Doesn’t Russia’s egregious invasion of Ukraine look familiar? Whether it’s the flagrant attacks on civilians, the hospital bombings, siege tactics, or rampant disinformation, Ukraine’s parallels with Syria are just about everywhere one cares to look. However, yet another feature of Syria’s grueling war now appears set to be repeated amid reports that Russia is already recruiting Syrian fighters to join combat units on the frontlines in Ukraine.
For weeks now, rumors and local media reports have been circulating about Russian recruiters in Syria enlisting fighters for the Eastern European war effort. Initially rumors pointed to the deployment of Wagner Group-trained mercenaries from Syria, part of a broader Russian build-up on Ukraine’s eastern borders. Syrian outlet Deir Ezzor 24 and monitoring group Syrians for Truth and Justice then offered details about the recruitment of pro-government fighters in the governorates of Deir ez-Zor and Rural Damascus. Those reports were immediately given greater credence abroad after an official U.S. assessment of Syrian troop movements, ascribed to multiple anonymous sources in a March 6 report in the Wall Street Journal, suggested that “Russia … has in recent days been recruiting fighters from [Syria], hoping their expertise in urban combat can help take Kyiv and deal a devastating blow to the Ukraine government.”
Russia’s recruitment drive has since broken out into the open. On March 11, an exchange between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu during a televised National Security Council session finally appeared to confirm the news. Shoigu claimed Moscow had received “more than 16,000 applications” from the Middle East to fight with Russian forces (without specifying Syria), to which Putin replied “we need to give them what they want and help them get to the conflict zone.” While that number is likely far exaggerated, a video later broadcast by Russia’s Ministry of Defense showed Syrian fighters chanting in front of pro-Russian banners — a handy visual aid to accompany the discussions taking place in the Kremlin.
Recent reports of renewed Russian recruitment were met with fierce debate among analysts, journalists, and various other Syria watchers online. Is Russia really that desperate to deploy Syrian fighters to the cold, alien battlefields of Eastern Europe? Is Putin’s war really going that badly?
Of course, this isn’t Russia’s first foray into the recruitment of Syrian fighters for far-away conflicts. But in contrast with its past recruitment inside Syria, Moscow is now only interested in specific combatant profiles — namely, Syrian fighters with prior combat experience in close-quarter urban warfare who previously served within elite Russian-backed formations. This not only tells us a few things about current Russian priorities in Ukraine but also about the country’s calculations in Syria.
How Russia recruited in the past
Since its intervention in Syria in September 2015, Russia has helped build a number of militia groups and auxiliary military units. They include the 25th Special Mission Forces Division (formerly known as the Tiger Forces), Suqour al-Sahara (the Desert Hawks), Liwa’ al-Quds (the Jerusalem Brigade), the 5th Corps, the ISIS Hunters, and smaller Russian-backed militias in As-Sweida. Russian private military contractors such as the Wagner Group have worked with some of these groups; in other cases, support, coordination, and training comes directly from the Russian military presence in Syria. For example, video evidence exists of Russian special forces training Liwa’ al-Quds fighters in the kind of warfare that may soon be required in places like Kyiv. This training took place in Handarat/Ein al-Tal, a largely abandoned Palestinian camp controlled by the nominally Palestinian militia group that is comprised of some Palestinian fighters but mostly Shi’a fighters from in and around Aleppo.
Russia has meanwhile ingratiated itself into Syria’s regime structures, reshuffling security commanders and embedding Russian influence into certain sections of the security apparatus. This is particularly pronounced in Military Security, one of Syria’s four notorious intelligence agencies.
Since then, Russia has repeatedly enlisted fighters from the Syrian government’s war effort as part of its global proxy campaigns — for example in Libya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Venezuela. This has often been carried out in apposition to simultaneous Turkish recruitments of opposition fighters from the Ankara-backed Syrian National Army (SNA), who fought alongside Government of National Accord forces in Libya after late 2019 and the Azeri military during the Nagorno-Karabakh war between Azerbaijan and Armenia in late 2020. Past Russian recruitment drives have been reported across Syria: for example, in Damascus and Rural Damascus, northeastern governorates like Ar-Raqqa, Deir ez-Zor, and al-Hasakeh, as well as Daraa and As-Sweida in the country’s south.
It has never been difficult to find willing recruits. Enlistment provided an opportunity for individuals to clean their record with Syria’s security apparatus upon return from combat, a particularly enticing prospect for former opposition fighters who’d stayed on in their communities to live under renewed Syrian government control. And with Syria’s economy in freefall long before the COVID-19 pandemic, or before anti-Russian sanctions over the Ukrainian invasion exacerbated the suffering of millions of ordinary Syrians, many young men were drawn in by Russia’s promise of comparatively generous service salaries and leave periods.
Russian officers were able to use local connections forged during the 2015-18 offensives on opposition-held territories in Aleppo, Rural Damascus, and Daraa. In Yarmouk camp and the neighboring southern Damascus suburbs of Yalda, Babila, and Beit Sahem, Russian recruiters received help from Abu Hani Shamout, a Palestinian former opposition commander who has since become a prominent Russian representative in the area. Owing to prior connections with Russia (he speaks Russian and his wife is from there), Shamout joined a Russian-led negotiations process that ultimately saw Yalda, Babila, and Beit Sahem returned to government control through a reconciliation/evacuation agreement, while ISIS-held Yarmouk was violently brought to heel. According to local sources, Shamout helped bring young men on board to fight in Libya. Local reports suggest he is now doing the same for Ukraine.
Areas as impoverished and fear-stricken as southern Damascus swell with recruits even though recruitment promises have often been broken. In the case of Libya, prospective recruits were reassured that they would largely be deployed in rearguard positions to protect oil installations and other state facilities well behind the frontlines of Gen. Khalifa Hifter’s Russian-backed Libyan National Army (LNA). Young Syrian men signed up in the thousands, apparently undeterred by the fact that some recruits had found themselves on frontline positions while others were killed in action, their bodies returned unceremoniously to Syria.
Even so, in late 2020, Moscow reportedly succeeded in recruiting thousands more from several regions, including southern Syria’s Druze-majority province, As-Sweida, after the Trump administration called for the overthrow of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro and mounted pressure on the Latin American autocracy. Russia sought to protect Maduro with the help of shadowy private military contractors from the Wagner Group. As the situation in Venezuela eventually calmed, some new recruits were instead sent to the central/eastern Badia desert to fight ISIS forces alongside Syrian army units, Iranian factions, and Russian-backed militia groups.
How Russia is recruiting now
These past recruitment drives demonstrate a degree of Russian investment, logistical flexibility, and local community penetration that could prove useful to a war effort in Ukraine that appears to be faltering.
Recent recruitments, however, are being conducted differently. Recruitment is not open to all as it was in the past, likely with a view to only enlisting militarily experienced and politically reliable individuals — former opposition fighters need not apply. The available evidence suggests that Russia is looking for Syrian fighters who require minimal vetting and training before they can be deployed into the thick of it in places like Kyiv.
Based on the list of Russian-backed groups in Syria, these requirements point first and foremost to the 25th Division as well as other Russian-trained sections of the Syrian military and auxiliary militias.
Even so, Russia may still resort to its past strategy at a later date. As and when Russia decides to broaden its recruitment for later stages of the Ukrainian conflict, it’s expected to draw from 5th Corps fighters with prior combat experience in Syria or other theaters such as Libya. Other Russian-backed forces may provide fighters for the Ukrainian war effort depending on the geographic and institutional focus (if any) of these expanded recruitment efforts.
One Daraa-based 5th Corps commander recently suggested that to date Russian recruiters have only issued enlistment orders to the 25th Division, 5th Corps, and National Defense Forces. There have been lots of rumors that the Syrian army’s elite 4th Division would be providing soldiers to Russian invading forces because of a Facebook ad, posted to a page linked to the division, calling on interested recruits to get in touch. Although this may indicate that other Syrian army units are due to form part of an expanded recruitment effort at a later stage, there is little evidence to suggest 4th Division soldiers stand to be deployed in Ukraine — according to one source with knowledge of past Russian recruitment efforts, the recruiter that posted that ad previously helped enlist fighters from Russian-backed groups, including the 5thCorps and Liwa’ al-Quds.
Unintended consequences
Whichever way you look at it, any deployment of Syrian fighters will further escalate and internationalize Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Their arrival to Ukrainian battlefields will be further confirmation that Russian plans to employ its so-called Syria playbook in its fullest form, meaning mass-casualty attacks, deliberate targeting of civilians, sieges, and razed cities.
One less immediate consequence may well be a xenophobic backlash against Syrian refugees in Europe.
Businesses, cultural institutions, and ordinary citizens in Europe are already taking it upon themselves to interpret Western governments’ push to isolate Russia: Tchaikovsky performances have been banned and Russian literature classes cancelled. This kind of arguably well-intended culture war harking back to the Cold War could easily impact Syrians as soon as images and videos of them fighting in Ukraine start to reach social media. This will not be helped by remarks made by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, criticizing Russia for sending “murderers from Syria, a country where everything has been destroyed … like they are doing here to us.”
He is right: Russia is doing in Ukraine what it did for years in Syria. But that should be a source of reflection, an opportunity for renewed solidarity, among Europeans who now, whether through geographic proximity, news coverage, or just blinkered racism, can more fully appreciate the years of horror that Russia helped inflict on Syrians — and that Russia is now inflicting on Ukrainians.
As BBC correspondent Quentin Somerville remarked while reporting from Ukraine last week, “If these tactics are unfamiliar to you, then you haven’t been paying attention.”
Tom Rollins is an independent journalist and researcher and a non-resident scholar with MEI’s Syria Program. Follow him at @TomWRollins. The views expressed in this piece are his own.
Photo by Vadim Savitsky\TASS via Getty Images
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