many Alawite public servants have been fired and have lost out on these additional income streams.
Hawar believes that “if these issues of marginalisation and lack of livelihood are not well-addressed, there is a high likelihood for a new insurgency to take root, especially among those who lost their families in the recent violence”.
There is also the issue of demobilised soldiers and delays in the restitution of civilian status. Despite the new government’s declaration of the dissolution of Assad’s military, “no clear administrative or legal decree has been issued to formally demobilise the troops,” according to Dr Samir Alabdullah, Researcher at the Arab Centre for Contemporary Syria Studies.
Whilst conscripts were able to retrieve their civilian IDs, officers and volunteer soldiers were issued with temporary settlement documents until they were cleared of war crimes and their civilian IDs were returned. This has left “hundreds in a legally unstable position,” he adds, raising “fears of possible questioning or harassment”.
Many former Alawite fighters are essentially stuck hiding at home, either bored, angry, or unable to work, and this marginalisation risks pushing more men into joining insurgent elements. The obvious parallel is the dissolution of Saddam Hussein’s military after the US invasion in 2003, which pushed thousands of young Sunni men into unemployment and fuelled Iraq’s growing insurgency.
Solving this issue is not easy, according to Alabdullah, as it “remains one of the most complex and costly challenges, requiring long-term programs including vocational training, psychological rehabilitation, and secure economic alternatives,” for those who have spent their life in the military.
However, no such policy is apparent. Instead, “Damascus’ heavy-handed security responses on the coast have exacerbated the situation and also given rise to new risks,” explains Hawach.
“This approach eroded state legitimacy, deepened divisions, and has allowed hardliner figures to consolidate power.”
He believes that the emergence of new groups, such as the Men of Light, “highlights the tensions and fertile ground that prevail on the coast and the risk for a more sustained insurgency to eventually emerge”.
However, Al-Abdeh, whilst recognising the risks of a deepening insurgency, is sceptical for two primary reasons. Firstly, he doubts that there is deep-rooted support for these armed groups within the Alawite community.
“Like the rest of Syria, the Alawites are exhausted from war, and, in contradiction to a lot of the sectarian discourse, they are not that in favour of the resurgence of the Assad regime,” he explains.
Secondly, Abdeh believes there is no clear foreign patron capable or willing to nurture any incipient insurgency. He points out that while Iran had played a role in coordinating the March uprising, it achieved little success. A series of bloody noses in its conflict with Israel has further limited its ability to destabilise the coast.
He also argues that some remnant factions may look to their former patrons in Moscow for support, but Russia has adopted a “dual strategy” of maintaining its links with its former allies whilst tentatively working to build relations with Damascus – making it unlikely that Moscow will fully support an insurgency on the coast, short of a major policy shift from the Kremlin.
However, most analysts agree that low-level violence will likely continue, and according to Hawach, “if the insurgency gains traction, or if the current fertile ground persists, it might eventually draw in external sponsors”.
These are just the embers of an insurgency, and Damascus could still put them out if managed properly. If the ground were to shift in Syria, however, they may well catch light, and in a country working desperately to recover from a decade of war, it is not an impossibility.
The government has already lost its grip on Suweida, negotiations with the SDF have stalled, and Israel continues to encroach on Syrian territory. A spark that could ignite the coastal region again remains a risk.
