Why Al-Sharaa’s scrapping of conscription for Syrians matters

The leader of Syria’s rebels Ahmed al-Sharaa, also known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, said in an interview on Sunday that the new Syrian transitional government will abolish mandatory conscription into Syria’s armed forces.

“Initially, we are studying matters. It will be a volunteer army,” al-Sharaa said. “We do not have to increase the burden on the Syrians with the nightmare of compulsory conscription.”

Expanding further, al-Sharaa explained that conscription would only be reintroduced in extreme cases, such as national emergencies relating to war.

The announcement by al-Sharaa, should it come to pass, is one of the most significant reforms that the transitional government could make, with the Assad regime’s policy of compulsory conscription being widely hated and often a trap for young Syrians.

The New Arab looks at the history of military conscription under the Assad regime during the Syrian civil war, how it was used and abused and how it came to be seen as the “nightmare” al-Sharaa describes.

Trapped in service

When the Assad regime began the war in 2011, it immediately violated its prewar laws on conscription. Prior to the war, conscription lasted 18 months, but after the onset of the war, Assad essentially introduced a system where Syrian men, aged 18 and over, would be forced to serve in the army for an unspecified time.

By the point of 2019 and onwards, some conscripts had been serving in the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) for eight years.

The Assad regime advertised the SAA as a unifying national force that brings together all sects, but the reality was that most high-level and even mid-level officers were Alawites, often with family connections to the Assad clan, or ultra-loyal ideological Baathist Sunni Muslims.

This stopped some of these conscripts, who were effectively trapped in service, from being able to defect, desert or mutiny, though many did.

Hide or flee

When it became apparent that the Assad regime was keeping Syrians in military service in perpetuity, many Syrians who were ready to be conscripted tried to defect, either by hiding or fleeing.

However, while hundreds of thousands fled for this and many other reasons, Assad implemented a series of harsh punishments for those caught defecting, including indefinite detention and possibly even the death penalty.

Moreover, families of those who had defected would be targeted by the regime’s Mukhabarat (secret police) and could have their property confiscated.

This led to some Syrians opting to stay and either serving or paying bribes to get themselves exempted.

Exploiting the situation

For Syrians living abroad, a fee could be paid to guarantee exemption from military service.

In 2020, the conscription law was amended to revise the military service exemption fees for Syrians living abroad. The updated fees were set as follows: $7,000 for those who had been abroad for at least four years, $8,000 for a minimum of three years, $9,000 for at least two years, and $10,000 for those who had stayed abroad for no less than one year.

For the first time, the amendment also introduced the option to pay exemption fees for reserve service, requiring Syrians who had been abroad for at least one year to pay $5,000 to be exempt.

Assad calculated that the places that Syrians had fled to, such as Europe, would deport them due to the rise of anti-immigrant forces.

With Syria under his regime financially broken, Assad saw this as an opportunity to ease the country’s desperate need for foreign exchange currency, or, if Syrians couldn’t pay it, a means to boost up the ranks of the terminally depleted SAA.

Assad thought he had won the war by 2020, the SAA was a shadow of its former self in terms of numbers, with it being roughly 2/3rds the size, losing an estimated 800,000 conscripts due to desertion and flight.

The main ground forces fighting for Assad were Iranian-run foreign proxy forces, the sectarian super-militia known as the National Defence Forces (NDF) and a few ultra-loyal Alawite-led special brigades of the SAA.

Assad needed money more than numbers. So, while the regime was aware of many Syrians bribing medical officials to get exempted, he introduced a third revenue stream from conscription, namely $3000 for those who were medically unfit to serve.

He effectively legalised the system of bribery. Those who could not afford the payment would have to pay $8000 by a certain age or face having their personal property seized by the regime.

While this scheme was highly exploitative in itself, none of the revenue generated went to the good of the country, with much of it often ending up in the pockets of regime officials.

Conscription as a form of control

The system of conscription in Syria became so messy and infused with corruption that Russia stepped in and tried to fix it. However, and as we’ve possibly seen with the ease with which the rebels eventually won the war, it didn’t work. In attempts to normalise his regime internationally, Assad did attempt to institute some reforms in conscriptions, but these all ended up being false dawns.

For example, in 2019, Assad issued a decree that granted amnesty to 800,000 defectors from the regime army and from compulsory and emergency service. This was hugely popular even among demographics typically hostile to Assad. However, it was short-lived. Just weeks later, the regime created a loophole in the decision and issued new lists of those summoned for emergency military service. including a large number of youths whose names had just been cleared under the amnesty.

As well as using conscription as a huge shakedown operation, the Assad regime also used it to control Syrians.

By trapping Syrians in indefinite military service, he could keep potential defections to rebel-held areas, where no conscription existed, and he could also use it as loyalty tests. Those who refused to serve could be treated as traitors. Returning refugees, most of whom had been unwillingly deported, and who couldn’t pay exemption fees, were put into the trap of military service, curtailing any potential anti-regime behaviours.

As the Italian Institute for Policy Studies put it: “For Syrians living abroad or in the areas under regime’s control, conscription remains a nightmare. The regime adopted conscription to serve its ends, exploiting the military to subjugate the society.”

Living conditions for conscripts were also horrific, with reports of soldiers being forced to share a single potato for dinner and living in disordered and unclean barracks and bases.

Even among Alawites, the religious group to which the Assad family nominally belongs, conscription was hugely contentious, with most Alawites facing the same financial problems as Sunni Syrians.

Several times during the war, Alawites conducted local revolts calling for better pay and for the regime to compensate families of those who died in service, as opposed to simply being treated as dispensable cannon fodder.

Ultimately, Assad’s use of conscription could have been one of the major reasons his regime fell, with most of the conscripts living miserable lives and resentful of being trapped in service.

Moreover, many already hated or came to hate Assad. The Assad regime’s only source of legitimate defence was Russia and Iran and once they, for whatever reason, decided to no longer defend the Syrian dictator, the rebels won what many thought was a dead war after 13 years in only 11 days.