Debates over the morality, legality and strategic efficacy of U.S. missile strikes in Syria will dominate the news for the foreseeable future. It is understandable why so many people, notably many Syrians, would want to see a regime that has repeatedly targeted its population with sarin and chlorine gas, barrel bombs and starvation tactics be punished for its actions. The Syrians I know feel alone and abandoned by the world. They have seen the United States and its Western and Arab allies undertake massive diplomatic and military action targeting the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS, while regime-sponsored violence has been responsible for a vast majority of the close to 500,000 civilian deaths in Syria since 2011.
No matter where one stands on the issue of military intervention — and there are legitimate reasons to doubt the effectiveness of air power to deter or erode Assad’s killing machine — it should be possible to agree on one thing: There will be no end to the civil war in Syria without the sustained and active participation of Syrian activists, peacebuilders and humanitarians inside the country, in the surrounding region, and dispersed in the diaspora.
“The voices of these Syrian nonviolent fighters should be amplified in the media, their shoestring budgets should receive multi-year support, and they should feel international solidarity.”
These individuals and groups, which are operating under the most difficult conditions imaginable, are building and sustaining health and education systems, protecting civilians from violence and extremism coming from multiple sides, organizing to increase community participation in the peace process, and trying to imagine and piece together an alternative future. They include groups like the White Helmets, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the Karam Foundation, Citizens for Syria, Syria Deeply, Project Amal ou Salam, the Center for Civil Society and Democracy in Syria, the Syrian Civil Society Platform, Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently, Khadraa Organization, Syrian Expatriate Medical Association, Violet Organization, the Syrian Emergency Task Force and Women Now for Development. These organizations are building the resilience, social capital and civic infrastructure upon which a future peace will rest.
Six years into a civil war whose humanitarian and geo-political consequences have been devastating, it is easy to forget that the Syrian revolution began nonviolently. In March 2011, after a group of kids in Dera’a province (close to the Jordanian border) painted graffiti calling for the fall of the Assad regime, the local police tortured them and abused their families. In response, protests broke out in Dera’a and across the country. More moderate calls to end regime impunity and corruption quickly gave way to demands that the Assad regime step down.
Inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, Syrians were eager to free themselves of the shackles of Assad family dictatorship. The first eight months of the revolution were dominated by massive rallies, celebratory dance protests in the streets, puppet shows that dramatized the corruption and repression of the regime, sit-ins led by lawyers and students, and red dye applied to fountains to dramatize the blood shed by the Assad regime — these were staples of the nonviolent resistance. During this phase of the struggle, although the majority of protesters were Sunni, members of minority groups, including Christians, Kurds, Druze and Alawites (an off-shoot of Shi’ism and the sect of the ruling Assad family) protested in disproportionately high numbers.
A decentralized network of Local Coordination Committees quickly took root inside Syria and took the lead in organizing the protests and demonstrations. Later, local councils were established and focused on civilian representation and service provision. Eventually, as regime violence escalated and the opposition increasingly turned to armed resistance, forming the Free Syrian Army and other militant factions, the civilian structures focused increasingly on local administration and humanitarian operations.
There have been multiple analyses of why the nonviolent resistance in Syria failed to achieve its ultimate goal — the removal of the Assad regime — before the onset of civil war. Although historically nonviolent campaigns have been twice as effective against violent campaigns in removing central governments, Syria was a tough test case for nonviolent resistance. The Assad family had ruled with an iron fist for decades; Syrian civil society was painfully weak when the revolution began in 2011, with few or no truly independent civic organizations (including no independent trade or labor unions); Syrian security forces were highly sectarianized; and the region was in the throes of a Sunni-Shia power struggle.
Once the nonviolent uprising began, Bashar al-Assad ordered lethal violence against peaceful protesters and employed armed thugs, called “shabiha,” to kill individuals during demonstrations. The Syrian Electronic Army and regime security forces infamously tracked down, arrested, tortured and killed thousands of the best nonviolent organizers and activists. Eventually, Syrian army mortar attacks and bombings proved to be devastating for the nonviolent resistance.