The Assistance Front Versus the Popular Protection Units Versus the Islamic State: Reciprocal Mobilization and the Ascendance of Violent Non-state Actors in the Syrian Civil War

Abstract

Recent scholarship on civil wars demonstrates the importance of the security dilemma as a motivating force that drives the interaction of rival communities whenever state authority collapses. Less well understood is the ancillary dynamic that students of international relations call a conflict spiral, that is, the marked escalation that occurs as antagonistic actors take steps to protect themselves by implementing increasingly coercive and more violent security-producing programs. Conflict spirals do not always result from security dilemmas, but if they do take shape they raise the stakes of the contest and make conflict management increasingly difficult. Insight into the workings of conflict spirals can be gained from a detailed exploration of the third and fourth phases of the popular uprising that broke out in Syria in the spring of 2011. During these months, radical Islamist forces competed against one another by undertaking more sustained and indiscriminate attacks against minority communities across the northern and northeastern provinces. The attacks strengthened the radical wing of the country’s Kurdish national movement, and sparked the emergence not only of an armed formation affiliated with that faction but also of militias drawn from other minorities. Fighting among these disparate forces entailed a sharp escalation in the severity and extent of the civil war, and complicated the prospects for a negotiated resolution to the conflict.