Pro-Government Militias
Documentation for Sootoro (Syriac Protection Office)
Nov. 1, 2013 Drott, Carl. “Qamishli’s cold war.” Le Monde diplomatique. Available at http://mondediplo.com/blogs/qamishli-s-cold-war
[…] The northern half of the city, in Turkey, is called Nusaybin. The southern Syrian half is called Qamishli, and here there are further divisions. Kurds form the majority, and their militias control most of the city. The regime still holds the area surrounding a border post in the north, a few official buildings in the city centre, a civilian airport in the southwest and a military base in the south.
The population in the Arab neighbourhood of Haret Tey is dominated by the Tey tribe, which is led by an MP, Mohammed al-Fares. Masked men from a local militia patrol the streets and guard certain buildings. They serve the regime as part of the Syria-wide militia network called the National Defence Force (NDF) but their loyalty is said to lie primarily with the tribe and al-Fares himself. The group has been operating in its current form at least since the late spring.
The adjacent Christian neighbourhood of Wusta is dominated by Syriacs (Assyrians), but a smaller group of Armenians live here too. A militia, the Sutoro, started operating here openly in February (it already had an active presence last year). The Sutoro was set up by the Syriac Union Party (SUP), but in Qamishli it takes its commands from a “peace committee” that also includes other Syriac organisations. The Sutoro units in al-Qahtaniyah and al-Malikiyah, on the other hand, are fully under SUP control and co-operate more closely with the Kurdish militias.
A war on hold
To understand the current situation, we must go back to last summer. Some parts of northern Syria had only a sparse presence of regime forces: others had none left at all. When Kurdish militias took control over these areas, most of the remaining police and military units gave up without a fight, and agreed simply to leave their weapons behind and retreat. But in Qamishli, regime forces barricaded themselves in a few locations, and the Kurdish militias backed down.
There have been speculations about a high-level, comprehensive secret agreement between the regime and the Democratic Union Party (PYD), which controls the Kurdish militias. Another suggestion is that a tacit understanding developed when local regime commanders responded tit-for-tat to the Kurdish militias’ attempts to avoid bloodshed. Whatever the case, both sides now see radical Islamist groups operating in the area as the greatest threat. So it makes no sense for either to open up a second front against the other. Everyone also knows a full-scale war would be disastrous in a crowded city overflowing with displaced people.
In a similar way to the PYD, the SUP has declared itself to be in non-violent opposition to the regime. Judi (not his real name), who is 23, was arrested last year when he was doing political work for the SUP in Damascus. He was moved around between secret prisons belonging to the Military Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence and General Security agencies. “I was naked, it was completely dark and we were not allowed to talk to each other,” he recounts. “Every second day we got some stale bread to eat.”
Judi was electrocuted, burned and beaten with baseball bats. For the first 15 days, there was a fixed schedule: four hours of torture, then four hours of rest. Then the questioning started, and the torture sessions were reduced to one or two hours a day. Judi was now allowed to talk to his fellow prisoners, some of whom were deserters from the army or belonged to oppositional organisations. “What I experienced was nothing compared to what others suffered,” he says. “They burned some people alive or brought their sisters there to rape them. I had heard many things before, but now I have really seen the true face of the regime.”
Judi believes his own arrest may have been the result of a misunderstanding that was unrelated to his political activities. He was placed in a regular prison for the last 18 days of his two-month long incarceration. Soon after his release, he was pardoned as part of a prisoner amnesty.
The Sutoro members in Qamishli obviously hold conflicting opinions about the regime. When one of them gives a smiling thumbs-up for Bashar al-Assad, another shakes his head and looks embarrassed. Several sources confirm that regime-friendly elements are now running the show here. One former member is none other than Judi. Although he is still supportive of the Sutoro, he admits it was difficult to work in that environment. He has now gone back to doing political work for the SUP.“They are all Shabiha there now,” says Khabur (not his real name), a young Sutoro member in the nearby town of al-Qahtaniyah, using a derogatory term for regime militias.
How could people on different sides in the civil war belong to the same militia? The reason is that group solidarity has come to dominate over politics in the local Christian community. There are threats from everywhere: the regime is arresting and torturing people; criminals are carrying out abductions for ransom or rape; al-Qaida-affiliated groups are attacking villages in the nearby countryside. Being for or against the regime is no longer the main issue; the priority is protection from harm.
The Sutoro base was attacked in a drive-by shooting this summer, allegedly from a regime car. No one was injured, but that may not have been the purpose. While Haret Tey was always regime turf, Wusta did not clearly belong to anyone. The regime is now trying to re-assert itself here through its clients within the Sutoro, whose oppositional elements have little to set against. Acting in the familiar role of a mafia-like bully, the regime is offering potential victims protection from itself in return for obedience.
The SUP is now struggling to maintain the limited space for autonomy that opened up here last year. After its vice president Said Malke and executive committee member Roubel Baho were arrested this summer, the Sutoro actually provided armed protection for an anti-regime street protest. However, the German journalist Benjamin Hiller saw some of the Sutoro members shake hands with regime soldiers they encountered along the way. This ambiguous event could only have occurred in the warped world of Qamishli, with its unique set of possibilities and restraints for all actors. In the end, this is a cold war because they all know each other and have a stake in keeping the peace.”
March 6, 2014 Drott, Carl. “A Christian Militia Splits in Qamishli.” Carnegie Endowment. Available at http://carnegieendowment.org/syriaincrisis/?fa=54794
Unlike the Sutoro branches in the nearby towns of al-Qahtaniyah and al-Malikiyah, power over the Qamishli branch was not fully in the hands of the SUP. Instead, this branch was ruled by a “peace committee” that also included other Syriac Christian organizations, some of which were friendly to the regime. The Qamishli branch had its own logotype and even its own spelling of the name in Latin script: “Sootoro” instead of “Sutoro.” As the Sootoro developed more and more into a regime militia, Michael left the organization.
The Sutoro/Sootoro Split
When I returned to Qamishli in January 2014, the Syriac Christian militia had split. While the Christian Wusta neighborhood in Qamishli previously had one militia with ambivalent political loyalties, it now has two separate militias with clear and opposing loyalties: Sutoro and Sootoro. The two organizations try to coordinate their activities, calling each other to see that they do not both respond to the same incidents—but only in order to stay out of each other’s way and avoid problems.
The older group, known as the Sootoro, is now fully part of the regime’s security apparatus, which also includes the militia of the Arab Tey tribe in the nearby Haret Tey neighborhood.
The newer Syriac Christian militia branch, the Sutoro, is commanded by none other than Michael himself. “The Sootoro had some SUP members,” says Michael. “They left in order to establish a new branch of the Sutoro instead, because they wanted to be part of the autonomy project.”
By the “autonomy project,” Michael means the Jazeera Canton, a local government that was recently set up by the Democratic Union Party, or PYD. The PYD is a Kurdish organization affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a guerrilla group fighting the Turkish government. Since the Syrian regime withdrew many of its troops in 2012, the PYD and their allies have gained control over large swaths of northern Syria.
Drawn Into the PYD’s Orbit
The PYD-backed Jazeera Canton government now runs most of Qamishli city. To prop it up, the PYD has helped create a Kurdish-dominated police force, known as the Asayish. The Sutoro serves as its Syriac Christian counterpart.
By contrast, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime troops and intelligence agencies are now very weak in Qamishli. They generally stay within their own isolated enclaves, whose borders are marked off by checkpoints, but they have occasionally ventured into the city to carry out arrests. “We are not afraid to confront the regime if they arrest anyone from our people,” says Michael. “If the SUP tells us to attack them, we will attack.”
Slightly contradicting himself, Michael then states that the Sutoro is independent from the SUP. He also says, “I do not belong to the SUP, but we in the Sutoro have similar ideas to them.” Similar things are often said by members of organizations affiliated with the PYD.
Parallel Kurdish-Syriac Structures
Regardless of whether or not Michael and his comrades are currently card-holding members of the SUP, the borders are extremely fluid between the Syriac Christian organizations.
However, a clearer structure may be taking shape. Among the Kurds, the PYD serves as the dominant political party within its Jazeera Canton government. The Asayish is the autonomy’s police force, while the PYD-backed militia, known as the People’s Protection Units (YPG), functions as a military wing. Similarly, the pro-PYD Syriac Christians now have the SUP, the Sutoro, and a military body known as the Syriac Military Council, which is allied to the YPG.
While chaos rages on in the rest of Syria, a large portion of the Syriac Christian community in the northeast seems to have cast its lot with the PYD movement and is now slowly being integrated into an emerging Kurdish-run autonomous region.”
May 5, 2014 Inter Press Service
July 23, 2014 Al-Tamimi, Aymenn Jawad. “Christian Militia and Political Dynamics in Syria.” Syria Comment. Availiable at: http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/christian-militia-political-dynamics-syria/
An explicit affirmation of the split between the SUP Sutoro and the Qamishli Sootoro (i.e. where the latter mentioned the SUP by name) came in a statement released at the end of December 2013, in which the following was stated:
“Stories have proliferated recently about the arrival of material support for the Sootoro protection office. We in the Syriac Protection Office of Sootoro are affiliated with the Civil Peace Committee for Syriac Orthodox and the committee is the one that offers us support from a headquarters and mechanics (thanks for their efforts).
But we are suffering from a lack of possibilities as the current ammunition in the office is from collections that have been gathered at the beginning of the crisis. We would like to emphasize that it is possible that wealthy persons have sent us support but it arrived by a mistaken path to ‘Sutoro affiliated with the Syriac Union Party.’
So until this moment nothing has reached us. To offer immediate material support to the Syriac Protection Officer of Sootoro, we have set up a bank account number in Germany and it is in the name of a well-known Syriac working man living in Qamishli.”
This resource shortage has comes in spite of the attempts of multiple declarations by the Qamishli Sootoro to expand beyond Qamishli and set up Sootoro branches in other towns. Besides a statement noted in my previous article on Qamishli, one should also note a “clarification statement” released at the beginning of December 2013 and in the Turoyo language, making it clear that Sootoro does not distinguish between Christians of different sects- whether Chaldean, Assyrian or the like- as all deserve protection; and that this protection will soon be expanded. It should be noted that the statement is in Turoyo, showing that the issue of identity or language suppression feared in past times is quite irrelevant now and the regime can be looked to as a guarantor of Christian interests in the northeast of Syria. For now, however, the Qamishli Sootoro remains confined to its own town and lacks resources for expansion.”