Introduction
The armed opposition in a civil war is rarely a cohesive unitary actor. The Syrian Civil War has seen approximately 6,000 individual armed factions over the course of the conflict that together have formed an ever-shifting network of over 1,000 unique groups.Footnote 1 Past and current civil wars in such diverse locations as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Myanmar, Libya, and Israel also point to a plethora of non-state armed actors being involved in the fighting. The global trend is that the proportion of multi-party armed conflicts in the international system is increasing.Footnote 2 Even in conflicts often portrayed as having only a single rebel group, such as the Nicaraguan Civil War during the 1980s or the Kosovo War in the 1990s, the dominant opposition movements consisted of various factions.Footnote 3
A concurrent trend is that the amount of internationalised civil wars around the globe is on the rise.Footnote 4 While states today rarely fight wars against each other directly, there is a considerable amount of indirect conflict that is being channelled through non-state proxies.Footnote 5 States strategically delegate the business of war to rebel organisations by providing support to various elements of the armed opposition.Footnote 6 In fact, state support to armed groups has become a key feature of international relations.Footnote 7 Given the proliferation of armed actors, states make decisions about whom to support in increasingly complex environments. Similarly, armed groups carefully consider whether, at what cost, and with what consequences to accept foreign support. How are these partnerships between states and armed groups formed?
Although there has been significant progress in research on the informal alliances between external states and rebel movements in recent years, we still lack detailed knowledge about the political decision-making processes related to support provision. Most existing theories provide reasons as to why states provide support but are less clear about how the recipients of assistance are selected.Footnote 8 The few studies that do speak to this question have been limited by large-N research designs which are not ideally suited to examine dynamic processes.Footnote 9 Such methodological constraints are mirrored by restrictive assumptions of established theoretical paradigms, mainly principal–agent theory, which diminish the agency of the recipient of support in their causal accounts.Footnote 10 This ignores the empirical record which has established the latitude of armed groups and obstructs theoretical developments that can shed light on delegation dynamics. In this article, I outline a theory of strategic alignment that takes into account the agency of both actors. I argue that support provision is based on a dynamic matching process in which state sponsors place specific demands on groups which in turn frame their armed struggle and make organisational changes. For states, this constitutes an important mechanism for justification and control. For rebels, it sets them apart from domestic competitors and increases their prospect of receiving vital aid.
Understanding how states and armed groups enter into partnerships is important since relationships once established are often durable. Moreover, they have significant long-term consequences for conflict resolution,Footnote 11 democratic transitions,Footnote 12 and post-conflict stability.Footnote 13 Several scholars have found that intervening on the side of the rebels increases the likelihood that the insurgents will emerge as victorious.Footnote 14 If the rebels are increasingly likely to become the new executive once the conflict is over, whom states choose to support becomes central. This initial bet may essentially dictate which government and what political structure is likely to emerge in the aftermath of conflict.
This article provides a process-oriented account of state support to rebel movements. I define state support as deliberate assistance from a foreign government to a specific rebel group engaged in a civil war. The type of assistance provided includes political, military, and economic support. Political support encompasses public endorsement in international forums and diplomatic acts that legitimise the group. Military support entails access to resources such as weapons, logistics, and military training as well as access to intelligence, safe havens, and air support. Economic support includes various forms of money transfers aimed at strengthening a group’s armed campaign.
The article makes three contributions. First, it presents a theoretical argument focused on the process of strategic alignment. While much existing research has shown why states provide support, this article elaborates on how states and armed groups form partnerships together. It does so by presenting a dynamic framework that emphasises the importance of calculated choices made by both state sponsors and rebel groups that are often required to initiate a strategic partnership. Second, it challenges some widely held assumptions in the field. In particular, it problematises identity as a causal driver of support provision. It expands on the notion of ideational contiguity by offering a detailed account of how symbols, goals, preferences, and organisational structure are purposively adjusted. In addition, it questions the prevalent view that states have little control over non-state armed groups. In fact, it shows that at least some states place specific demands on rebel groups before engaging in more extensive aid distribution. Third, it brings together related but hitherto-separate strands in previous research. This offers a fruitful way of integrating research on external support in civil wars with the growing literature on rebel diplomacy. In addition, it supplements and refines some of the findings from large-N studies on the topic. In line with existing work, it shows that the reasons for state support to rebels are multifaceted and underscores that rebel capacity and identity ties are essential. However, it adds a more nuanced understanding of the actual process of support provision and is thus amply suited to offer an illustration of the mechanism at work.
The article proceeds as follows. The next section elaborates on previous explanations as to why external states provide support to armed groups in civil wars, highlighting the capacity of the group (strength) as well as transnational affinity between the state sponsor and the armed group (similarities) in the selection process. The second section outlines the theoretical framework and explains why state sponsors and rebels strive to strategically align their divergent interests. This is followed by a brief description and motivation of the selected research design. I then turn to an empirical analysis of the partnership between the United States and the Syrian Democratic Forces from 2014 to 2019. The article ends with some concluding remarks and a discussion of how its findings might inform future research.
Existing research: Strength and similarities
Research on external support to non-state armed groups has identified a wide range of motives as to why states initiate support. These motivations include incentives such as to weaken an adversary, balance support to the government side, limit conflict diffusion, promote regime change, secure economic interests, address humanitarian concerns, divert attention away from domestic politics, and ensure political survival.Footnote 15 While these studies offer several important insights into why states provide support, they are unable to explain exactly how partnerships are formed. There are basically two accounts in the existing literature for how states choose which groups to aid: strength and similarities.
Strength
States are more likely to select rebels that can pose a viable threat to the target regime.Footnote 16 To this end, states will try to determine the capabilities of potential recipients. Various criteria can be used to assess the capacity of a particular group. Indicators include group size, cohesion, organisational structure, access to extractable resources, and support base as well as a demonstrated track record of battlefield performances or a proven ability to hold and control territory. States are unlikely to see the weakest rebel groups as worth investing in. Although the rebels need to be sufficiently strong, Salehyan, Gleditsch, and Cunningham found that support is most often channelled to moderately strong groups.Footnote 17 They explain this by rebel groups’ willingness to accept support. Insurgents that are already highly capable have fewer reasons to accept offers from external state sponsors as this restricts their autonomy and potentially decreases their legitimacy in the eyes of their local constituency. In addition, the most capable groups are often able to rely on extensive domestic resources, which significantly reduces the need for external support.
As potential recipients, rebel groups need to demonstrate that they are worthy of support. Asal, Ayers, and Kubota compare various ethno-political organisations and find that support is more forthcoming to organisations that engage in political violence to achieve their goals.Footnote 18 Moreover, they find that the popularity of the organisation and organisational capability matters, but that the significance of these factors varies over time. They conclude that: ‘after the Cold War, states are more likely to support successful organizations in a way they did not during the Cold War period’.Footnote 19 ‘Success’ is here measured in terms of battle deaths, control over territory, and domestic as well as diaspora popularity. Most civil wars are dual contests: rebel groups regularly fight against both the incumbent regime as well as competing factions. Stein and Cantin convincingly argue that inter-rebel fighting increases as groups target each other to signal to external state sponsors that they are the most capable organisation worthy of support.Footnote 20
Similarities
States do not care only about which rebel groups are the most viable challengers. San-Akca argues that while the presence of a strategic interest (i.e. the target is an adversary) determines the decision to start supporting a rebel group, ideational affinity – similarities in ideology, ethnicity, or religious beliefs – can guide states to support particular rebel groups.Footnote 21 Ideational affinity can be an important reason for support even when a state sponsor lacks direct strategic interests. Ethnic kinship ties have proven particularly salient. Several scholars have shown that members of ethnic groups care about other group members and that this loyalty transcends borders.Footnote 22 Saideman argues that ‘ethnic identity, by its nature, creates feelings of loyalty, interest, and fears of extinction’.Footnote 23 This implies that people will care strongly about those with whom they share ethnic ties. Because ethnicity is such a strong identity marker, it is likely that some state sponsors sympathise with certain rebel movements based on kinship ties. Examples include India’s backing of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (LTTE) in Sri Lanka, Albanian support for the Kosovo Liberation Army in Serbia, and Rwanda’s assistance to M23 in the Democratic Republic of Congo.Footnote 24
Rebels are motivated by similar considerations in selecting their sponsors as states are when choosing which rebels to support.Footnote 25 Gaining support from an external state with which the group shares some form of identity link can help maintain legitimacy in the eyes of the local population and foster a sense of trust. This diminishes the risk that rebels would be seen as pawns of a foreign state.Footnote 26 Despite the acknowledgement by existing research of various forms of ideational congruence, similarities between states and rebels are frequently seen as static and underpinned by affection; it is often assumed that identities do not change over time. This is problematic as it black-boxes significant parts of the process of strategic alignment, since ideational changes are rendered invisible. Furthermore, there may be more than affection at play. Salehyan et al. have argued that ‘external states will be more likely to delegate to rebels when they are reasonably confident that the rebel force shares similar preferences; when they can select good, competent agents; and when they can effectively monitor agent activities and sanction bad behavior’.Footnote 27 But how does this work?
Strategic alignment
To understand this process, I suggest that we could conceptualise the formation of a partnership between a state and an armed group as a two-stage matching process. Conflict delegation is a highly asymmetrical hierarchical relationship in which the state sponsor has the preponderance of power and resources. Since the interests of states and armed groups are seldom perfectly aligned, there is an inevitable conflict of interests. Because the pool of available recipients is not infinitely large and diverse, the state sponsor is unlikely to find a recipient that perfectly mirrors its preferences. This suggests that states will try to shape and transform armed groups. I assert that this is done by issuing a set of demands to the group’s leadership. This constitutes the first stage of the matching process.
The second stage is that the armed group purposively adjusts following these demands. This means that rebel groups actively frame their struggle and make organisational changes in order to make external support flow. I refer to this two-stage matching process as ‘strategic alignment’. The explanation put forward builds on scholarship that has emphasised the need to understand the provision of support as a two-way simultaneous selection process.Footnote 28 On the one hand, I adhere to rationalist core assumptions and start from the premise of traditional principal–agent theory: interest divergence and how to overcome it. On the other hand, I emphasise the agency of both actors and rely on a constructivist view of agency theory in which goal incongruity is in no way fixed – rather it is socially constructed.Footnote 29 I will now outline how the strategic alignment process works in practice and the underlying incentives for states and rebels to engage in it.
State incentives
With the act of support provision, states often gain influence over the group and a stake in the post-war order. In the context of armed conflict, it might be difficult to find groups that already from the outset match the preferred goals and preferences of the state supporter. This means that states seek to connect their support to specific criteria that need to be fulfilled before the relationship is established and support provided. There are essentially two rationales for why states select groups based on a dynamic process of strategic alignment: (1) to increase control, and (2) to be able to justify the act of support to relevant audiences.
First, the process of strategic alignment serves as an indirect mechanism of control. The ability of state sponsors to monitor the behaviour of the group is inherently limited and costly.Footnote 30 A careful screening process thus serves to reduce the risks involved.Footnote 31 States need to make sure that the armed group shares its view of what is appropriate in the conflict situation and, more importantly, what vision it holds for the future. Fostering strategic alignment is essentially a way to mitigate risks. State sponsors attempt to shape the incentives of armed groups so that it is in the interests of those agents to carry out their sponsors’ vision.Footnote 32 The shadow of the future is important, and states often invest in groups to reap future benefits. To this end, state sponsors want to make sure that the group has a stated vision that is at least to some degree in line with their preferred policies. This means that rebel groups’ efforts in framing their goals and preferences become crucial in attracting support. State sponsors and their non-state proxies generally share a common enemy. This is the most basic form of goal alignment, as the pursuit of a military goal against a mutual enemy is often the primary reason for the formation of a partnership.Footnote 33 However, state sponsors often have other goals that they need to consider as well. As such, there is often a need to make trade-offs. Goals such as promoting regime change, containing regional spillover effects, or securing strategic resources might be goals that at times may be contradictory. States may also hold clear preferences as to how goals should be achieved – for instance, with minimal civilian victimisation or through the establishment of certain religious institutions. Delegation requires some degree of agenda control, and as such states try to shape the aims, strategies, and tactics of the groups they support.Footnote 34 Partnerships are essentially bargaining processes in which sponsors both seek to coerce and cooperate with armed groups.Footnote 35 Ultimately, if states sponsors are successful at influencing the armed group at an early stage, this could reduce interest divergence at a later stage.Footnote 36 Importantly, even though states go through the process of strategic alignment with the intent to increase control, this does in no way guarantee it.
Second, it is important for state sponsors to find armed groups with goals and preferences as closely aligned to the sponsor as possible, since decision-makers need to justify their provision of support to internal and external audiences. The identity of the most salient audiences varies on a case-by-case basis, but ‘power-granting actors’ are always present.Footnote 37 These are the actors that political leaders need to engage with to empower the narrative that legitimises their action. The primary internal audiences are often other political elites and the domestic constituency, while external audiences are frequently allies or the international community at large. Political leaders, regardless of regime type, are rarely completely free to make decisions regarding foreign policy. The provision of external support to a rebel group needs to be justified both domestically and internationally even if most instances of support to rebel groups abroad are covert actions.Footnote 38 This is likely to be especially important in democracies where decision-makers are more accountable, oversight committees exist, and the public is more influential if information leaks to the press. For instance, the US Congress played a significant role in overseeing support to the Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s.Footnote 39 However, even in authoritarian regimes there are often political elites that hold leaders accountable and constrain the flow of resources.Footnote 40 Similarly to democracies, leaders in more authoritarian states also rely on certain audiences as a source of power.Footnote 41 GrohFootnote 42 has touched on the need to actively frame proxy war policy, since support to armed groups is often ‘implausible to deny’Footnote 43 and frequently ‘open secrets’.Footnote 44 The provision of external support becomes easier to justify for relevant audiences – both internal and external to the state – if there is some degree of strategic alignment. The matching process thus facilitates policy acceptance.
Rebel incentives
Rebels are often in dire need of external resources to credibly challenge incumbent regimes, especially if they are unable to tap into domestic resources. To attract supporters, groups need to convince states that their goals and preferences are generally aligned.Footnote 45 An integral part of the strategic matching process for the rebels is thus to adjust to the demands of state sponsors and to frame their armed struggle accordingly. This activity is part of what Reyko Huang has termed ‘rebel diplomacy’ – that is, the rebel group’s conduct of foreign affairs during civil war for the purpose of advancing its military and political objectives.Footnote 46 Already in The Marketing of Rebellion, Clifford Bob highlighted how rebel groups marketed themselves to attract support from NGOs. Bob argued that insurgent groups magnify their appeal ‘by framing parochial demands, provincial conflicts and particularistic identities to match the interests and agendas of distant audiences’.Footnote 47
During the Cold War, many rebel groups framed themselves as either communist or anti-communist to attract support from the Soviet Union and the United States respectively. More recently, emphasising liberal Western values and normsFootnote 48 or various tenets of IslamismFootnote 49 have become other ways to attract external supporters. Rebels generally need international legitimacy for their armed struggle and vital material support that contributes towards a successful outcome. Rebels soliciting support must successfully convince potential sponsors to devote resources to the group’s cause. They therefore strive to package and promote their organisation in ways that demonstrate the legitimacy of the group’s goals, garner sympathy for the movement and its members, and delegitimise their opposition.Footnote 50 Strategic frames are key tools for rebel groups in this endeavour just as for social movements more broadly.Footnote 51 It is not necessarily the case that a group must change its entire ideological orientation or organisational structure to adhere to state sponsors’ demands – often, it is more a matter of adjustments.Footnote 52 There is also a limit as to how much a rebel group can engage in strategic alignment. Rebel leaders need to balance the need for external support with the equally pressing need of local acceptance of the armed struggle. Rebels might be reluctant to accept foreign support if this would mean that they risk undermining local legitimacy.Footnote 53 Rebel group framing is thus driven both by international as well as local concerns such as recruitment and civilian support.Footnote 54
I am not alone in arguing that some form of matching process takes place. Tokdemir et al. have compellingly argued that rebel groups make strategic use of ideology and demands to set themselves apart from other groups in a multi-party setting.Footnote 55 They show empirically that groups are more likely to shift their ideology and modify their demands as the number of rival groups increases. Their study acknowledged that rebel groups’ goals and preferences are not set and that they can be strategically adopted in multi-party contexts. They have suggested that ‘rebel groups have a rational incentive to substitute for or complement inter-group violence with ideological product differentiation, demonstrating that they are distinct from their competitors in features such as goals, demands, and tactics’.Footnote 56 Similarly, Schwab emphasises that rebels make use of ideological differentiation to carve out a niche in a competitive environment.Footnote 57 Baylouny and Mullins have shown that ideological differentiation helped Syrian rebel groups in attracting and maintaining external support.Footnote 58 Relatedly, Phillips and Valbjørn have shown that ‘identity content’ matters for support provision in that global powers are more reluctant than regional states to back groups that emphasise subnational identities.Footnote 59 Similarly, Skoll argues that rebel groups actively engage in ‘branding’ efforts to attract external support.Footnote 60 What I am essentially doing in this article is demonstrating how this process works in practice by offering a general theoretical framework that can help us understand it. As such, it builds on and integrates insights from these other studies.
Rebranding, reframing, and reforming rebellion
I propose that it is heuristically useful to characterise the type of changes that facilitate alignment based on the ways in which a group rebrand, reframe, and reform the organisation. In essence, this is the result of rebel groups responding to either explicit or implicit demands made by state sponsors. Rebranding concerns changes in symbols used by the armed group, such as for instance the group’s name, its logo, flag, or insignias. Reframing refers to changes in the groups’ stated objectives and ways to achieve those, for instance, highlighting certain goals as more important than others or stressing certain values or identity markers. I define a goal as an explicitly stated policy objective, to which the act of providing support is intended to contribute. Preferences are conceived of as preferred paths to achieve a particular goal. Goals are thus what state sponsors and rebel groups wish to achieve while preferences concern ideas about how these should be achieved. Reforming concerns organisational changes such as the degree of centralisation or integration with other groups. These three adjustments can occur step by step or in tandem. To some degree, they are increasingly infringing on the armed group’s autonomy. While many symbolic actions may be plain window dressing, adjusting goals and preferences or implementing organisational changes can impact groups at a deeper level. However, I am not interested in assessing whether the adjustments made are ‘sincere’ or not. The ambition is rather to explore how groups engage in these practices in order to facilitate support distribution and establish a partnership. Not all supporter–recipient relationships go through all three stages. The degree to which changes take place is likely to vary based on sponsor preferences, relevant audiences, and how vital the support is perceived to be for a specific group. While the establishment of most relationships between external state sponsors and rebels is likely to see some degree of strategic alignment, certain conditions such as great power sponsorship, the post–Cold War context, and a more fragmented conflict environment may be factors that further accentuate the process. Figure 1 depicts the process.
The process of strategic alignment.
As an example, the United States issued a number of demands to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) before providing support. The CIA delivered these demands directly to the group in 1998: (1) there must be no Muslim influence, you must not repeat the Bosnian experience; (2) there must be no strong drug money supporting your activities; (3) there must be no terrorist attacks outside the geographical boundaries of Kosovo; and (4) you must target uniformed personnel rather than civilians as much as possible.Footnote 61 The leadership of KLA responded to these demands by stressing ‘Western values’ while at the same time downplaying religion, secessionism, spillover effects, and terrorism. The group steered clear of militant Islamic influences, raised money in other countries openly, kept the armed struggle inside Kosovo, and largely avoided terrorist attacks on civilian targets. KLA even disavowed the objective of creating a ‘Greater Albania’ which was somewhat paradoxical in light of the ethnic nationalism that helped establish the movement. However, talk of a Greater Albania worried potential supporters, who feared that such a path could lead to the dissolution of Serbia and Macedonia, as well as an expansion of Albania, which was far from a model of either democracy or market economy at the time. As such, each KLA communiqué contained language emphasising that the group’s activities were aimed at expelling occupiers and did not constitute a conflict of a terrorist, inter-ethnic, or religious character.Footnote 62
States can also help establish new armed groups from scratch rather than seeking to shape a pre-existing group. Robinson labels this ‘foundational support’ and finds that as many as one out of six rebel groups in the 1990–2019 period was created with a foreign state’s direct assistance.Footnote 63 In these cases, it is more about the initial branding, framing, and forming of the group, as states interact with the aggrieved sentiments of a population and individuals rather than with an already-existing organisation. Examples include Iran’s foundational support to Hezbollah, Libya’s organisational assistance to the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone, and Rwanda’s support of M23.Footnote 64
Analytical approach
This article uses frame analysis to empirically study strategic alignment.Footnote 65 This approach is ideal since what I seek to evaluate is essentially the actors’ discursive efforts to engage in a framing process. In comparison to discourse analysis, frame analysis highlights the strategic and deliberative use of frames by key actors. As such, it is a particular causal-oriented and focused version of discourse analysis.Footnote 66 Importantly, for the purpose of this research article, I am more interested in highlighting the actual framing process rather than specific frames. I adhere to a deductive type of frame analysis in which I construct a set of predefined frames based on my theoretical framework and then systematically go through the case to see if these processes took place. What is set is the broader analytical frames, but I will go through the case to fill them with content. To capture reforming, I turn from the actors’ framing strategies to actual organisational changes made. At this stage, I focus particularly on key changes in the organisational structure of the group such as centralisation or decentralisation in terms of command structure and splintering or merging with other groups. I also look at the criteria for membership inclusion in the organisation.
For the empirical analysis, I focus on the relationship between the United States (the sponsor) and the Syrian Democratic Forces (the recipient). The case constitutes a plausibility probe, and it is nomothetic in orientation as I seek to probe the details of a particular case in order to shed light on a broader theoretical argument.Footnote 67 To this end, I consciously depart from a case that is typical of contemporary great power support in a multi-party setting. These are conditions under which the process of strategic alignment is likely accentuated. I am particular interested in empirical fingerprints that shed light on the process of how the partnership was formed. The material collected showcases the framing process in which the state sponsor stipulates demands and the rebel group adjusts to meet those demands. The empirical analysis rests on statements by key decision-makers as well as secondary source documentation. Studying state–rebel relationships is notoriously difficult as publicly available information is scarce. Triangulation of sources is used to validate the claims made. In terms of analysis, I focus on the key actors of strategic alignment: the state sponsor and the armed group. In the empirics, I seek to validate three parts of the process: (1) that the state sponsor places specific demands on the group; (2) that the group adjusts to these demands; (3) that this enables external support to be distributed.
Strategic alignment: Origins of the partnership
The civil war in Syria erupted in early 2011 after peaceful demonstrations were met with violent repression. The conflict escalated significantly in 2014 after the emergence of the Islamic State (ISIS), and by the summer ISIS was seen as a significant threat to the United States’ policy objectives in the wider Middle East.Footnote 68 The United States had earlier provided lethal assistance to other elements of the armed opposition in Syria to promote regime change, but at this point the main strategic objective shifted towards defeating ISIS.Footnote 69 Because of this, the United States actively sought new local partners. In the northern part of Syria, the People’s Protection Units (YPG – Yekineyen Parastina GelFootnote 70) and some affiliated Kurdish militia groups had been relatively successful in countering ISIS, but the United States was reluctant to support an ethnic militia whose primary goal was secession. This diminished the group’s appeal, as it would be popular neither domestically nor in the eyes of regional allies (i.e. Turkey). As such, the United States requested that the group should rebrand their image, reframe their goals and preferences, and restructure the organisation.
Both the United States and the YPG had a mutual interest in defeating ISIS. This basic form of goal alignment formed the basis of the relationship. For the YPG, it was a matter of survival. Former rebel commander Mazloum Abdi explained that the group opted for a partnership with the Americans at a time when ISIS was getting stronger every day: ‘we were at capacity just stemming the tide and protecting our area’.Footnote 71 At the same time, a sense of urgency was growing in the United States after ISIS conducted public beheadings of American citizens.Footnote 72
Despite a common goal in defeating ISIS, there were significant areas of interest divergence. US General Joseph L. Votel said in an interview that ‘in terms of balancing our interests versus their interests, one way might be in developing a partnership. First and foremost, it is about making sure we know what their true motives and intentions are – and in areas where we diverge, making it clear the areas we can or cannot support. I think that’s very important.’Footnote 73 In this case it was the YPG’s long-term interest of post-conflict autonomy that appeared most problematic for the United States.Footnote 74 American officials conveyed early on that the US would not support any effort to establish an independent Kurdish state and cautioned the group against taking actions that could provoke Turkey.Footnote 75 In fact, at the beginning of the relationship, the United States communicated a clear set of demands to the YPG. These were that the group should not (1) take steps towards autonomy (connecting the cantons in northern Syria into a contiguous land), (2) fight against Turkey, (3) associate with the PKK, (4) cooperate with the regime or its backers, or (5) commit human rights violations. When incidents later surfaced, US officials also requested that the group should not fight against other US-backed groups in north-western Syria.Footnote 76 Being aware that support would be contingent on how the group framed their armed struggle in relation to these demands, they entered a process of strategic alignment.
Rebranding: From ethno-nationalism to national armed struggle
The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) was founded in October 2015 announcing that their political goal was to create a secular, democratic, and federalised Syria.Footnote 77 Although there were eight different groups that signed the founding document, the People’s Protection Units (YPG) and the Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) came to form the backbone of the new organisation. Prior to the formation of the Syrian Democratic Forces, the United States had provided limited air support for the YPG as they battled ISIS in Sinjar and Kobani.Footnote 78 However, it was not until the SDF was created that the United States ‘opened the flood gates of support’.Footnote 79 On the same night as the SDF was established, the United States airdropped 50 tons of ammunition destined for the group.Footnote 80
Turkey saw the YPG as an extension of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), which was considered a terrorist organisation. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said that it ‘would be wrong for the United States with whom we are friends and allies in NATO to talk openly and to expect us to say “yes” to such a support to a terrorist organization’.Footnote 81 American officials conveyed that American support was contingent on the YPG not associating themselves with the PKK publicly or materially.Footnote 82 When the first US military advisors arrived in north-east Syria in December 2015 and saw a large portrait of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan overlooking the meeting, they jokingly said that ‘that’s the first thing that’s got to go’.Footnote 83
US General Raymond ThomasFootnote 84 explained how the group adjusted in light of US demands:
“I dealt with them directly, that was in the formative stages of the relationship with these guys. They formally called themselves the YPG who the Turks would say equated with the PKK – you are dealing with the terrorists, enemy of mine, how could you do that ally? So, we literally played back to them that you got to change your brand. What do you want to call yourselves besides the YPG? And with about a day’s notice, they declared that they were the Syrian Democratic Forces. I thought that it was a stroke of brilliance to put democracy somewhere in there.”Footnote 85
This is illustrative of conscious discursive efforts at rebranding initiated after US demands. Statements made by political decision-makers in Washington, DC, as well as special forces operatives on the ground in Syria, substantiate the rebranding process. The National Security Council’s director for Syria Alexander Bick said that ‘the SDF was our name’,Footnote 86 and US special forces officers that ‘we made the word “SDF”’ and that ‘the SDF was something [the US military] helped them brand themselves with’.Footnote 87
In general, the United States favoured those armed groups in Syria that appealed to the nation and that were more inclusive rather than those that mobilised around a narrower subnational identity. This was partly based on an interest in keeping the Syrian state intact, but it is likely that historical experiences also played a role. There were past instances in which support channelled to groups with a subnational identity had either actively turned against the United States or not proven to be advantageous in the long run, a primary example of this being the Reagan administration’s efforts to arm the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s.Footnote 88 That the United States favoured national movements was problematic to the YPG as their core constituency was the Kurds. However, with the creation of the wider umbrella organisation, the Syrian Democratic Forces, in October 2015, they changed to a more inclusive framing. Whereas the YPG and YPJ retained the traditional Kurdish flags and symbols of red, yellow, and green, the SDF’s logo was consciously more inclusive: a map of Syria, with its name written in Arabic, Kurdish, and Syriac. Similarly, Rojava – which means ‘West’ in Kurdish, implying it is the western province of a greater Kurdistan straddling Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran – was renamed the ‘Democratic Federation of Northern Syria’ in 2016, to make the organisation more inclusive.Footnote 89 The colours of the newly created flags and symbols remained the same.
Any time US military officials saw PKK symbols, especially near official SDF buildings or bases, they reminded their SDF counterparts of the original agreement not to associate with the PKK as a condition of American support. A former special operations commander noted that, although members of the SDF would remove the symbols when caught, threats of support withdrawal did not entirely prevent similar behaviour in the future. Another special operator elaborated on the same issue: ‘We raised hell every time. They made a good faith effort to curb it, but it will be hard.’Footnote 90 After the SDF would take over a new town from ISIS – such as Raqqa in October 2017 – they first raised the SDF flag, but it did not take long until huge posters of PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan appeared in the city centre.Footnote 91 A former State Department official with knowledge of the SDF relationship confirmed that despite repeated appeals from the US, PKK or Ocalan imagery was ‘always an issue every single time they took a new town’. YPG leaders claimed it was difficult to police these expressions of support for Ocalan among YPG fighters and downplayed that they reflected any actual link to the PKK.Footnote 92
Reframing: Towards a secular, democratic, and federalised Syria
The SDF presented the organisation and depicted their goals and preferences in a way that would facilitate a strategic partnership with the United States. More specifically, this meant emphasising certain aspects of the armed struggle while at the same time de-emphasising others. This included downplaying the central goal of secessionism, the Kurdish identity, and the group’s conflictual relationship with Turkey, while at the same time highlighting a willingness to confront ISIS and to stand up for democratic values. The SDF had to accept that its region would remain part of Syria rather than striving for an independent Kurdish state, while simultaneously vowing not to attack Turkish interests. Still, American special operators and diplomats knew that YPG commanders wanted to leverage American support to further their own project of autonomous governance.Footnote 93
After the US Department of Defense found that the Kurdish fighters in Syria were more committed to democratic values than other armed groups, they deepened the collaboration with the YPG and helped it evolve into a broader and more inclusive force, under the banner of the SDF.Footnote 94 The SDF explicitly emphasised Western values and ideals. This targeted communication to particular audiences is visible in public interviews and meant that certain goals and preferences became more salient. A representative of the Syrian Democratic Forces said in an interview that ‘the current goal in practical terms is to confront Daesh, given that it is the first enemy, but the goal is also to build a democratic Syria in the future’.Footnote 95 Similarly, Nasir Haj Mansour, an official in the defence ministry of the Kurdish administration in YPG-held territory said that ‘given that these forces in general are democratic and secular forces that believe to a great degree in diversity, we hope that they will receive support’ from the US-led coalition.Footnote 96 The United States rotated the same special operators through north-east Syria year after year to actively foster personal relations, build up an institutional memory, and establish contact networks.Footnote 97 Interviews with US special operatives on the ground mirror the armed group’s own depiction of the organisation: ‘The SDF and its political arm, the Syrian Democratic Council, believe in equal rights for women, freedom of speech and religion, and local governance. The group also values education and has a judicial system that is fair and transparent.’ The same special operative added: ‘This was the first opportunity I have seen to actually achieve our end-state objectives because we had a partner that very closely shares our American values.’Footnote 98 Another special operative said that the members of the SDF were ‘incredibly fair in their heart. … They would rather take casualties themselves than harm a civilian.’Footnote 99
SDF consciously promoted women’s empowerment and liberation to the point that it became a major component of the organisation’s identity.Footnote 100 It has even been described how the movement has been on one end of the spectrum and ISIS on the other in the portrayal of gender identities in the Syrian Civil War. Szeleky suggests that the salience of gender ideology is an efficient and relatively low-cost means by which armed groups can signal their position relative to other parties in the conflict.Footnote 101 This includes strategically using frames related to female fighters, which has at least in part served to boost their appeal to the broader US public. This practice strengthened the legitimacy of the group in relation to key audiences, since portraying combatants as simultaneously armed fighters and feminine women sent the message that even those who are traditionally expected to be the furthest removed from fighting were taking up arms. The attention-grabbing nature of this messaging was founded on gendered assumptions that women have no place in conflict.Footnote 102 In general, we know that external state supporters such as the United States are affected by this type of gendered messaging.Footnote 103
Reforming: Inclusion of non-Kurdish militias
The creation of the Syrian Democratic Forces allowed the United States to provide military assistance to the YPG while bolstering the public image of the group. The National Security Council Director for SyriaFootnote 104 has explained that ‘the SDF gave a superstructure which allowed the United States to have a partner’.Footnote 105 The United States actively devised a plan for the YPG that would bring on board more Arab forces. Training provided by US advisors, along with weapons and airstrikes, was later supplemented with monthly stipends of between $100 and $400 paid to SDF fighters, which induced more Arabs to join the movement.Footnote 106 American officials noted that they pushed their Kurdish counterparts to ‘be more inclusive of Arab groups and the Kurdish opposition’.Footnote 107 Colonel John DorrianFootnote 108 underlined in an interview that ‘the Syrian Democratic Forces are a multi-ethnic and multi-sectarian organization, and that is one of the reasons why we’re working with them, and they have continued to build the Arab element of their force’.Footnote 109
Although the SDF included a range of different factions, the YPG was clearly dominant within the organisation. In the words of one of the SDF commanders, the YPG constituted ‘the core column of SDF’.Footnote 110 At as many as 40,000 fighters, the YPG overshadowed any other Arab or minority factions in the SDF, the second largest of which was at most 4,000 fighters. The YPG also formed the leadership and logistics backbone of the group. American officials in charge of the relationship with the SDF would most regularly speak to commanders in the YPG or leaders affiliated with the YPG’s political arm.Footnote 111 ‘The entire backbone and mission command structure of the SDF was built on the expertise, experience, and commitment of the YPG. There was a deliberate attempt to put SAC elements [shorthand for Arab groups within the SDF] in the lead and make them the visible components but they were underpinned by Kurdish experience and leadership.’Footnote 112 The United States actively sought to create Arab-majority elements, grafted onto the YPG, to enhance the effectiveness of post-conflict local governance and to ameliorate Turkey’s concerns.Footnote 113 Whenever YPG took territory from ISIS, they had to include other ethnic or religious groups, notably Arabs and Christians, in setting up governance and security. The inclusion of non-Kurdish factions facilitated the framing of the group as more inclusive. Not only did this help mitigate concerns that the group had ties to the PKK, but it also helped the movement appear more legitimate to a domestic audience.
Knights and van Wilgenburg assert that the United States had much more control over the SDF than most observers believe because of ‘explicit instructions, implicit examples, and inferred expectations’.Footnote 114 A US official involved in vetting and interacting with the YPG/SDF explained: ‘We wanted to mitigate the actual security threats originating in northeast Syria. The YPG did everything we told them to do, and did not do the things we told them not to do.’Footnote 115
The matching process
Interest divergence is at the core of the principal–agent problem. State sponsors and non-state armed groups rarely – if ever – have identical interests. Because of this, they need to engage in a matching process. Figure 2 displays the main issues of interest convergence and divergence between the United States and the Syrian Democratic Forces summarised in a Venn diagram.
Convergence/divergence of interests between state sponsor and rebel group.
The United States issued a set of demands to the Syrian Democratic Forces at the beginning of the relationship. Promises of external support were then to some extent made conditional on these. In response, the Syrian Democratic Forces used a range of different framing techniques to secure support. Using frame amplification, they invigorated certain goals and preferences. In particular, they emphasised that their long-term political goal was to create a secular, democratic, and federalised Syria.Footnote 116 This was then picked up in Washington, where the SDF was depicted as sharing a Western understanding of human rights and women’s rights.Footnote 117 The SDF also employed frame transformation. Specifically, they changed the dominant narrative that they were fighting for an independent Kurdistan to one that would contain the conflict within the borders of Syria. This meant changing certain key symbols as well as de-emphasising linkages to the PKK. Moreover, this included a deliberate frame extension in that they broadened the group’s membership. Although the YPG dominated the new movement, the addition of various Arab militias was crucial to extending the frame from Kurds to Syrians more broadly. Figure 3 summarises some of the main tenets of the strategic alignment process.
Strategic alignment process of the Syrian Democratic Forces.
In sum, the United States made a number of demands, many of which clashed with the YPG-led SDF’s objectives of protecting Kurdish territories, pursuing Kurdish autonomy, and carving out a future for itself in Syria.Footnote 118 Still, the group went through a comprehensive process that included actions directly related to rebranding, reframing, and reforming. These adjustments made it possible for the United States to set up a working partnership with the group.
Conclusion
How are partnerships between foreign states and armed groups formed? I have argued that states and rebel groups engage in a strategic matching process to establish and sustain their relationship. For state sponsors, strategic alignment helps to justify the act of support to relevant audiences and to enhance control. For rebels, strategic alignment serves to distinguish them from competitors and to increase the chances of obtaining resources vital for organisational survival. This does not imply that decisions to provide and accept support are not also guided by states’ calculations about group capacity and rebel concerns for recruitment. However, it does demonstrate that both actors engage in a process of strategic alignment in the formative stages of the relationship. Seeing how actors consciously and actively frame their own relationship problematises identity as a causal driver.
The study demonstrates how useful it may be to shift from an outcome-centred lens to a more process-centred approach. External support provision has often been studied through ‘snapshots’ in time focused on a single actor, usually the state sponsor. This misses the dynamic matching process in which both state sponsors and rebels exercise agency. In this article, I have presented a framework focused on state demands and key activities such as armed groups’ rebranding, reframing, and reforming to highlight this process. Drawing on frame analysis, I have then illustrated how the Syrian Democratic Forces crafted narratives in tandem with the United States to create the necessary conditions which enabled support to be provided. This case served as a plausibility probe meant to integrate research on external support in civil wars with the growing literature on rebel diplomacy. Future research is needed to assess the value of the proposed framework and to determine how far the process of strategic alignment extends beyond the empirical illustration.
There are at least three pathways worthy of further inquiry. First, more research should engage in unpacking the discursive efforts made by both actors as the relationship unfolds. This would mean a stronger focus on language and communication rather than on the actual resources provided. Furthermore, while this article focused on external framing, other studies have looked at internal framing efforts.Footnote 119 A fruitful avenue for future research might be to integrate the two strands. Second, there is a need to acknowledge that proxy relationships develop over time. Since strategic alignment is a continuous and gradual process, the establishment of the relationship may not be as neatly sequenced as depicted. Moreover, the findings seem to suggest that, while limited external support could be provided at an early stage, the process of strategic alignment is needed to more fully ‘turn on the taps’. Relatedly, it could prove fruitful to explore in greater depth whether the strategic alignment process differs for groups that are directly created by foreign states. Third, the study gives rise to a number of additional questions that could be further examined using comparative approaches: Why do states and rebels sometimes engage in extensive efforts to match while at other times they do not? Are some states and rebels more likely than others to engage in strategic alignment? Which are the main audiences of the discursive efforts and how do these change over time and across cases? In the end, acknowledging that a dynamic matching process exists is central if we want to increase our understanding of how states and non-state armed groups establish and manage their relationships.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Lars Wikman, Lisa Ekman, Vladimir Rauta, David Gebre-Medhin, and the members of the Civil Wars and Military Interventions Research Group at the Swedish Defence University for constructive comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Previous versions of this project were presented at the Conflict Delegation and Proxy Wars in International Security Workshop in 2021, at the PRIS biennial conference in 2022, and at the War Studies Research Seminar at the Swedish Defence University in 2022. This research has been enabled by a grant from the Swedish Armed Forces.
Niklas Karlén is Senior Lecturer in War Studies at the Swedish Defence University, Stockholm, Sweden. His main research interests are interventions, civil wars, and US foreign policy. His previous work has appeared in outlets such as International Security, Journal of Peace Research, Security Studies, International Studies Review, Terrorism and Political Violence, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, and Civil Wars.
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