Pro-regime Sunni fighters in Aleppo defy sectarian narrative
Pro-regime militias such as the Al-Quds and Baath Brigades are at the forefront of the battle against rebels in Aleppo, and they're mostly Sunni.
ALEPPO, Syria — This month marks three years of an uprising that has swept through Syria, leaving death and ruin in its wake. Aleppo has suffered 18 months of brutal, divisive conflict. The city now lies split, both in territorial control and along social, political fault lines.
The conflict in Syria has taken on many shapes as it mutated from a popular mass movement for political change into a proxy civil war with sectarian undertones. Each region of this land, a diverse tapestry with intricately interwoven social, ethnic and religious ties bound together with the strings of a shared history, has experienced the conflict in distinct ways.
Aleppo is perhaps unique in this respect, deviating from the standard Syrian model in that the conflict here follows the stratification of society along class and clan lines, rather than the general sectarian rift that delineates the conflict elsewhere. A large number of Sunnis from all backgrounds, including the working and rural classes, fight alongside the regime in militias or as willing conscripts. In other provinces, however, the split could be more or less described as halves of a once coherent social order split along purely confessional lines.
In Aleppo, the splits are more blurred. Needless to say, the entirety of the rebel forces — except for the foreigners fighting with the al-Qaeda affiliates — fighting under Islamist or mainstream groups are composed of poorer Sunnis from the countryside.
