The American withdrawal from areas east of the Euphrates in October 2019 was a turning point in the conflict in northeastern Syria. It allowed Turkey to expand into the area, effectively moving its border deeper inside Syria to create a buffer zone with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The SDF is a heterogeneous alliance of multiethnic armed groups led by the People’s Protection Units, which Turkey sees as an extension of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), an organization it accuses of engaging in terrorist activities.
This expansion has fundamentally altered the nature of Turkey’s border areas with Syria, linking them politically, socially, economically, and in security terms to Turkish provinces just over the frontier. While stopping short of outright annexation, such integration has reshaped the social and economic framework of these regions. It also may lay the groundwork for future, more far-reaching, steps by Ankara in the area.
The U.S. withdrawal was followed by a Turkish military operation known as Peace Spring, which resulted in Turkey’s military taking control over a strip of land between Ras al-‘Ayn and Tell Abyad. This established a new border zone, much as Turkey’s Euphrates Shield and Olive Branch operations had done in other parts of northern Syria. The Peace Spring area is closely connected to Sanliurfa Province in Turkey in terms of administration, services, and trade. However, it is also isolated from surrounding areas inside Syria. The area has strategic importance for Turkey in that it intervened to prevent the emergence there of an entity effectively controlled by the PKK. That is why the expanse between Ras al-‘Ayn and Tell Abyad is highly securitized and is not one to which Syrians can easily return today.
Turkish involvement in the area runs deep. Every local council has a coordinator who is affiliated with the province of Sanliurfa. These coordinators help local councils secure the logistical support and funding necessary to carry out service projects. They also help coordinate the delivery of Turkish assistance to local bodies through the Syrian opposition’s interim government. This includes such things as healthcare, property and civil status registration, and education.
The depth of this involvement is illustrated by the fact that when the interim government declared the formation of a local council in Tell Abyad on October 28, 2019, the governor of Sanliurfa, ‘Abdullah Erin, visited the city and expressed his support for the new council. When the local council for Ras al-‘Ayn was formed on November 7, 2019, Erin visited this city as well, stressing that Turkey would continue to rebuild the area and encourage a Syrian refugee return.
In the education sector, the Turks have reopened 146 schools operating in the Ras al-‘Ayn area, enrolling more than 15,000 students. Harran University has also signed a memorandum of understanding to open a branch there soon. Scholarships are given out to a number of students who have achieved high scores on the YÖS Turkish-language exams, especially for universities located in Harran, Mardin, and Hatay.
In another example of what Turkey is doing, last May it allowed 85 combined harvesters to pass through its territory from areas captured in the Euphrates Shield operation to the area of Ras al-‘Ayn and Tell Abyad in order to harvest wheat and barley. This was necessary as there is no direct connection between the two areas under Turkish control. According to sources on the ground, the Turkish authorities also granted entry permits to 1,500 farmers during the harvest season so that they could move through Turkey to harvest their land in Syria. After the end of the harvest, transit procedures will be eased in order to move seeds to the Euphrates Shield areas. The Turkish aid groups IHH and the Disaster and Emergency Management Authority, as well as the Turkish Red Crescent, are also involved in the area, filling the gap left by U.S. and European aid agencies no longer active there.
The Ras al-‘Ayn and Tell Abyad area is highly connected to Turkey but has closed its boundaries with the rest of Syria. This has encouraged smuggling. According to people on the ground, building materials are cheaper in the Peace Spring areas, where they are stored. Steel costs $500 per ton in these areas, but $650 per ton in Raqqa, controlled by the SDF. A ton of cement costs $42 in Peace Spring areas and $100 in Raqqa. The opposite is true for fuel products, because SDF-controlled areas produce oil. A barrel of fuel oil costs $37 in Peace Spring areas but just $15 in Raqqa, while gasoline costs $84 per barrel in Peace Spring areas and $40 per barrel in Raqqa.
This indicates that while the area is technically in a border zone with Turkey, it also acts as a border between Turkey and the rest of Syria. The fact that it is closely connected to Turkey yet remains isolated from Syria makes an imminent large-scale refugee return unlikely. Asked about the prospect of refugees returning, a local commander stressed the deficiencies in local infrastructure and the difficulties in procuring sufficient resources. “The electricity, water, and food are just enough for us. We don’t want anyone to come back,” he said.
The idea behind Turkey’s reshaping of Syria’s northern border areas is not to seize these territories for Turkey, but to create a buffer zone with the SDF to absorb the impact of any confrontation with the group. These parts of Syria will likely remain Syrian, but under Ankara’s heavy influence. That said, the situation could create more options for Turkey in the future. But for now, as its administration of these areas has in many ways been successful, Turkey may be encouraged to replicate such a model east of the Euphrates.
Pakistan is neither the worst-affected nor the worst-performing coronavirus case in the neighborhood. In fact, the country experienced a sharp decline in infection and fatality rates after an early surge. Many bright spots of good crisis leadership have emerged in a number of cities and provinces. But in early March, a remote border crossing called Taftaan on the Pakistan-Iran border became a flashpoint. The experience delivered some important lessons on preexisting fragility, as cracks emerged between the national and provincial governments, between the provincial center and the deprived peripheries, and between citizens and the state. Based on accounts of first-hand experiences, and using Pakistan as a case study, this essay examines how Covid-19 exacerbated fragility where grievance and inequality were already rife.
When the WHO declared Covid-19 a global pandemic on March 11, the provenance of Pakistan’s pandemic experience had already been established by nationals streaming home from Iran, where there was a severe outbreak of the disease. On February 26, a Karachi student returning from pilgrimage in Iran became Pakistan’s first documented case of Covid-19. Pakistan closed the border in late February, seeking to delay the arrival of approximately 6,000 Pakistani pilgrims at the Taftaan crossing, 630km from the nearest major city, in the province of Balochistan. The Zaireen, predominantly Shias from communities across Pakistan, were returning home from holy sites in the Iranian cities of Qom and Mashhad, which were already heavily afflicted by the coronavirus. Facing an urgent situation, the government launched plans to quarantine the Zaireen in the stark, primitive landscape of Taftaan.
The federal government made major pandemic decisions through an emergency commission that became the National Command and Operation Center. Compared to other provinces, Balochistan is historically neglected and under-resourced, and it is also perhaps more dependent on direct guidance from the center. According to Pakistan’s constitution, “health” as an area of governance is the domain of the province, but an infrastructure exists for cooperation and coordination between the center and the provinces, and to deal with Covid-19 all hands were needed on deck.
By February 27, the special assistant to the prime minister for health had made a well-documented trip to Taftaan to arrange the pandemic response. There was concern that the burden had fallen to the most impoverished and ill-equipped province, and that additional resources would be needed. The minister designated Pakistan House, the main federal government building at Taftaan, as a quarantine facility, and pledged that a special team from the National Disaster Management Authority would aid the effort, but people we interviewed told us that supplies were dispatched late or were never manufactured in sufficient quantities. Hobbled by its preexisting deprivation, the border remained a poorly defended front line of the crisis.
In the first few days of March, as returnees poured in across the border, they were shocked and dismayed by the conditions of their confinement: the absence of medical personnel, the lack of sanitation or clear guidelines, and the unregulated movement of people inside the camp. “Inside the compound there were no standard operating procedures and no communications from the government,” said one witness. Provincial officials used thermometer guns to check temperatures once a day, but there were few standard measures for pandemic containment, like testing, isolation, or social distancing.
Alarm grew among the residents of the camp, many of whom had fallen ill. “I didn’t see any doctors,” said one of the quarantined, a tour guide. “The compound had Panadol and a few other tablets, but not even enough masks. Later, a container with a few medical supplies, manned by a pharmacist, was installed, but it was outside the compound.” As the days went by, the camp began to resemble, to this researcher, a holding area for displaced persons more than a quarantine facility.
We often see a national-security reflex as states rely on “muscle memory” to confront a crisis, simply replicating conditioned behaviors instead of adapting to new circumstances. Pakistan’s institutions have extensive experience managing refugees and displaced populations, but none managing contagion. At Taftaan, the Zaireen were subjected to a policy of vector containment without treatment or basic health, safety, or sanitation facilities. This response unfortunately created a petri dish for virus contamination, which then spread through the country.
Peripheral populations in Pakistan, particularly those in challenging topographies, struggle to obtain proper health services. Chaghi, where Taftaan is situated, is the largest district in the province, but it performs poorly on human-development indicators. As a border district, Chaghi hosts a scattered, rural population, including many Afghan refugees. With few functioning mechanisms for relief or containment, Chaghi was the least likely candidate for frontline crisis response. “I spent 22 days in the camp,” a resident told us. “For 18 days there was no testing. On the 19th day they did a swab test, and I tested positive.”
There were difficulties in finding and dispatching medical personnel. Staffing state health facilities in Pakistan’s peripheries is a challenge in the best of times, but in this case the prospective staff did not have confidence in their employers’ care for their safety. “There was too much fear about the pandemic,” said one, “and we knew there was no protective gear available.” The Young Doctors Association of Balochistan resisted deployment to Taftaan, and protests demanding protective equipment resulted in unsavory images of doctors facing a baton charge and being arrested for insubordination and agitation. The Lady Medical Officers also refused a Health Department order to go to Taftaan, and were then directed to file a formal explanation.
To add to a complicated scenario, Covid-19 inflamed an old sectarian faultline. Evidence from 2016 to 2019 suggests that trouble for Shia pilgrims at the Pakistan border has been a regular feature of their annual pilgrimages to Iran. The history of terrorist incidents in Balochistan requires security screenings that the border checkpoint is ill-equipped to process at speed. Border economies and trading systems are rudimentary on the Pakistan side, and the rough experience of traversing this terrain can sap a traveler’s confidence in the state.
For the minority Shia pilgrims who must navigate this passage, the difficult experiences at the Taftaan Gate have given rise to a somewhat “othered” sentiment. Returning pilgrims complain of being detained for long periods, which sometimes sparks protests, often in a sectarian vernacular. “I once spent three days in the crowd at Taftaan trying to get into Iran,” said a journalist who travels frequently in the border region. “There was a scuffle with the Frontier Constabulary—they used batons, and I even fell in the melee.” These narratives of alienated citizenship indicate a fragile social contract frayed by rankling grievance.
With this baggage, the Taftaan camp crisis also acquired sectarian trappings, as the media began to report that the Zaireen were “responsible for the spread of coronavirus in Pakistan.” When the angry and exhausted pilgrims were finally released from Taftaan, their onward journeys were beset by conflict and incident that led to openly sectarian blame and antagonism on social media. Independent media sources and government officials responded with warnings against a “Shia media trial.” Fortunately, the social media campaigns were effectively countered and did not progress to vigilante attacks, but the brief flare-up is a warning as we continue to see more virulent manifestations of Covid-fueled identity conflict in South Asia.
The coronavirus struck Pakistan at its most vulnerable points, clothing old problems in the new garments of the pandemic. On the one hand, longstanding structural inequalities and resource constraints hampered cooperation between the national government and the provinces. On the other hand, the government’s ineffective quarantine of the travelers reawakened old sectarian identities and resentments. Most important, though, is the outcome: in the underserved periphery of the borderland, the status quo remained unchanged in the hour of greatest need.
Ultimately, Pakistan’s Covid-19 story is one of good intentions, sincere efforts, and some success, but also one where cracks in an already fragile system derailed the best-laid plans. Covid-19 has shown that structural inequality is a problem in any context—one that defines who are the most vulnerable, where are the cracks, and where the crisis will seep through.
The Covid-19 crisis has once again focused attention on political fragmentation in Myanmar, especially along ethnic divides. Much of the nation’s population in borderlands and rural areas has limited access to government healthcare and assistance, relying instead on ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) that are often the dominant political power in these regions.
Although EAOs and the Myanmar military, the Tatmadaw, have mounted joint responses to the pandemic in some cases, armed clashes have continued in the southeast, the west, and the north, including Kachin State. Heightened conflict, along with pandemic-related restrictions on cross-border movement and trade, poses a significant challenge for communities along Myanmar’s mountainous periphery.
In a recent interview, The Asia Foundation’s Araya Arayawuth spoke to Dan Seng Lawn, executive director of the Kachinland Research Center, in Kachin State, Myanmar, about the economic impact of the pandemic in Kachin, its effects on internally displaced persons (IDPs), and joint responses to the pandemic by the Tatmadaw and the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) that have crossed the lines of conflict.
AA: Dan Seng Lawn, welcome to Views from the Field
DSL: Hi, how are you?
AA: Tell us, first, a bit about your organization, the KRC.
Kachin State, Myanmar (TUBS / CC BY-SA 3.0)
DSL: Very briefly, the Kachinland Research Center is a regional policy think tank that is currently involved in the Covid-19 Concern and Response Committee–Kachin, which was organized by community organizations and faith-based groups across Kachin State.
AA: As of early August, there had been just over 470 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in all of Myanmar, and most were reported in the Yangon region among citizens recently returned from abroad. What has been the impact in Kachin State, and especially among communities along the Myanmar-China border?
DSL: Looking at the official figures, there had only been two positive cases in Kachin State by early July, so I think the virus has not had a strong direct impact on communities, but the economic effects on cross-border trade have been deep and far-reaching.
Movement restrictions, not just on people, but on the movement of goods, have had significant effects on the Kachin State economy, from extractive industries like jade mining and other mineral resources to the agricultural sector.
Kachin State relies largely on cross-border trade with China. In the agricultural sector, when the Chinese government closed its border, the price of paddy went down, and farmers could not repay their agricultural loans from the government. The majority of farmers in Kachin State rely on these loans, and when they could not repay their debt, it affected the government’s ability to issue new loans.
This will definitely have an impact on this year’s agricultural cycle, which I think we will see later this year. Farm productivity will fall, and many farmers will be at risk of losing their land.
AA: Due to years of ethnic armed conflict with the national government, there is a large population of internally displaced persons in Kachin State. How have they been affected by Covid-19?
DSL: When we talk about IDPs in Kachin State, we need to understand that there are three categories of people.
One group lives in areas controlled by the Kachin Independence Organization, the KIO, which is the civilian wing of the largest ethnic armed organization in Kachin State. Its armed wing is the Kachin Independence Army. In much of Kachin, the KIO is the local authority. These people are located along the Chinese border. Since the Chinese government closed the border, humanitarian agencies supporting them have had a hard time delivering aid, because they were sending that aid across the Chinese border.
A second group, internally displaced persons living in camps in areas of government control, have been under strict Covid-19 health guidelines, imposed by camp management committees, since April. But since mid-May it has become more and more difficult to observe these strict rules about lockdown—staying at home, social distancing, and so forth. The problem is that the camp management committees cannot provide sufficient subsistence support, livelihood support. These people cannot stay forever in these camps, because they have to solve their own livelihood problems. That means they have to go out. So, the camp management committees have had to loosen enforcement of the Covid-19 guidelines since mid-May.
Finally, in mixed-control areas like Injangyang Township, there are returning IDPs. This third group is also facing livelihood issues as they try to restart their agricultural activities from scratch, and they don’t get any support from the humanitarian agencies.
So, these are the challenges facing IDPs in Kachin State.
A Bamboo house in Kachin State, Myanmar, where healthcare and social services are often disrupted by ethnic conflict and competition between government agencies and rebel organizations (Sinwal / Shutterstock)
AA: In April, the government established a committee to coordinate with ethnic armed organizations on the prevention, control, and treatment of Covid-19, but there have been clashes between the Myanmar military and the Kachin Independence Army in recent weeks. What has been happening, and how are these clashes affecting coordination on Covid-19?
DSL: Looking back to May, there were good prospects for peace and collaboration between the government and the KIO. The Covid-19 Concern and Response Committee–Kachin, the CCRCK, facilitated a meeting between delegations from the Kachin State government and the KIO’s Covid-19 response committee.
On May 10, at Mai Sa Pa Village, which is under KIO control, both sides exchanged good will and identified areas where they could work together. The next week, the Tatmadaw came to Mai Sa Pa with a helicopter and delivered Covid-19 prevention materials and medical equipment to the KIO. So, the general situation in May was quite positive, and people were quite happy about it.
But then things started changing. We noticed after the first week of June that the Tatmadaw was reshuffling its troops in Kachin. Then, on June 8 and 9, armed clashes broke out in northern Shan between the Tatmadaw and the Kachin Independence Army, the armed wing of KIO. On June 22, the Tatmadaw destroyed one of the KIO’s Covid-19 cross-border checkpoints. And on June 29, there were armed clashes in central Kachin State in an area controlled by the KIO.
These clashes occurred despite the Tatmadaw’s declaration of a unilateral, three-month ceasefire in Kachin State. So, unfortunately, I think that the peace process right now is really at rock bottom.
AA: Dan Seng Lawn, thank you for sharing your insights on this very complex and tragic situation.
DSL: Thank you.
Yemen and Somalia are connected by a maritime border that runs through the Red Sea—a space of cooperation and exchange that joins rather than divides the two countries. Historically, movements of Somali and Yemeni people have occurred in both directions. But, since the start of Yemen’s civil war in 2015, most migration has been from Yemenis fleeing the conflict, with some Somalis living in Yemen also returning home. Prior to this, the proximity of the two countries, which fuelled trade between their coastal towns and cities, meant that communities of Yemenis and Somalis had developed on both sides of the Red Sea, facilitating ongoing cultural and economic interactions. Now, most Yemenis who arrive in Puntland are refugees attracted by the proximity, ease of entry and social connections with pre-existing Yemeni communities. Many see Puntland as a temporary refuge, or staging post for more ambitious future migrations. As part of RVI’s ongoing project on the cross-border connections between Yemen and Somalia (read the two reports here and here), the Institute’s partners at Puntland State University in Garowe spoke to Yemenis living in Bosaso and Garowe in Puntland, to discuss their lives there.
Since the start of Yemen’s civil war, the migration of Yemeni people to Puntland has increased as they sought a refuge from the fighting and economic collapse in their homeland. Somalia is often not the first choice destination for Yemenis as many prefer to stay in the Gulf region, where there are likely to be better economic opportunities. However, to move freely and live there they must have a kafeel—sponsor—but many do not. This is a major reason many end up in Somalia, where there is no requirement for a kafeel and there are no restrictions on entry for Yemenis fleeing the war.
Maasim Khaadim, a Yemeni living in Bosaso, said that he:
Used to smuggle khat into Saudi Arabia, it was a good business, but I was arrested by Saudi Police at the border, they entered by data into their system, and I am blocked to enter any Gulf Countries. I tried Oman but my data showed as ‘Blocked Entry’. They arrested me, transferred me to prison. During my prison time in Oman I met other Yemenis and they told me about Somalia. After release I decided to move [there].
There are other factors that pull Yemenis to Puntland. First, the established Mukulla-Bosaso transport corridor means that Puntland is quite easy to get to, particularly from Yemen’s south-eastern Hadhramaut region, where security is generally better than the rest of the country. Most refugees coming from Yemen to Puntland use Mukulla port to reach Bosaso and then move to other destinations by land. The cost of travel between Mukulla and Bosaso is very low as there are already boats which transport commodities—including fish—between the ports.
Abdalla, a Yemeni living in Bosaso who owns a restaurant there said, ‘Somalia is nearer to Yemen, its less costly to travel and living cost is cheap, we are here to earn income to send back home for our families’. Shaahir, a Yemeni who works as a waiter in Garowe, told us that ‘I have a family of 10 persons, they live in Yemen and they need USD 400 for their living costs but I only send USD 100–150 per month, sometimes nothing, they are suffering, and I am trying to help them’.
Mohamed Salim, a 21-year-old waiter now living and working in Garowe is from San’a in Yemen. He described how he had ended up in Puntland. Mohamed left Yemen in 2014 for Saudi Arabia, where he became a cashier in a supermarket. He lived in Riyadh for four years, but in 2018 the Saudi government adopted a law criminalizing foreigners working in retail businesses. His Saudi kafeel (also his employer) cancelled his job. He was then arrested and deported to Yemen. Mohamed stayed two months there and then decided to travel to Egypt, with the intention of reaching Europe. During the journey, Egyptian police arrested him at the border and he spent 57 days in prison. They later released him on condition that he go back to Yemen, but he flew to Malaysia after receiving an invitation from a friend in Kuala Lumpur to join him there. After his arrival, he got a job at a Syrian restaurant. Following a three month stay he moved to Muscat, Oman, when another friend invited him for a job. But, as Yemeni workers are only allowed to work in restaurant jobs or manual labour, such as painting buildings, Mohamed had difficulties getting a visa extension and was later arrested and deported back to Yemen. During his prison days, other inmates told him about Somalia, the route, and business opportunities. After his release, he decided to travel there.
To see an illustration of Mohamed’s journey from Yemen to Somalia via Egypt, Oman and Malaysia click here.
The long-established trade connections between Yemen and Somalia mean that the routes between the two countries are already well-known, and information is shared via pre-existing Yemeni communities in Somalia. This facilitates mobility between the two countries. When they get to Puntland, many of the Yemeni refugees often start off by living in camps supported by international agencies and the Puntland authorities.
Outside of their own communities, Yemenis feel reasonably at home in Somalia, which shares common cultural practices, including some foods, khat chewing and Islam. Inter-marriage between the two communities—both in Yemen and Somalia—is common. Many Somali returnees to Puntland have Yemeni wives and Yemenis living in Puntland have made mixed families. Abdalla Hussein told us, ‘I am Yemeni, and I married two Somali women’.
Despite the relative ease of moving and integrating into Puntland life, Yemeni refugees often struggle to survive financially even with support from aid agencies. Some have been able to start businesses—often restaurants—while others take jobs in the food and construction sectors. Businesses are mainly partnerships with Somalis. Generally, a Somali partner injects the capital, while the Yemeni provides skills and labour for running the business.
Yemeni refugees, unlike Ethiopians for example, are more likely to find employment, due to their skills and their social connections with local people. Some problems do arise with language, khat chewing and frequent conflicts, which are all raised as issues by Somali employers. A Somali NGO employee noted that, ‘most of the legal cases [we try to help resolve] concerning Yemeni refugees are over conflict with their employers or business partners, while most of the cases from Ethiopian refugees are on domestic issues’.
Hussein, a Yemeni migrant in Garowe, reported that: ‘I had a booming restaurant, near Garowe municipality building, it was a profit yielding business. One day, without prior notice, local government contractors entered the building and demolished the restaurant structures, we lost all prepared food, stock, supplies at that day, now I re-started another restaurant business’. Abdullahi, a Yemeni businessman, noted: ‘I partnered in seven businesses with Somali traders, all of them collapsed due to conflict between me and my partners, currently I run my own business in Bosaso’.
Mohamed Hussein is a Yemeni refugee in Garowe, born in Raadac in North Yemen. He was a businessman in Raadac before the start of Yemen war, but fled to Somalia. He left Yemen in 2017 through the Mukulla-Bosaso corridor, with a Somali returnee from Yemen. Mohamed planned to start a business with his Somali friend in Kismayo, but their plan failed after disagreements between them. He decided to start a business in Bosaso, but had no capital in hand. Mohamed started to look for capital and finally met a businessman in Bosaso, Yasin, who agreed to help. Yasin gave him a small loan as seed capital. He started the business and opened a restaurant selling Yemeni food. After a few months, the business collapsed. Mohamed decided to move to Garowe, the capital of Puntland, and Yasin again provided a small loan. He started a new business by partnering with a Somali trader and now employs fifteen other Yemenis. His business has become a central meeting place for Yemeni people in Garowe and Puntland at large.
As Mohamed’s story shows, Yemenis are generally resilient in coping with the difficulties of life in Puntland. They work in groups, which provides a degree of solidarity and mutual support, and often draw on their connections with the Yemeni communities that lived in Puntland before the Yemen war. But, despite the safe refuge, and some economic opportunities, Puntland is usually not the end goal for Yemeni refugees and migrants. Most of those interviewed had aspirations to move to other countries where they perceive there to be better economic prospects. These include Ethiopia, Kenya, the Gulf and even Europe. Mohamed Salim, who told us his life story before ending up in Puntland, explained how he ‘moved like a bird, from country to country, but always ends up back to Yemen. Now, I cannot go back to Yemen … my intention is to save money to reach other countries then to Europe.’ Due to its proximity and ease of travel and existing connections, Puntland seems to mostly be an interim point for Yemen’s new generation of migrants, on a long journey towards a better life.
Aid providers in the Horn of Africa have always struggled to adapt their systems and models to the simple fact that people move from place to place. Delivering aid in remote areas normally involves establishing long supply chains that rely on populations being in places where they can be relatively easily ‘accessed’. The refugee and IDP camps of the region, many of which were constructed as temporary locations for the provision of food or shelter, are an obvious symbol of this tendency.
But, the idea of populations being fixed in one place works against the intrinsic mobility in their lives; from pastoralist groups moving with their animals to grasslands for grazing, to seasonal farm labourers moving annually for work. Movement is often a survival strategy that helps people to seek refuge from conflict, food shortages or the coercive control of the state. Borders are also central to these strategies. Recent research by the Rift Valley Institute has shown the importance of the social capital created by the transnational networks that operate across borders, and how borderland populations use it as a critical component of their livelihood strategies.
Political actors have been alive to these contradictions for years, and the aid community has long experience of how aid can be used to push populations towards, or away from, particular places in support of political agendas. The COVID-19 response opens up a new front in these longstanding tensions, one that needs urgent consideration if aid delivery is not to be implicated in long-term harm.
In South Sudan and its neighbours, reducing the circulation of people has been a major pillar of the COVID-19 response. In countries where communities share small living spaces, social distancing becomes a virtual impossibility. Therefore, for public health authorities, the key response is to keep communities fixed in place. In common with COVID-19 affected countries around the world, the decision to lock down comes with complex consequences for these communities. Three key issues arise in the South Sudan context:
Small-scale cross-border flows of goods and resources are often critical for the livelihoods of populations living in border areas. For example, in RVI’s work in Akobo, on the border between South Sudan and Ethiopia, it was noted that members of the Nuer-speaking community living either side of the border would regularly cross to conduct business, access resources and visit family and kin. RVI’s work in Northern Bahr el-Ghazal, on the border with South Darfur, has shown similar patterns of cross-border movement. In both cases, local authorities seek to control and profit from these movements.
While these borders cannot, and have not been, fully shut down, attempts by national authorities to regulate movement across them as part of its pandemic response have enabled local agents of the state to increase their presence and control over economic activity. The targets of state authorities tend to be the most lucrative, or easily controlled parts of this cross-border economy. For example, in Northern Bahr-el-Ghazal this includes goods like cement and fuel, while on the Ethiopia border the focus has been on the river trade that supplies small towns like Akobo with everyday necessities. The increased involvement of the authorities in regulating, and in some cases manipulating, these flows, reduces the autonomy of local populations and shifts power balances even further.
Aid programmes in these areas have also come under pressure from national authorities during the pandemic. For example, in Gambella—on the Ethiopian side of the border with South Sudan—the government announced the closure of registration centres for refugees, which provide access to the goods and services available in refugee camps, to reduce the flow of people across the border. Although these goods and services are primarily intended for people displaced from South Sudan, there is evidence that they are as important to the Nuer-speaking population on the Ethiopian side of the border—particularly at times of economic hardship. The closures have therefore increased economic pressure on populations either side of the border.
Long-standing traditions of community mobility have created transnational networks of support that are critical to household economies in South Sudan. This includes remittance networks, which have both physical and digital components (in the form of money transfer companies). While distant territories such as the US, Canada and Australia are critical nodes in these networks, just as important—perhaps more so—are the individuals or families that have travelled to urban centres such as Juba, or over the borders into Uganda, Sudan and Ethiopia, and who circulate the cash that they earn back to their places of origin. In South Sudan, the digital remittance system is far less developed than, for example, in Somalia, so the ability for individuals or transfer agents to move in, out of and across the country is very important.
At the moment, these channels are under threat from COVID-19. This is the case for two reasons: first, if people cannot move easily across borders, or through South Sudan more generally, they cannot bring money back to their families. Second, the economic effects of the lockdown on, for example, boda-boda drivers (motorbike taxis) and tea stalls in Juba or Uganda, or on the daily income of those of South Sudanese origin in Australia or the US, mean that people will have less spare cash to send or take back to their families, who often rely on these external injections into their household budget to make ends meet.
Previous research on the transnational networks of Nuer-speaking peoples shows that a crisis in one population centre can ripple outwards to effect populations elsewhere. For example, during the December 2013 violence at the start of South Sudan’s civil war—when many Nuer living in Juba were killed—populations as far afield as Melbourne and Minnesota suffered due to the increased financial demands from relatives in South Sudan, as well as the psychological impact of observing traumatic events from a distance. Similar dynamics may play out during the current pandemic.
The response to COVID-19 also adds to the political toolkit of local and national authorities at a time of intense fragility across South Sudan. Coming after the signing of the ‘revitalized’ peace deal (R-ARCSS) between the government and opposition coalition, President Kiir’s new unity government is seeking to reassert its authority across the country. Key positions of authority at state level and below are still being appointed, and political actors at local levels are therefore seeking to increase their leverage and influence through the mobilization of local populations to pursue their agendas through force. Any new tools they are given by the COVID-19 response—for example, the ability to impose local lockdowns on particular communities, or to utilise security forces to monitor or enforce particular entry or exit points from their areas—are likely to be deployed in the service of these wider political objectives.
There is one issue on which the COVID-19 crisis may be used to encourage greater circulation of people, adding a new dynamic to the tensions around the Protection of Civilian (POC) camps across the country. The UN has long seen these camps as unsustainable and is uncomfortable with the complex politics that shrouds these highly visible, and expensive symbols of the civil war. The risks that such high-density settlements create for the rapid spread of COVID-19 provides a further justification for seeking their dispersal. For example, in May David Shearer, the head of UNMISS, said that they ‘very strongly encouraged people in the POCs to return home’. However, the sense of insecurity felt by these populations—which keeps them in the POCs—must be acknowledged, and their physical safety should not be de-prioritised in the face of the pandemic response. This is especially true given the scarcity of quality health services available in potential locations of return.
Humanitarian actors in South Sudan, and the Horn of Africa more broadly, know that the resources they provide are always at risk of manipulation or misdirection by politicians seeking to pursue their own agendas. The response to COVID-19 has opened up new fronts in this battle. Mitigating these risks requires strong analysis, close monitoring of local political dynamics and the ability to understand the links between so-called intercommunal conflicts and national politics. All of these tasks will be hampered by COVID-19. With travel between the capital and more remote locations more difficult than ever, there is a risk that Juba-based teams lose the ability to keep in touch with realities on the ground.
While seasonal rains will act as a natural constraint on mobility for a few months—providing all actors in South Sudan with a degree of space to reflect—the end of the rains will act as a trigger for movement across the country and it will be critical to have clear plans and policies in place before then. Above all, there is a need to recognise the importance of mobility as a pillar of individual and community resilience. Aid agencies must seek to understand the specifics of how the communities they work with use mobility in their everyday lives, and work with community leaders and local authorities to enable as safe and dignified passage as possible within public health guidelines.
Given the risk that political elites will seek to exert greater control over communities, the ability of aid agencies to monitor and communicate dynamics around mobility and lockdown in key locations could act as an important mitigating factor. The work that organisations such as IOM and REACH do to monitor movements across, in and out of the country becomes even more important. Analysis of this data could potentially be used as part of a strategy of more nuanced and targeted movement restrictions. Aid agencies can also play a role in promoting a more transparent debate about options for those currently living in the POCs. The donor and diplomatic community will have a critical role in creating space for discussion of the political implications of lockdown and aid.
Agencies will face particular challenges in tracking local dynamics as their own ability to move is constrained, both within the country and across borders. Creative thinking is required to enhance information gathering from particularly sensitive areas, and to ensure that there is good information sharing between locations connected by movement channels. For example, the interdependency of Nuer communities along the Ethiopia-South Sudan border speaks to a need for regular and detailed information sharing between humanitarian actors on both sides, which does not currently take place.
The humanitarian community should also explore new ways to engage with the global support networks that the communities they seek to help are part of. While there is an existing body of research on diaspora humanitarianism, current thinking risks focusing on attempts to reshape these transnational support networks into a vehicle for international aid funding, rather than trying to understand them on their own terms. At a time when accessing remote locations is more expensive and challenging than ever, aid agencies should look for opportunity in these networks—reinforcing positive effects by working in multiple locations at once.
Rather than seeing diaspora communities simply as an extension of their places of origin, aid actors should seek to develop new kinds of partnerships that help to build trust, tackle the issues that they face in their new homes, and support their efforts to strengthen social capital across their transnational networks. This will require new programming modalities, with resources that can be spent in multiple countries, by organisations with a wide range of expertise.
The aid community has talked a lot over the last decade about dealing with complexity, but translating this into action has proved harder. The basic framework of aid delivery remains too rooted in an analysis of the world predicated on states, capitals and permanent settlements. This is not how the world works. People move, they connect and use these connections to create networks that are resilient to the systems around them. Aid actors must increase their understanding of these strategies. This will help prevent their efforts becoming part of existing systems of control and maximise choice and opportunity for the populations they support.
Afghan kings ruled by forging alliances with local strongmen. Even the influence of tribal leaders waned quickly, however, as one left the towns for the mountains or the desert. Ansary describes rural Afghanistan as a universe of “village-republics,” self-reliant social units where daily life remained unaltered by events in the capital. The wars of the past decades have changed this. National and global politics have left deep scars in the social fabric of rural Afghanistan: bombs and mines turned fertile valleys into deserts; millions left their villages for the cities, Pakistan, or Iran. But to a large extent, these wars have illustrated once again the resistance of rural Afghanistan to central rule.
Afghanistan’s borderlands are an extreme illustration of this governance challenge: border residents tend to have stronger economic and cultural ties with people across the border than with Kabul. And yet, these areas play a central role in the security and economy of the country. Border security is inseparable from the larger war effort, as insurgents take advantage of porous borders and kinship networks to take refuge in neighboring countries.
This satellite photo of Bahramcha, a border town in Helmand Province, strikingly illustrates how the Durand Line (in yellow), which marks the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, runs straight through border communities. Bahramcha is also a Taliban-controlled border crossing on the Kandahar–Quetta route, and a major export route for narcotics. (Source: Afghan Analysts Network / Google Maps)
The borders are also vital to the Afghan economy. Customs duties are the most important single source of government revenue after foreign aid. Despite significant improvements in customs collection since 2015, considerable leakage persists because of insecurity, entrenched corruption, and insufficient processing points along thousands of miles of permeable borders. Security dynamics and cross-border trade are interrelated in complex ways. In his 2000 book, Taliban, Ahmed Rashid exposed the role of Quetta’s trucking mafia in financing the expansion of the fundamentalist movement in the mid-90s. Insurgents levy taxes on trafficking and trade in areas that they control.
In border regions, a vast share of the local population makes a living from legal trade, smuggling, or the grey area in between. A 2019 study by The Asia Foundation looked into livelihoods and trade in the districts of Spin Boldak, in Kandahar province, and Muhmand Dara, in Nangarhar province. The two busiest official crossing points between Afghanistan and Pakistan, Torkham and Wesh-Chaman, are located in these districts. Torkham links Kabul to Peshawar via the Khyber Pass; Wesh-Chaman connects Kandahar to Quetta. A representative survey in these districts found that two-thirds of respondents had crossed the border at least once in the past year, and nearly one in five was conducting regular business with Pakistan residents other than family. A large majority reported that their community (71 percent) or their household (56 percent) depended on such trade for their economic welfare, and 47 percent depended on it for their own occupation. The study paints a picture of large traders and smuggling barons profiting most from business opportunities and ineffective border controls, while many more earn a modest living as truck drivers and cargo handlers, or by transporting licit and illicit goods along local trails.
From the perspective of local residents, the border is an artificial line that divides families but also provides economic opportunity. Although they acknowledge the contribution of porous borders to national insecurity, border residents do not see lax controls as a threat to their own safety. Instead, they worry about the impact of tighter controls on their lifestyle and livelihoods. In the past few years, a series of measures by Pakistan have drastically limited their traditional freedom of movement. These measures include fencing the border, establishing additional security posts, and requiring incoming Afghans to show proper passport and visa documents. (Previously, border tribes were allowed to cross without them.) Pakistan has also occasionally closed the border, sometimes for days or weeks at a stretch, usually in response to security incidents.
From the perspective of Pakistan, these measures are part of a legitimate effort to enforce border security, curb smuggling, and boost legal bilateral trade. The goal is to encourage people and goods to pass through official border crossings, where they can be more easily controlled and taxed. Security measures such as the border fence are combined with positive incentives: in September, Prime Minister Imran Khan inaugurated the 24/7 opening of the Torkham gate, which used to be closed at night. This measure was intended to reduce the long wait times at the border, a major grievance of Afghans trading fresh produce. Afghans say delays persist despite Khan’s initiative, and it remains to be seen whether these policies will have the intended long-term effects. One way or another, they will durably affect the vast majority of border residents whose livelihoods, and often healthcare or education, have long been dependent on their ability to cross into Pakistan.
Why does this matter for peace? Western commentators have focused on geopolitics and ideology to explain past and current Afghan wars. Tamim Ansary and Ahmed Rashid remind us, however, that the rise of the Taliban in the 90s was not just a religious reaction to the instability and insecurity of the Afghan civil war; it was also a revolt of southern tribes rooted in historical grievances and a sense of marginalization. Improving border management and the rule of law in border regions might be a legitimate goal, but unless the needs of local populations are taken into account, such efforts may feed a fresh cycle of frustration and sow mistrust in the benefits of peace.
Last year, U.S.-Taliban peace talks raised hopes for an agreement on a political process to end the war. It remains unclear whether the talks will resume, and if they do there is no guarantee that they will succeed. Nonetheless, key governance issues that have been pushed aside by the war will eventually reclaim their place in the Afghan public debate: What role for the central state in border regions? How to protect borders against traffickers and insurgents and improve customs revenues without hurting livelihoods and fueling local grievances?
These are questions that The Asia Foundation wants to help answer. Over the next four years, our offices in Afghanistan and Pakistan will undertake joint research to document changes in policy and other conditions along the border and their favorable or adverse effects on local livelihoods, trade, and security. This work will be done through the X-Border Local Research Network, a partnership with the Carnegie Middle East Center and the Rift Valley Institute, supported by DFID, to study conflict-affected borderlands in Asia, the Middle East, and the Horn of Africa and suggest more effective responses from the international community and national governments. Our research this year will focus on how border residents on either side adjust to tighter border controls. Future studies may look at the integration of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, bilateral trade, and other relevant topics.
Views from the Borderlands sheds light on how political, security and socio-economic developments affect the people living in contested borderlands and, reversely, how border dynamics shape change and transition at the national level. In this first issue, we cover:
Improvised security initiatives forged to combat specific transnational threats are gradually becoming key features of the African security landscape. Proponents of such efforts see them as potentially consequential in shaping the patterns of interaction and military cooperation among affected states.
A similar perception of threats by states participating in such initiatives helps foster cohesion, whatever the other problems existing among them. The G5 Sahel Joint Force is a good example of this. The force was formally launched in 2017 by five countries of the Sahel—Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, and Chad—because of a genuine desire to address the threat that terrorist groups could spread out from their stronghold in northern Mali. Such coalitions allow for the adoption of issue-specific approaches, which yield engagement strategies limited in their goals and geographical reach. They also benefit from institutional and operational advantages over formal regional or continental security mechanisms, which can be large and unwieldy. Indeed, part of the appeal of such initiatives lies in their flexibility and adaptability.
The idea of creating a regional coalition, after years of persistent mistrust among heads of states in the Sahel, began taking shape in November 2013. That is when the Nigerian, Malian, and French armies conducted Operation Roussette on the Mali-Niger border. This military operation implemented decisions taken in Niger in October 2013 by an Operational Coordination Committee (OCC) that the chiefs of staff of the armed forces of Burkina Faso, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Chad, and France had created months earlier in Paris. In terms of priorities the OCC was tasked with analyzing data and building semiannual action plans to deal with threats on the Mali-Mauritania, Burkina Faso-Mali, and Niger-Chad borders.
This concept of joint military operations was not new in the Sahel. Rather, this collaboration sought to resurrect a short-lived joint Malian-Mauritanian experiment that had taken place in 2011. In Operation Benkan (Unity), both countries’ forces collaborated to dislodge militants of Al-Qa‘eda in the Islamic Maghreb from their base in the Wagadou forest on the Malian side of their common border. After Operation Roussette, hundreds of troops from the five armies concerned carried out a handful of cross-border military operations in early 2014 by. Each army operated on its side of the border but had a right of hot pursuit, and was assisted by French troops who provided air cover as well as support in planning, logistics, intelligence, and medical evacuations.
After a year of coordinated military action in which the practice of coalition warfare proved promising, the necessity for the affected states to institutionalize their military consultation, planning, and operations became more pressing. Having already created in early 2014 the G5 Sahel—an intergovernmental cooperation framework designed to prop up regional development and security activities—Sahel leaders had to determine how to sustain the continuity of their security partnership. On November 4, 2015, the G5 Sahel heads of state signed the Military Cross-border Cooperation Partnership, which regulated the actions of G5 Sahel cross-border military operations. On November 20, at a meeting in Chad, they announced their intent to create their own joint force.
In a February 2017 summit in Bamako, after months of debate over the structure of the joint military force and its possible operations, the heads of state opted for a modest approach with a limited aim. The G5 Sahel Joint Force was not to police the whole G5 Sahel region—at least not initially. Its main task was limited to securing the borders of the eastern sector of the Sahel involving Niger and Chad, the central sector involving Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, and the western sector involving Mauritania and Mali.
The G5 Sahel Joint Force conducted its first military operation, Operation Hawbi, in November 2017 in the border area of Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso. The second, Operation Pagnali, took place in January 2018 in the area between Mali and Burkina Faso. Since then, the force has gained political momentum and international support. U.S. National Security Advisor John Bolton recently praised the force and called for more such initiatives by African states.
For now, the G5 Sahel Joint Force is still in a capacity development phase, heavily dependent on French military assistance and the goodwill of donors. The fact that the United Nations Security Council has so far refused to grant the force a peacekeeping mandate under Chapter VII of the UN Charter has complicated the efforts of the G5 member states to secure a stable revenue stream. Without access to the UN peacekeeping operations budget, the force will struggle to sort out its funding challenges.
The success of the G5 Sahel joint force is also dependent on its ability to differentiate itself in a crowded security environment, while coordinating action with other African and Western military forces present in the region. For instance, the question of cooperation, especially between the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) and the G5 Sahel Joint Force, which provides 35 percent of the troops assigned to MINUSMA, is not yet fully settled.
A third major challenge for the G5 Sahel Joint Force is to gain the support of local populations. To become legitimate guardians of regional security, the G5 Sahel states need to professionalize their armies, police, and intelligence services as well as seriously prosecute human rights violations.
The G5 Sahel Joint Force is a worthy initiative that can enhance regional military cooperation in a vast geographical area that is crisscrossed by transnational armed groups and smuggling and trafficking rings. But to optimize its stabilizing role, the force must rest upon a political framework that improves people’s access to justice and reduces socioeconomic inequalities.
This blog was originally published by the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center.
Jihadi groups in the Sahel have not yet won any of the insurgencies in which they have been involved, yet they remain the most adaptive and resilient of all insurgent groups. Ansar al-Dine, Al-Mourabitoun, and the Sahara branch of Al-Qa‘eda in the Islamic Maghreb have shown remarkable staying power, defying predictions that their military rout by France in 2013 in northern Mali would be a crippling blow. What explains the endurance and proliferation of Salafi-jihadi groups in the Sahel?
Since Algerian terrorist groups relocated to northern Mali during the first decade of the century, rebel leaders in the Sahel have become more inclined to adopting Salafi-jihadism as a means of survival and recruitment, and to outcompete other armed actors. In contexts of contending warring groups, ethnic or religious divisions, and state misrule, a basic challenge of rebel mobilization is the collective action problem, because the natural inclination of individuals is to stay out of conflicts, given the high costs of participation. Insurgent groups try to mitigate this problem by providing material benefits—protection, money, social services—in return for becoming a supporter or fighter. Extremists also have the advantage of using ideology wrapped in religious ideas to motivate, coordinate, and retain recruits.
Violent extremism helps draw the most devoted recruits on the cheap. This is important in contexts of intense rebel competition where switching sides and the realignment of alliances is more the norm than the exception. In such fractured environments, extremist groups can also become appealing to moderates, as they appear as the only ones able to follow through on their commitments to reshape state-society relationships. This is critical in the early phases of conflict as recruits tend to flock to groups that have the potential to win and a fearsome reputation for enforcing law and order.
It is not a coincidence that an essential theme in the discourse of jihadi groups is morality, honor, and justice—values that individuals and communities who are repressed, exploited, and discriminated against crave. For example, in analyzing a trove of unearthed documents by the so-called Islamic State group, New York Times correspondent Rukmini Callimachi revealed how the group used a rough and ready dispensation of justice to win over the population it controlled, including those whom it abused. The Islamic State also distinguished itself by its willingness to hold its own fighters to account. It is this revolutionary character—backed by a moralizing and revolutionary language—that builds the credibility and reputation of jihadis as enforcers of order and purveyors of security.
Armed jihadi groups in the Sahel have quickly learned that ideological purity and religious zeal can act as a useful branding strategy to differentiate themselves from rival groups. The case of Ayad Ag Ghali, the leader of Ansar al-Dine and a Machiavellian fixture of Tuareg insurrections in northern Mali, is revealing in this regard. According to several observers, Ag Ghali’s embrace of extreme ideology was determined by the fast-moving events that led to the January 2012 uprising launched by the secular National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) against the government of Mali. Ag Ghali had wanted to be the movement’s secretary general but was rebuffed in November 2011, leading to his marginalization during the crucial preparatory stages of the rebellion. It is a matter of conjecture whether Ag Ghali’s radical trajectory would have been the same had he been allowed to lead this revolt against the Malian state.
Regardless what one might think about Ag Ghali’s 2012 reinvention as a firebrand intent on imposing an extreme form of Islamic law, the adoption of a radical jihadi posture allowed him to differentiate himself from the MNLA, while at the same time benefiting from the critical material support of violent extremist organizations operating in northern Mali. The result is that a few months after the start of the northern Mali conflict in early 2012, the charismatic Ag Ghali emerged as the most prominent leader of the Tuareg insurgency. An appreciable number of those who joined him did not share the radical ideology he had set for his organization. Alghabass Ag Intallah, the son of the hereditary chief of the Ifoghas, who first joined the MNLA, acknowledged that his defection to Ansar al-Dine was based on the group’s power and better organization. Ag Intallah also reportedly mocked the conversion of Ag Ghali into a radical jihadi.
The Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), a jihadi group active in southern Algeria and northern Mali between 2011 and 2013, had an even more ambivalent relationship with religion. A non-negligible portion of its members was made up of drug traffickers not known for radical religiosity. Their primary objective was to secure their position in the bitter competition over access to trafficking revenues and control over trafficking routes, “without any particular regard to the harsh religious dogma held by the organization they lead,” as Mathieu Pellerin, a French specialist on Africa, has written.
In an environment marked by intense fear, uncertainty, and competition among insurgent factions, the leaders of MUJAO understood that the embrace of radical ideology could quickly yield a critical early advantage in attracting the most dedicated fighters. This was necessary for building a winning force that could, over time, attract the support of a population that was often religiously moderate. A nonideological wing and a hardcore religious wing came together in MUJAO, recalling what had occurred in Iraq with the Islamic State, where religious zealots joined with aggrieved Arab Sunnis, including officers from Saddam Hussein’s secular army.
The importance of radical ideology in the Sahel stems from its instrumental value and normative commitments. For rebel leaders, radical ideology helps their groups recruit and stand out from the rest of the pack. For aggrieved communities, there are situational incentives in joining a winning coalition. It is not the presumed religious radicalism of young men that determines alignment choices. Rather, it is the strategic gains to which leaders and their followers aspire that determine which are the armed groups that individuals or communities choose to join or support.
This blog was originally published by the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center.
The Yemeni province of Mahra, on the border with Oman, has not been reached by the war so far. However, Saudi Arabia – as Oman used to do to defend its influence – has started to support a large number of Mahari tribes. This has led to large community divisions in local tribal society, for the first time in the history of this eastern province. This support is not limited to the financial domain but also extends to the military. The spread of armed tribal groups has become a new feature in Mahra in light of the indirect Saudi-Emirati-Omani competition for regional leverage.
In 2015, Yemen’s president, Abdurabo Mansour Hadi, fled to the Yemen-Oman border when the Houthis, along with their former ally Ali Abdullah Saleh, decided to invade Aden to arrest him. The president traveled to the remote provinces of the desert until he arrived in Mahra, through which he crossed the border into Oman. In the meantime, the Saudi-led coalition began its military operations to restore the legitimacy that the Houthis had gained.
The border strip between Mahra and the Omani province of Dhofar is 288 kilometers long, starting from the coast of Haof district and ending in the heart of the desert at the border triangle between Yemen, Oman and Saudi Arabia: beyond the desert, there are few agricultural zones and the population lives along the border strip. Although the border area is divided between the two countries, the frontier communities in Mahra and Dhofar appear to be an ecosystem: tribes descend from a single tribe and share many historical, social and cultural constituents. In addition, they speak another language beside Arabic, namely “Mahriya” or “Jabali”, which is a Semitic language not spoken by the rest of Yemenis.
This social cohesion in border areas has led Oman to deal with this ecosystem as a first line of defense to protect its security from any break-in. To this end, Oman has strengthened its relationships with Mahra society and provided Omani citizenship for many personalities in the area, especially after signing the border agreement with Yemen in 1992. It has also made it easier for those who do not have Omani citizenship to move to Oman. Despite Yemen’s upheavals since 2011, Mahra province has not been affected economically because it relied on Omani markets to obtain fuel and food, depending especially on a major shared market, the Al-Mazyounah, which is a few kilometers from Yemen’s Shihen border-crossing. This explains why Mahra province managed to remain economically autonomous from the other provinces. At the same time, this contributed to protecting the Omani border from any security breakthrough by extremist groups: most tribes are also grateful to the Omani state for this status quo. This does not mean that illegal activities are absent from this area: the smuggling of goods and vehicles is widespread and recently many human trafficking cases in Dhofar were also recorded, but all the people involved in such activities are Mahris.
However, the consequences of the war have extended to the border of Mahra province since mid-2015. The Houthis reduced the financial allowances of Mahra employees to a quarter of the amount required for the province, causing non-payment of salaries for many civil and military employees: many of them, especially non-Mahris, had to leave and return to their areas. This provoked a severe shortage of employees in security and service institutions: as a result, the then governor of Mahra handed out Mahra crossings to the tribes, surrounding the areas to take over the management of ports at a governorate level and transfer customs fees to the province’s account. Moreover, Oman provided the necessary fuel for the service facilities and distributed regular food aid to the population. In 2017, the tribes of Zabanout and Ra’feet began to quarrel over control of the Shihen crossing, each tribe claiming the port as part of its tribal area.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) began to be present in the province of Mahra a few months later at the beginning of the military intervention in Yemen. In 2015 the UAE trained about 2,500 new recruits from among Mahra inhabitants, although they reportedly did not create an elite force due to tribal refusal, while providing a lot of assistance to rebuild the local police and existing security services. It also distributed food baskets and humanitarian aid to the residents of Mahra districts through the UAE Red Crescent Society.
In the eyes of the sultanate, the UAE presence at its Yemeni border is perceived as unjustified: the two countries have disputes on several issues, most notably the border, especially after Oman accused Abu Dhabi of planning a coup in 2011 to overthrow Sultan Qaboos, which the UAE denied.
The collapse of Yemeni state institutions and the military intervention of the Saudi-led coalition stunned Muscat, which found itself having to cope with new dynamics and a no more effective border strategy: these concerns have turned into reality. In January 2016 the Omani authorities closed the ports in the Shihen and Surfeet areas, and a few months later al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) seized control of the city of Mukalla, the capital of Mahra’s neighboring region of Hadramout. The stated rationale for Oman’s move was to protect its border security from any breakthrough of extremist groups. It is here worth noting that AQAP has never been close to Mahra or its border areas, due to local society, strongly attached to traditional Sufism, which has never accepted al-Qaeda’s ideology. In late 2017, when a group of Saudi-backed Salafists tried to establish a religious education center in Mahra’s Qashan, protests were held against them because locals reject this type of religious belief.
However, observers believe that the real reason for the temporary closure of the ports was the result of political choices made by president Hadi and Khaled Bah’hah, the prime minister at the time: leaders of security and military services in Mahra were replaced by new leaders and the sultanate was uncertain regarding the future political direction of these appointments. It should be noted that, over the past few years, tensions have arisen between Saudi Arabia and the UAE on the one hand, and Oman on the other, because the sultanate adopted political attitudes not aligned with the Saudi-UAE politics in the region, especially in relation to Qatar and Iran.
Oman was also accused by Riyadh and Abu Dhabi of providing access to arms and communications devices to be delivered to the Houthis. In August 2015 Marib province authorities seized a shipment of arms and ammunition for the Houthis at one of its checkpoints. In October 2015, the governor of Marib declared that military forces took possession of Iranian military equipment (including advanced communications equipment) in the province: according to their statement, this shipment was coming by land from the Sultanate of Oman. In November 2015, the Yemeni army dismantled an informal network involved in the smuggling of arms and explosives, as well as of military communications equipment, which entered through Mahra ports, said the army. In October 2016, Western and Iranian officials stated that Iran had stepped up arms transfer to the Houthis, and most of the smuggling crossed Oman and its Yemeni frontier, including by land routes. This was denied by the Sultanate of Oman in a statement from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, arguing that “the news of arms smuggling through Oman is baseless and no arms are passing through the lands of Sultanate”.
Despite these allegations, there are smuggling routes towards Yemen that seem easier than passing through the sultanate’s borders. The Yemeni coastal strip on the Arabian Sea extends over 1,000 kilometers: this is a security vacuum area and is closer in terms of distance to the Houthis’ strongholds. In any case, smuggled arms or goods cannot reach the Houthis in northern Yemen without the help of smuggling networks operating in areas controlled by the legitimate government forces.
In October 2017 the Southern Transitional Council (STC), a UAE-backed faction of the Southern Movement seeking independence for southern Yemen, tried to convince the former governor, Abdullah Kedda, to join the council, but he refused, asserting that he supports the authority of the legitimate government led by president Hadi. This disappointed the Saudi-led coalition, especially the UAE, which intends to promote the STC as the only entity representing the Southern Movement: the STC embraced the UAE’s agenda in the south.
The Omani influence on the tribes of Mahra was a major motivation for Saudi Arabia’s military reinforcement in the region. In November 2017 Saudi forces entered the province and took over its vital facilities, including al-Ghaidha airport, Nashton port and the ports of Srfeet and Shihen on the border with Oman. The Saudis also deployed their forces in more than 12 locations along the coast of Mahra, and dismissed the airport employees.
These developments worried Mahra inhabitants, pushing thousands into the streets in April 2018: they staged an open protest in the city of Ghaidha, demanding that Saudi forces to leave the facilities and institutions, handing them over to local authorities. Even famous Mahris such as Shiekh Ali Harizi, Shikh Al Afrar and Ahmed Qahtant, described the Saudis as an “occupation power” seeking to seize the resources of the province.
Therefore, the war in Yemen has opened a subtle but acute season of popular discontent and regional rivalry in Mahra, stuck in a three-players game among Saudis, Emiratis and Omanis.
This blog was originally published by the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center.
Despite the catastrophic situation in Yemen, the flow of African migrants to the country fleeing violence or economic hardship at home continues. The number has been on the rise since the war began in 2015, and is higher than during the prewar years. Most of the migrants come from the Horn of Africa, and in 2018 alone their numbers jumped to 150,000, from 100,000 migrants in 2017.
Networks of traffickers have taken advantage of the lack of security measures along Yemen’s maritime borders to increase the transport of illegal migrants. The traffickers have become more organized on both the African and Yemeni sides, and dozens of migrants arrive in Yemen on a daily basis. The journey takes around eighteen to 24 hours depending on weather conditions and the state of the vessels. Due to competition among traffickers, the fees are very cheap. It costs between $170 and $200 to be taken to Yemen from Africa, and migrants can pay upon arrival. However, they are not allowed to go free until they pay the full amount due, otherwise they may be imprisoned in detention centers managed by the traffickers.
Lower prices may be a key reason for why migrants choose to go to Yemen, as paying to migrate to Europe costs a great deal more money. The journey of most migrants begins in Somalia’s port city of Bosaso and carries them to Yemeni coastal areas mostly in Hadhramawt, Abyan, or Shabwa Governorates, most of which are tribal areas. Before the conflict there was another route, toward Yemen’s Mocha. But when the Yemeni conflict extended to western coastal areas, the traffickers had to reroute their ships because the western costal zones fell under the control of armed groups allied with the Saudi-led coalition. These groups sought to combat illegal migration and prevent migrants from moving toward the border with Saudi Arabia.
Although traveling through sparsely inhabited tribal zones is difficult, as most of the journey takes place in the desert, migrants benefit in unexpected ways from this route. The tribes of Hadhramawt, Abyan, or Shabwa have traditions obliging them to offer food and accommodations to people passing through their areas. Furthermore, the road through these governorates is relatively safer than the one through more northerly areas where fighting is taking place.
Upon arrival in Yemen, most migrants do not immediately continue to their final destination. Instead, they often spend some time in the country to learn more about the trafficking routes. At the same time, they start working to earn more money to be able to pay for the rest of their passage inland, toward such places as Saudi Arabia or Oman. According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), 99.9, percent of migrants tracked in Yemen in 2017 intended to go to Saudi Arabia. Although it is difficult for one to find work in Yemen, many of the migrants work for very low wages in farming or construction, where they can earn around $5 a day.
Crossing the Yemen-Saudi Arabia border is the most difficult part in the migrants’ journey. The 1,400-kilometer border strip has been militarized since the Yemen war began in 2015, and Saudi Arabia has reinforced border security by sending thousands of soldiers to the area. Moreover, the Saudi authorities are working with border communities to prevent migrants from entering the kingdom. Despite such security measures, however, traffickers continue to find ways to circumvent the restrictions.
The numbers of Somali migrants have declined in the last four years, given that their primary destination remains Europe. Many have relatives who have made it to the continent, and therefore prefer to take routes through the Mediterranean. In contrast, the number of illegal Ethiopian migrants to Yemen has increased and represents a majority today. According to the IOM, 92 percent of African migrants to Yemen are Ethiopian, with Somalis coming second.
Circumstances have forced Ethiopians to rely more on traffickers to get into Yemen. That is because in 2013 Saudi Arabia officially stopped accepting Ethiopian laborers following clashes between the Saudi security forces and Ethiopian workers in Jeddah and Riyadh. Ethiopians can easily find jobs as domestic workers in the kingdom, as there has been an acute shortage since those clashes. Moreover, the fact that Saudis spend around $13.7 billion on domestic workers per year, according to official Saudi statistics, encourages migrants.
While waiting for the proper circumstances to cross into Saudi Arabia, many migrants end up relying on humanitarian assistance provided by international nongovernmental organizations in refugee camps in Yemen. These camps lack basic services to receive large numbers of people, and humanitarian workers are facing difficulties in delivering food supplies to them.
The human rights of illegal migrants have also been frequently violated by the parties on the ground. In April 2018, dozens of migrants were tortured and raped by government officials after being put in detention camps in Aden. Elsewhere, armed groups have forced migrants to pay money in order to pass through their checkpoints. Such abuses have pushed many migrants to earn money by fighting as mercenaries in the Yemeni conflict. For example, in recent years the Houthis announced the death of several African fighters who had fought with them in the Yemen-Saudi Arabia border region. According to local sources, some migrants have disappeared in the mountainous areas of Shabwa, Abyan, and Bayda and are believed to have been recruited by Al-Qa‘eda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Despite the hardships and abuses illegal migrants face, they continue to arrive in Yemen looking for a better life that can help extricate them from poverty and deprivation. Here is an unhappy case of people leaping from the frying pan into the fire, but all the signs are that such migration will continue, whatever the cost.
This blog was originally published by the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center.
The continuing threat of a resurgence by the Islamic State group, and its efforts to exert influence in Syria and Iraq, has played out most noticeably along the Syrian-Iraqi border. Yet that border, extending all the way up to the frontier with Turkey, is about more than the Islamic State. It has emerged as a main point of confrontation among regional and international powers.
Over 600 kilometers of the border formerly controlled by the Islamic State are currently held by a patchwork of political actors. On the Iraqi side, the major forces are Iraq’s regular army, Arab Sunni tribes, as well as Shi‘a and Yezidi militias tied to Iran, which also share a connection with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) operating in western Sinjar. On the Syrian side, the U.S.-backed Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) controls large parts of the border. The Syrian regime, allied with local partners, holds other areas, while the Islamic State rules over a small pocket of territory.
This complex mix of forces is reshaping the border area, even as the border itself is reshaping how the different parties are interacting with one another as they compete for spheres of influence. Cross-border interaction and a mutual need to prevent a return of the Islamic State have also brought Damascus and Baghdad closer together, which ultimately works to the benefit of Iran. Indeed, today Iran is the only actor that has a significant presence, and influence, on both sides of the Syrian-Iraqi border.
In 2014, during the phase of expansion by the Islamic State and the initial fight to oppose it, Iraqi Kurdish forces counterattacked and took some 30 kilometers of territory beyond their former area of control, almost reaching Sinjar. Following the failed referendum on Kurdish independence in 2017, the Iraqi government recaptured nearly all of those areas and stationed government troops and units of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF)—quasi-official militias composed primarily of Iraqi Shi‘a—on the border. The dilemma for the Iraqi government today is that those forces require food and fuel, creating a major drain on the national budget. If these funds are cut, as is possible, it might allow the Islamic State to regain territory and reignite conflict in the border region.
On the Syrian side, the regime of President Bashar al-Assad does not have the same problem. After retaking the highly strategic Al-Bukamal border crossing in November 2017, the regime employed a model that involves collaboration between the Republican Guard’s 104th Brigade and local tribal elements in Deir Ezzor. Because the system is more financially sustainable, it allows the regime to maintain a strong presence on the border.
Geopolitical rivalries on the Syrian-Iraqi border have only intensified as a result of mounting tensions between the United States and Iran. Complicating matters in the broader border area that stretches northward toward Turkey are the conflict between Turkey and U.S.-backed Syrian Kurdish groups and the rivalry between the United States and Russia. The United States has also possibly intervened militarily against the PMF, which has crossed the Iraqi border into Syria to conduct operations against the Islamic State. Washington considers them to be an extension of Iran and in June 2018 U.S. aircraft reportedly bombed PMF forces between Al-Bukamal and the Tanf crossing, which the Americans control, on the Syrian side of the border. However, the U.S. denied that it was involved.
These clashing agendas underline that the Iraqi-Syrian border plays a far more intricate role than delineating the boundaries between two sovereign states. The presence of nonstate actors who are disputing state control over borders—or indeed who sometimes share border control with states—has produced new military relationships.
That is increasingly the case on the Iraqi side of the border, where Shi‘a militias and the Kurdish Peshmerga operate alongside Iraqi military forces. According to one its leaders, the PMF deployed along the Syrian-Iraqi border in coordination with the Iraqi government. Other reports estimate that 80 percent of the 140,000 PMF members are stationed in northern and western Iraq, close to Syria and far from areas where they were recruited. This figure has not been confirmed, but to some observers the deployment, if the numbers are corroborated, is part of an Iranian attempt to secure a corridor between Iran and Syria.
At the same time, the Turkish armed forces continue to carry out cross-border operations against the PKK in areas such as Sinjar. The Turkish intervention is affecting relations between Kurdish factions. The Kurdistan Democratic Party, which leads the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq, is coordinating with Turkey to deny the PKK and its allies a safe haven in northern Iraq. However, this attitude is not shared by the other major Iraqi Kurdish party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which controls the city of Suleimaniyya and has a strong presence in Kirkuk. The PUK is a close ally of Iran and is believed to have developed a more sympathetic attitude toward the PKK and its Syrian affiliate, the Democratic Union Party.
The Islamic State’s priority has been to preserve its caliph minus a caliphate. It still controls a small strip of territory on the Syrian side of the Syrian-Iraqi border, which is at risk of imminently falling. Last December, U.S. President Donald Trump ordered the withdrawal of the 2,000 American troops in Syria. Most of the units are stationed along the border and are scheduled to have completed their withdrawal by the end of April, except for around 200 troops.
If this new situation creates a vacuum, it could lead to military advances by Iran and its proxies, the Syrian government, Kurdish militias, Turkey, or Russia. That is why the Syrian-Iraqi border is likely to remain highly militarized, a consequence both of geopolitical rivalries and local crises.
This blog was originally published by the Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center.
