The city of Homs played an important role in the cascade of revolutionary activity that engulfed Syria from the beginning of 2011 onward. If Homs was historically a mostly Sunni and Christian city, Alawite urbanization from the countryside increased in the 1970s and by 2010, a significant minority of Alawites lived there, commanding a disproportionate share of government jobs, including sensitive positions in the security apparatuses (police, army, intelligence). Political activism and mass demonstrations in Homs began to spread and gain traction alongside the broader civil uprising across Syria. The uprising went through three distinct phases: non-violent activism, military insurgency and civil war, and finally escalation of regime violence—siege, mass arrests, generalized destruction of opposition areas (Baczko et al., 2018). The first phase began in mid-March, following the uprising in Deraa and supportive demonstrations in Damascus, as the Local Coordination Committees sprung up in Syrian cities and protests spread to Homs as well. On Friday, 18 March 2011, after online calls for a “Friday of Dignity” (جمعة الكرامة‎), thousands of Homsis demonstrated in the streets of the city. For example, in the Khaled bin al-Waleed mosque in the largely working-class Sunni neighborhood of Khaldiya, 2000 people gathered and demonstrated, but the security forces and Shabbiha assaulted and arrested a number of them. From then on, Homsis demonstrated regularly on Fridays, which turned deadlier and deadlier, and by early April, every week dozens of demonstrators were killed or arrested. So many people attended so many demonstrations in such a sustained way, that Homs became known as the “capital of the revolution.” By early August 2011, defecting Syrian Arab Army (SAA) soldiers and officers established the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and the rebellion acquired a two-track character, with both civil activism and military insurgency. The armed uprising went from defensive actions against regime assaults, to sporadic attacks on police patrols, military checkpoints, and intelligence stations, and by late 2012, the state’s monopoly of violence broke down, and the city experienced territorial fragmentation and sectarian segregation. The third and final phase of the uprising was its crushing, through overwhelming violence, by the regime. As the fighting gradually escalated from a low-intensity conflict with small arms to an asymmetric civil war, the regime increasingly used draconic methods, including a deadly siege, heavy weaponry, including air strikes and indiscriminate bombing of opposition areas. The fighting continued, with the rebels slowly but steadily losing ground, until in early May 2014, the warring parties reached a ceasefire, and the remaining rebel fighters evacuated to northern Syria. By 2015, the regime was back in full control of Homs and the uprising was de facto over.⁷

Paramilitary mobilization in support of the Assad regime’s repression against the uprising began in the footsteps of the first demonstrations. From 2011 onward, the city experienced political polarization, as some neighborhoods began massively protesting against the regime, whereupon significant paramilitary mobilization occurred to repress them, and yet other neighborhoods remained fairly uninvolved and sat on the fence for a host of reasons. The daily or weekly mass demonstrations emerged from the mostly Sunni and working-class neighborhoods of Baba Amr, Jobar, Khaldiya, al-Wa’er, Bayada, Deir Baalbeh, and to a certain extent the mixed Sunni and Christian, middle-class areas such as Insha’at, Bab Sba’a, Karm al-Zeitoun, and Bab Dreib.⁸ Although the regime commanded a wide spectrum of security forces in Homs (especially the main four intelligence branches), it allowed, instigated, and organized pro-regime paramilitary groups to emerge in mostly Alawite areas such as Zahra and Wadi al-Dhahab (working-class), as well as Akrama, Nuzha, and Karm al-Loz (middle-class). The inception of the Shabbiha as a major actor and public phenomenon can be traced to this first phase of paramilitary mobilization. Much like in the rest of Syria, the Shabbiha in Homs emerged first as a set of loose, informal and tightly knit groups based on kinship or neighborhood, and gradually formalized, first into the Popular Committees, and then into the NDF, as their tasks and institutional affiliations changed gradually with the course of the conflict.⁹

According to most of my interviewees, including those with the Shabbiha themselves, mobilization came from a broad range of mostly Alawite milieus: influential businessmen, convicted criminals, Alawite sheikhs, Mukhabarat bosses, family elders, martial arts enthusiasts, retired army and intelligence officers, and even humanitarian organizations. There could be unlikely participants like the real estate businesses and offices in Homs, who were influential in organizing the Shabbiha, because of their close relations with the Mukhabarat, which needed to gather close intelligence about neighborhoods, such as names and addresses of families living in particular streets and houses. As long as they could mobilize a group to carry out the tasks of repression of opposition activity, including dispersing demonstrations, informing on activists, and storming and swarming neighborhoods, the regime tolerated and encouraged Shabbiha activity.¹⁰ Among the dozens of Shabbihaprofiles that I drew up in Homs, the mobilization generally ran through four avenues: kinship, business, party, and sect. Mobilizing these pre-existing structures and re-purposing them for political violence must have been more efficient than spawning a new force from zero amid the conflict.

As demonstrations, sit-ins, and civil protest spread, so the Assad regime’s response to it intensified: arrests expanded, surveillance increased, checkpoints mushroomed. Furthermore, the regime increasingly empowered and organized the Shabbiha, to the extent that within years, Homs became known as the capital of the Shabbihaphenomenon in Syria. No official paperwork exists on this phase of paramilitary mobilization, but in-depth interviews with his employees, his victims, and himself, corroborated with social media research demonstrate that a relatively unknown man named Saqqar Rustom (born 1974) quickly rose to prominence as the Shabbihaleader in the city and province of Homs. His power and influence in the city undoubtedly left an indelible imprint on the violence in Homs, and ultimately the entire conflict. Rustom hails from the Alawite village of Khirbet al-Hamam in northwestern Homs; the story of his family is a fairly typical one of rural Alawites moving to the city of Homs under Hafez al-Assad’s reign, in search of employment and education. So too, Rustom grew up in Homs, finished his education as an engineer, and became a businessman in a real estate development and investment company called Damas (Aliqtisadi, n.d.). Throughout the 2000s, Rustom was a rather unremarkable entrepreneur, working at the Hasya Industrial City north of Homs, and living in the al-Nuzha neighborhood. At some point, he seems to have fallen from grace due to allegations of various forms of corruption and self-enrichment. The 2011 uprising came at an opportune moment, as it catapulted him to unprecedented forms of power and wealth.¹¹

At the outbreak of the 2011 uprising, Saqqar Rustom’s maternal uncle Bassam al-Hassan, Brigadier-General in the Republican Guards, urged him to join the al-Bustan charitable association of Rami Makhlouf, Bashar al-Assad’s business tycoon cousin. Rustom derived much of his power from this kinship relation with Brigadier al-Hassan. Throughout April and May 2011, Rustom oversaw the mobilization and recruitment of young Alawites into Homs’ Shabbiha networks, which were reorganized into the Popular Committees in the summer of 2011 and formed the nucleus of the NDF, which was formalized in 2013. Other militias such as the Ba’ath Brigades were nowhere as powerful and present as the Shabbiha-turned-NDF of Homs. These armed groups had the dual task of protecting Alawite neighborhoods, as well as aiding the security services as auxiliaries in their repression of the uprising. Participation was voluntary in exchange for some material support, and the regime gradually allocated salaries, resources, and logistic support, including arms, as the Shabbiha’s numbers and power in the city grew exponentially. By early 2012, their number had exceeded 2500 and Rustom was lord and master of Homs, in many ways more powerful than the governor, mayor, and even the local army officers and intelligence bosses (Dagher, 2019: 274–275). But their power began to disturb established regime structures, and in mid-2013 simmering tensions between the NDF and the security forces erupted in clashes, as a result of which Damascus had to intervene. The regime promoted Saqqar away and appointed him the national head of the NDF. By 2017, when the regime seemed to be heading toward an unavoidable military victory, Rustom no longer worked with the NDF, but worked with his new non-governmental organizations (NGO), the Martyrs’ Association (مؤسسة الشهيد).¹² He left behind a devastated and divided Homs, with his NDF underlings in charge of much of the city.

The elevation of a relatively unknown and irrelevant peddler like Saqqar Rustom over the regime’s entire security and administrative bureaucracy demonstrates two points. First, that the patronage networks now began to run alongside kinship, apart from the existing patronage networks of the Ba’ath party and the business milieu. It set a high-profile example that promoting family members was necessary, even desirable, if the move held the promise and potential of mobilizing men for the highly sensitive assignments that required trust and discretion. Second, it shows that the scope of “polarization” and “escalation” was not limited between the regime and the opposition, but also, and critically, extended within the regime. Shabbiha mobilization sidelined sitting bureaucrats, cast aside possible moderates, and brought into power a new social class of lower and lower-middle-class Alawites. These men not only feared and hated rebellious Sunni communities in Homs, even before the conflict, but also harbored resentment against their marginal position within the broader patrimonial structures during Bashar al-Assad’s first decade of rule. This was their moment to “shine” and they seized the opportunity without hesitation.

The ebb and flow of the military confrontations was a process that ran parallel to regime violence against civilians, which continued in both opposition areas (through shelling, bombing, air strikes), as well as in regime-held areas (through arrests, executions, massacres). This latter vector of violence must be seen as a largely autonomous process that is not an epiphenomenon of war, but one that is distinctly separate from (but interrelated to) the fighting between combatants on the fronts. The Assad regime’s crackdown on the uprising consisted of a combination of cosmetic political concessions, attempts at co-optation, threats and intimidation against potential activists, as well as an uncompromising campaign of violence that gradually escalated into generalized destruction of any political opposition. Several forms of violence stand out for their relevance and impact on Homs city, but the massacres of 2011 and 2012 were in particular relevant for charting the course of the conflict from then on. Much of this violence was committed by the Shabbiha in Homs, who became synonymous with the violence they committed. These massacres were in particular representative of Shabbiha violence in that their commission not only demonstrated the forms of violence carried out by them, but also exposed their relationships to the state. This section will sketch the commission of that violence, using interviews with both victims and perpetrators as lived examples of the broader repression.

One of the first massacres in the city was the Clock Square massacre of 18–19 April 2011. By mid-April 2011, several bloody Fridays had passed, and each day dozens were being killed all across Syria. The revolutionaries dubbed Friday 15 April 2011 “Friday of Determination” (جمعة الإصرار‎), and mass protests occurred in various cities, including the big cities, Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, Hama, Baniyas, and again dozens were killed.¹³ On Saturday, 16 April, President Assad gave a televised speech to the People’s Assembly, in which he discussed a broad range of political and civil rights, including the right to demonstrate, but not only did he ignore the violence and killings by the formal security forces, there also did not seem to be any impact of his professed good intentions on the ground (SANA, 2011). In Homs, for example, security forces shot at the funerals of those who were killed the day before, which sparked more demonstrations. Ultimately, a number of revolutionaries decided on bold measures and took the protests to the city center: Clock Square. The demonstration drew a large crowd, and thousands began staging a festive sit-in with tents (like Tahrir Square in Cairo), which lasted into the night. After sunset, security personnel gradually took positions around the square, but eye witness accounts confirm that whereas the crowd-control police stood by and did not intervene, the units of the Air Force Intelligence and Military Intelligence and the accompanying Shabbiha became increasingly aggressive.¹⁴ But to no avail: around 2:00 am, their attack followed suit. The Shabbiha opened a deafening, random fire from the rooftops as people dispersed in panic. Those who were unable to get away in the carnage were killed or wounded, as the Shabbiha stormed the square, executed the wounded, and cleared the area of dead bodies, which were not returned to their families but dumped in unknown locations.¹⁵ Furthermore, demonstrators who were captured were arrested and either ended up in prison or were forcibly disappeared—the number of missing persons is still high. For these reasons, the death toll is unclear, and estimates range between 83 to over 300 (Al-Hadeed, 2014).

The perpetrators of the Clock Square massacre were primarily Shabbiha and intelligence agency personnel, as demonstrated by smartphone footage, shot by the perpetrators themselves to celebrate taking over the square. In these videos, they euphorically chant pro-Assad slogans, stand on dead bodies, tag graffiti on the square, insult and threaten the demonstrators, and take selfies with fellow Shabbiha(Abu Silmya, 2011). Throughout the night, the Shabbiha celebrated and congratulated each other for having suppressed the revolution in Homs once and for all. The eye witness account of a defected Mukhabarat official who participated in the massacre sheds light on the perpetration of the killings and corroborates the accounts of the protesters themselves:

Assad Mohsen (born 1984) hails from the mixed Alawite and Christian village of al-Mushrafah. At the outbreak of the uprising, Mohsen was a young chef working in a hotel in Oman, when he decided to return to Syria and volunteer in the early Shabbihaformations, “to protect my family, my village, and my community,” he argued in an interview, claiming: “I heard that Sunnis set fire to Alawite children in Latakia, and they slaughtered army soldiers in Jisr al-Shughr.” In several interviews conducted through 2017 and 2018, he explained that he took part in the Clock Square massacre as a preemptive measure, but showed no remorse at all.¹⁷ His story is fairly typical of an Alawite man in his 30s, who mobilized due to a combination of sectarian fear of future scenarios, rumors of atrocities, and empowerment and impunity. Many other Shabbiha mirror this perspective on and framing of the conflict.

The Clock Square massacre was particularly relevant for several reasons: it was the first organized violence that the Shabbiha carried out in the most public and visible way, it was carried out against the protocols and wishes of some of the most powerful security personnel (including Manaf Tlass), and most of all it accelerated the violence on both sides of the political cleavage. The shooting at unarmed demonstrators, swarming the square to beat and murder protestors, and the ecstatic celebration of this transgressive violence violated old norms and set new ones in the public political landscape of Syria. The massacre was a knife that cut through society as an uncompromising signal: anyone bold enough to demonstrate would have to fear a very violent retribution by the Shabbiha, who operated in plain view and whose brutality was condoned by the regime. Therefore, the massacre was also a major shock to the city in particular and in the country in general. It terrified the victims and their social and political environment, and emboldened the Shabbiha, for whom the massacre was the first publicly committed murderous transgression. It was a turning point in the polarization of political identities and hardening of sectarian ones.

As the demonstrations continued and spread, so did the repression. The next Friday (22 April 2011), demonstrators rallied in various Damascus neighborhoods, chanting the famous slogan “The people want the downfall of the regime” (الشعب يريد إسقاط النظام), calling for vigilance and revenge, and tearing down public banners and photos of Assad (Yassin-Kassab and Al-Shami, 2016: 46–48). Homs also saw demonstrations, and May and June saw daily death tolls at these protests. By late July 2011, the Violations Documentation Center had registered over 500 confirmed killings of civilians in Homs.¹⁸ That summer, as the regime escalated and militarized its repression against the uprising, especially in southern Deraa, Syrian army soldiers began defecting and hiding in their hometowns or in the opposition neighborhoods. The initial response was to defend the demonstrations, but defense escalated into skirmishes, which then bled into attacks on regime checkpoints and positions. On 29 July 2011, Colonel Riyad al-Asaad announced the formation of the FSA, and the uprising-repression dynamic was overlaid with an asymmetric armed conflict (International Crisis Group, 2012). The regime deliberately pushed people into the neighborhoods in order to isolate the uprising from coordination, segregate the city, and coordinate the repression. As the squares were closed off, and communications cut off, demonstrations retreated into the rebellious neighborhoods like Baba Amr, Karm al-Zeitoun, and Khaldiya, where a motley group of FSA factions attempted to withhold the regime’s onslaught and committed defensive and offensive violence, for example, by killing soldiers stationed at regime checkpoints or ambushing those traveling by their neighborhoods (Leenders, 2016). The city became tense, fragmented, with checkpoints sprouting across its socio-economic and sectarian tapestry. By October 2011, the regime sealed off rebellious neighborhoods, and skirmishes between the FSA and the SAA became regular experiences in the city. The regime then began blockading and besieging the insurgent neighborhoods more seriously, in an attempt to choke them into submission and surrender (Al-Fares, 2015). Residents going through checkpoints were treated as suspected demonstrators or FSA fighters, and regularly suffered humiliations and arrests. Finally, elite troops and intelligence agencies stormed the neighborhoods in violent search-and-arrest operations, during which Shabbiha committed indiscriminate massacres against the civilian population.

The twin Karm al-Zeitoun massacres are a good example of this course of events. The mostly Sunni neighborhood lies in a strategic area between three mostly Alawite neighborhoods (Nuzha, Akrama, and Zahra) and was sealed off with checkpoints and shelled throughout late 2011.¹⁹ On 26 January 2012, the State Intelligence (Amn al-Dawla) surrounded the neighborhood, as the Shabbiha stormed the neighborhood on foot, raided houses and massacred at least 36 civilians indiscriminately. One of the victims was Mohammed Turki al-Mohammed (1972–2012), a former detainee who had been released from prison shortly before the massacre and had returned home, only to be killed in the massacre.²⁰ This first massacre was followed by the second massacre early March. On 9 March 2012, SAA tanks entered Karm al-Zeitoun and began shelling it. On the night of 11 March, State Intelligence and Shabbiha encircled the neighborhood, stormed the inhabited houses, and massacred at least 47 women and children in the district.²¹ Video footage of the bodies shows men, women, and children in civilian clothing, shot in the face, throats slit, stabbed, hacked, and burnt, in what must have been very intimate forms of violence. A local activist named Abu Moaz comments on the video, as he describes in great detail the victims’ wounds and names, amid the pandemonium of grieving family members. The death toll is estimated at between 40 and 60 civilians, including women and children, with especially the Bahader, Akkra, and al-Mohammed families being struck (Syrian Network for Human Rights, 2012). Some women had been raped before being killed, according to survivors.²² The Karm al-Zeitoun massacres were one of the first in which unarmed children had been slaughtered in cold blood, in what was yet another moral threshold crossed in an ever-escalating repression.

The identities of the perpetrators remained unclear for a long time, although even on a balance of probabilities it was very plausible that pro-regime actors were the likely responsible. Pro-regime media outlets acknowledged that the massacre had indeed taken place, but immediately launched a misinformation campaign. It denied the responsibility of the Shabbiha and vaguely pinned the massacre on “armed terrorist groups” (الجماعات الإرهابية المسلحة) led by a certain Nawwar al-Muhaymidi, a hapless individual who was dragged out in front of the cameras to recite a clearly scripted confession.²³ But also in more serious documentation and journalism, the identities of the perpetrators were fairly unclear, and the generic term “the Shabbiha” was being used. Survivors mentioned about the perpetrators that “[s]ome were wearing civilian clothes, others were in military outfits” (Human Rights Watch, 2012: 16). Triangulation of survivor testimony, social media, YouTube, and most importantly, interviews with Shabbiha from Homs demonstrate that the main perpetrator group of the Karm al-Zeitoun massacre were members of the al-Sayes family, who originally hail from Fahel village in the northern countryside of Homs, and were mostly living in the Akrama neighborhood since the 1970s. The key Shabbiha mobilizer was Issa al-Sayes (born 1970), better known by his nickname Al-Khaal (“The Uncle”) Abu Ali. Al-Khaal is a retired special forces officer who organized one of the first Shabbihagroups in Homs, which included his younger brothers Ahmad and Suleiman, both of whom were involved in the Shabbiha from the beginning and were consistently active in their violence in the city. His influence was significant and he can be considered one of the most powerful Shabbiha bosses in Homs after Saqqar Rustom.²⁴ He is also notoriously secretive and evasive, and it proved particularly difficult to interview him about his life story and the “events” (أحداث) in Homs. His younger brother Ahmad, however, was more talkative and shared a great deal of information on his Facebook page, including photos, videos, and updates.

Ahmad al-Sayes (born 1978) was a policeman in the governorate office of Homs, when the security committee of Homs allocated him to the Popular Committees in early 2011. By 2013, he had become a division leader in the NDF (see Figure 2), had participated in several battles, and was wounded in some. In several interviews, Ahmad offered his perspective on the beginning and course of the conflict and his vision of the NDF. He began explaining how the Popular Committees were motivated by “protection of their neighborhoods, families, honor, and houses.” Alawites, he argued, were a poor minority in Syria and therefore had to fend for themselves against the “terrorist” uprising, which according to him was an international conspiracy. He dismissed media reports and human rights reports on Shabbihacrimes and in the early interviews flatly denied any violence against civilians, adding: ‘The state won’t harm anybody if he’s not a criminal.’ A key element in his arguments was his gendered perspective of the conflict. He denied any sexual violence by the Shabbiha and accused the Sunnis of Homs of coveting Alawite women and “honor.” He repeated a widely circulated, generic rumor that “Sunnis from Khaldiya” had stopped a minibus, selected and dragged off the Alawite girls, stripped them of their clothes and cut open a pregnant woman’s womb. But he offered no evidence of these allegations, nor did he mention when they supposedly happened.²⁵ At the time of interviewing, he argued that the situation in Homs was like in 2011: “People feel safe and women can go to restaurants at 3:00 in the night.” Ahmad was identified by local activists as responsible for several massacres (Al-Rifa’i, 2014). When asked about the Karm al-Zeitoun massacre, Ahmad was quite frank about it, confirming his presence on the scene and boasting: “They ate it and we trampled on their dignity” (أكلوها و دعسنا على كراماتهم).²⁶ This last comment is a clear reference to sexual violence, and exemplifies how perpetrators of atrocities speak euphemistically about them, even if they see the violence as justified.