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Fabrice Balanche
Kurdish pressure on Mosul, Kirkuk and other disputed areas were also a cause for concern.
The victory General Petraeus secured against al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia was fragile as it
was founded on a balance of power between the Shiite government in Baghdad and the
Sunni tribes who played a role in the counter-insurgency. When American troops left Iraq
at the end of 2011, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki revived the tendency to marginalise
Sunni Arabs. This trend was reinforced by a “Shia” nation-building process in Iraq.
Daesh blossoms in the Euphrates valley
Since the summer of 2011, Daesh fighters (then belonging to the al-Nusra Front), began
infiltrating Eastern Syria, leading the army to intervene in the Deir ez-Zor province. Some
of these fighters were Syrians who had gone to fight in Iraq after 2003 and had become
personae non gratae
in Syria. The al-Nusra Front seemed to be a group like all the other
myriad rebel groups that proliferated in the widespread militarisation of the opposition in
spring 2012. Al-Nusra and Daesh were a single outfit until spring 2013, when al-Julani,
the Syrian, clashed with al-Baghdadi, the Iraqi. Strategic divergence or clash of egos? It
seems as though the Syrians in the jihadi group were increasingly unhappy about being
led by foreign fighters and wanted to command the movement as they were fighting on
Syrian soil. But al-Baghdadi maintained there was no longer any difference between Syria
and Iraq – justifying his hegemony over a militia which was renamed as the Islamic State
of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL is its English acronym and Daesh is the acronym in Arabic),
while al-Julani and his supporters kept the al-Qaeda franchise in Syria: the al-Nusra Front.
It was not an easy divorce as the two groups were mixed together in the provinces of Idlib,
Aleppo, Raqqah and Deir ez-Zor. On the other hand, al-Nusra was the only one of the
two present in southern Syria (Damascus and Daraa). During the 2013-2014 winter, the
Islamic Front, a pro-Saudi coalition led by Ahrar al-Sham, made an alliance with the al-
Nusra Front to kick Daesh out of Syria. Al-Baghdadi’s organisation was chased out of the
province of Idlib and Western Aleppo, including the city itself. However, Daesh eliminated
the other factions from the provinces of Raqqah and Deir ez-Zor, reigning over the whole
of the Euphrates valley.
In Syria, the city of Raqqah became its capital and the centre for Daesh’s expansion into
the North East. With a third of the population illiterate, a birth rate of eight children per
woman and over fifty per cent of the active population working in agriculture, the provinces
of Raqqah and Deir ez-Zor suffer from low levels of development. While the Baathist
state had failed to dissolve the tribal system, which relied on patronage, it successfully
manipulated the local population to its own ends, notably through the Euphrates irrigation
programme and fear. The construction of the Tishreen Dam on the Euphrates and a vast
irrigation system designed to develop Eastern Syria absorbed nearly 20% of Syria’s national
budget from 1970-1990.
3
One of its objectives was to buy the loyalty of the Euphrates
population by distributing agricultural land and water, two rare commodities in this semi-
desert region. The development was designed as a political strategy rather than an end in
3 Ababsa M (2009).
Raqqah: territoires et pratiques sociales d’une ville syrienne
.
[Raqqah, land and social
practice in a Syrian city].
Beyrouth: Ifpo.