Handling Foreign Fighters

There are several major benefits foreign fighters, and only foreign fighters, can offer armed groups. They have knowledge and experience that the local population does not have and have connections in the international war industry. Usually they are more dedicated to their goals. Foreigners are better at raising funds in their home communities and thus provide armed groups with additional source of income. Finally, they can be successfully used by armed groups for propaganda purposes. On the other hand, it is much harder for the leaders of an armed group to manage foreigners versus locals. First, foreign fighters often do not speak the local language and are not familiar with the terrain. Second, they could have problems with the locals. Third, their presence in the group could decrease overall group cohesion. Fourth, they could be recruited as spies by foreign intelligence agencies more easily than locals. And finally, foreign fighters often joined the conflict with different motives than those of local fighters, which could lead to differences in combat strategy and tactics.

Armed Groups Human Resource Manual

Using criteria that she developed and elaborates, the author classifies rebel groups on a continuum from extreme to moderate. She shows that extreme Islamist groups were able to attract fighters away from initial moderate groups because they had better internal organization, took better care of fighters (physically and monetarily), and experienced less internal corruption. The author explains how extreme groups benefited from Islamist ideology, which helped ensure, among other things, that only the most dedicated fighters joined their ranks. However, one unforeseen side effect of using ideology as a central factor was attracting fighters more interested in Islamic ideology than fighting. With time, such individuals wasted group resources and caused internal splits and power struggles over the goals of the conflict. For ISIS, handling these issues became a major part of their decline.

Policy Implications

Although today’s civil conflicts are very different from those of previous generations, it is not a foregone conclusion that today’s Western-affiliated rebel groups will suffer defeat. While with any new conflict the task becomes more and more difficult, it is still possible to outcompete other groups in the rebel bloc, at least right now. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine a victory of a Western-oriented, startup armed group without significant outside support, because they lack experience and resources. At the same time, international actors with a different agenda also don’t want to miss a chance to use their money, experience, and knowledge to increase their sphere of influence through proxy groups in war-torn countries. That, in sum, makes this generation’s civil wars a highly competitive market for outside supporters. I this chapter the author discusses how this knowledge can be used to terminate a conflict more quickly by making foreign government intervention more effective—in particular, how a foreign actor could (1) choose a group in the rebel bloc to support; (2) persuade the group to accept support; and (3) provide the proper help at the right time in order to empower one group at the expense of others within the rebel camp.

Rebel CEOs and Managers

Human resource policies are developed and implemented by a group’s leaders, making leaders a crucial factor in a successful armed group. This means that a successful group will aspire to have the most effective top-level and midlevel leadership. There is a broad gap here between successful and unsuccessful groups. Successful groups are able to find or internally promote the most qualified people, learn from their own mistakes and the mistakes of others, and build a functioning organization, while unsuccessful ones fail to do so. Unsuccessful groups think that meritocracy is not the most effective system for choosing leaders. Other unsuccessful groups, while realizing the importance of choosing the most qualified candidates, cannot always find or recognize people with the right qualifications.

Handling Ultra-Radicals

Ideology is a strong weapon, but it could work against the group itself. Adopting strict rules grounded in ideology could help screen out undedicated people from a group, but it could not control the upper bar of dedication. Therefore, a group that portrays itself as ideological could be attractive to recruits more interested in the ideology than in the actual goal of the group. In other words, these recruits may be more radical than the group wants its fighters to be. Counterintuitively, this represents a major vulnerability for a group that claims to be ideological. In fact, it is even more dangerous for the group than not controlling the lower bar and letting undedicated members in. Such recruits waste a group’s resources (they draw a paycheck but are not interested in fighting) and could lead to internal conflicts.

Help from Abroad

This chapter covers the involvement in the Syrian civil war by foreigners, some of whom went to Syria and took up arms and others who stayed home and supported the group by other means. For foreigners with an interest in a civil war, their choice is not whether to leave or fight as it is with locals, but whether to go or not. While there are people who come with a positive perspective (going to the foreign battlefield), others went with a negative perspective (getting away from something back in their home country). Some foreigners decided to take a risk and go to the frontline, but other supporters did not. Instead, like local civilians, they actively helped armed groups with media outreach, raising funds, buying and sending equipment, and helping potential fighters move to the battlefield.

Making a Rebel Group Work

Popularity can cause problems for an armed group’s human resource wing. On one hand, the group’s ranks swell. But the group also has to ensure that such an influx does not decrease the overall quality of its labor force, because a good organization with good benefits attracts more than just dedicated fighters. To do this, armed groups impose additional unproductive costs on fighters in return for membership in the group. To ensure they get only the most trustworthy and loyal fighters, the most organized and successful groups present prospective fighters with a condition: adherence to a strict set of requirements that have no direct effect on fighting. Groups need to at least try to explain the rationale behind those restrictions to their members. Ideology—in the case of the Syrian civil war, Islamist ideology—comes in handy for that purpose.

Funding the Fight

In contrast to regular state armies, rebel armed groups do not have a budget assigned to them every year. Instead, it is the leaders’ responsibility to find money for the group. They must strategically choose and secure different funding sources at different times. Some leaders develop a portfolio of funding with enough resources not only to run day-to-day operations, but also to fund long-term projects such as medical care and social security benefits for their fighters. Other leaders take their groups down a completely different economic path, focusing on short-term planning. In a protracted war such as the one in Syria, the latter path leads to a lack of financial resources, bankruptcy, and absorption by other groups.

Managing Ideology

Even if a rebel group could mitigate the threat posed by group members interested in ideology, doing so would take significant time and resources away from the main group’s objective. As a result, well-organized groups in the rebel bloc need to find a delicate balance between using ideology as a screening mechanism and preventing it from becoming a fighter’s top priority. To achieve that, armed groups need to be very clear about their true goals to avoid any misunderstanding among potential recruits. Another helpful tactic is to have a small but more radical non-independent armed group in the rebel bloc to draw such fighters away from the main mother group while still keeping them in the rebel bloc to fight the enemy. Highly dedicated foreign fighters can join the smaller group, thus still pursuing the overall war goals without threatening the mother group and its leadership.

Finding a Group That Fits

This chapter discusses how prospective fighters choose a group to join and why (and when) some choose to switch groups. While the decision to take up arms is based on a person’s individual grievances, the decision to join a particular group is made rationally by comparing different groups fighting for the same goal based on their organizational qualities. Individual benefits for fighters are divided into immediate benefits and insurance. Although such things as salary and aid-in-kind are important, there also are long-term problems a fighter relies on a group to solve, such as medical care for wounded fighters, postmortem arrangements for deceased fighters, and support for families. Since there are no official insurance guarantees (and little power to enforce any in a war-torn country even if there were), fighters have to rely on a group’s reputation in this matter.