2 - Institutions of Violence and Proliferation

Summary

The militarisation of the Syrian uprising began a few months after the March protests of Dar‘a in the Syrian south. On 25 April 2011 government forces besieged Dar‘a and attacked protestors in response to mounting non-violent mobilisation. Following that, government forces perpetrated numerous massacres against unarmed civilians. For example, on 3 May 2013, the town of al-Bayda in the province of Tartus off the Mediterranean coast witnessed brutal massacres and summary executions of unarmed civilians by government forces, pro-government paramilitary groups and local mobs. After brief clashes between government forces and armed opposition groups in the nearby coastal town of Baniyas in the morning, armed opposition groups withdrew, and the village of al-Bayda saw government forces making their way in by 1pm. Until four o’clock in the afternoon, pro-government forces repeatedly entered specific complexes of homes of select families in the area, ‘separated men from women, rounded-up the men in one spot, and executed them by shooting them at close range’. As a Human Rights Watch investigation reveals, the violence of the day was targeted, and the indiscriminate killings of the day were not random. Although the men and women were separated, the report documents at least twenty-three women and fourteen children, including infants, killed on the day. In addition to killing 167 individuals, pro-government forces burned the bodies of the deceased and some perpetrators recorded the violence as it unfolded and uploaded the footage to YouTube. Mass looting and burning of properties ensued, before armed forces withdrew from the area on Saturday at 5pm.

Mass violence, such as the massacre in al-Bayda, has broad spatial attendance beyond the targeted unarmed civilians, as it encourages retribution from opponents and hastens polarisation more broadly. As Salwa Ismail notes, in August 2013, when opposition groups, including Suqur al-‘Iz and al-Farouq Battalion, launched an attack on Latakia countryside, their massacres reflect a mimetic reproduction of the violence witnessed in al-Bayda. Ismail argues that this ‘modus operandi of the actors produces the regime and the armed opposition as fetishes of each other’. What is significant here is the capacity of mass violence to bring civilians (loyalists, oppositionists and the silent majority – ramadiyyin) alike, into a spiralling polarisation. Ismail also notes that such dynamics render narratives of victimisation interchangeable and contested even where the identity of perpetrators is evident – pro-government or anti-government alike.