The Eighth Brigade: Striving for Supremacy in Southern Syria
The Eighth Brigade: Striving for Supremacy in Southern Syria
Executive Summary
In June 2018, the Syrian regime forces backed by Russia launched a military offensive that aimed at terminating rebel rule and restoring control over southern Syria. By August 2018, Daraa’s rebel organisations were pushed to surrender under a “patchwork” strategy, including Russian-led negotiations between regime and opposition figures, and the Syrian regime’s use of armed force. The two fundamentally divergent approaches have demarcated three main zones in which the regime’s authority and thus the roles former rebels come to play in the post-rebellion period vary significantly.
In eastern Daraa, Russia established the Eighth Brigade, a sub-division of the Fifth Corps, and entrusted Ahmad al-Oda, a former rebel leader, with its command. By incorporating former rebels in the Eighth Brigade’s ranks, Russia, in fact, intended to establish a local armed actor characterised by a wide margin of manoeuvre to handle local security affairs and inflict acceptable and monitored small-scale violence to limit the regime’s authority and to keep Iranian influence at bay, thereby limiting status quo violations.
For more than two years, the Eighth Brigade has limited the regime’s authority, served as a bulwark against Iranian expansion, intervened to defuse tensions, and mediated to prevent wide-scale regime-led military offensives against several localities, all of which are Russia’s top priorities to maintain the status quo in the south. Nevertheless, the Eighth Brigade has been mired in struggles to overcome and mitigate top four interrelated challenges. First, the absence of official recognition by the Syrian Ministry of Defence. Second, the ambitions of Iran and its proxies in southern Syria. Third, the intermittent cyclical patterns of retaliations with local armed groups in neighbouring province of Sweida. Fourth, the ongoing rivalries among former rebel leaders.
The views expressed are those of the authors alone and do not reflect those of the publisher.
Published in December 2020.
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Part of the Syria Transition Challenges Project
Abdullah Al-Jabassini holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the University of Kent in Canterbury. He is a Research Fellow for the “Wartime and Post-Conflict in Syria” (WPCS) project at the European University Institute in Florence. He is also an Associate Fellow for the “Striking for the Margins” (SFM) project at the Central European University in Budapest, and a Non-Resident Scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington D.C. Al-Jabassini’s research focuses on wartime and post-conflict dynamics in southern Syria.