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Jamaan Herbash used to smile when he talked about Syria. When I met the former Kuwaiti parliamentarian, a year ago, just outside Kuwait City, he scrolled through snapshots of Syria on his iPhone as if they were vacation pictures. One showed him with Free Syrian Army fighters in Aleppo, another was of an F.S.A. hospital that he had helped to fund. He told me that he was even conducting human-rights training for moderate rebel brigades. He was evidently proud of his work, and his face softened as he talked about his most recent visit to Syria. He said that other countries should be doing more to help the rebels, like supplying anti-aircraft weapons to the F.S.A. In the meantime, he explained, private donors were trying to make up the difference: “People pay for their own travel and make sure they convey their donations hand to hand, so the money is disbursed in a very clean manner, untainted by any corruption.”
When I saw Herbash again, nine months later, in October, he looked weary. His beard, scraggly and untrimmed, in the style of strict Islamists, framed exasperated eyes, and his feet fidgeted as we talked about the deteriorating state of the rebellion against Bashar al-Assad. “It’s clear that there is a war of exhaustion in Syria now,” he said, reversing his earlier prediction that the rebels were only months away from victory. More extreme fighters had taken control, and the rebels were so disorganized that many of them were primarily fighting among themselves. Herbash was still raising money—a poster outside his home urged people to contribute: “THEIR CHILDREN ARE BEING KILLED WHILE OUR CHILDREN ARE ENJOYING THE BOUNTIES OF LIFE”—but his optimism had faded.
On Wednesday, Kuwait hosted an international donors’ conference, chaired by Ban Ki-moon, the U.N. Secretary-General, which aimed to raise some of the $6.5 billion that the U.N. estimates will be needed for humanitarian relief in Syria in 2014. The Emir of Kuwait, Sheikh Sabah al-Sabah, made the largest pledge, five hundred million dollars; the United States added three hundred and eighty million. In all, the conference generated $2.4 billion, well short of its goal. But, even before the event began, Herbash was convinced that it would make little difference. Last year, the Kuwaiti government’s donation was channelled through the U.N., which under international law must work with the Syrian government—the al-Assad regime—to coördinate relief efforts. That aid hadn’t helped the refugees, not even a little, Herbash wrote on Twitter on Wednesday morning. So, he asked, why not give the money to private Kuwaiti charities to disperse?
Since the Syrian revolution began, in 2011, private Kuwaiti donors like Herbash have been among its most generous patrons, providing what likely amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars to the armed opponents of Assad. The majority of Kuwaitis—like most of the rebels—are Sunni; the Syrian regime and its Army are predominantly Alawites, a small Shiite sect that counts Assad among its members. With its open political atmosphere and its weak terror-financing laws, Kuwait also serves as a hub for private donors across the Gulf.
At the beginning of 2013, Herbash still thought that the moderate rebels of the F.S.A. could win the war. At that point, the Syrian conflict had produced fewer than five hundred thousand refugees, and, he believed, the opposition controlled seventy per cent of Syrian land. Today, there are at least 2.4 million Syrian refugees, with another 6.5 million Syrians displaced inside the country itself. The regime has reclaimed territory, and bitter fighting has erupted between mainstream-opposition fighters and the Al Qaeda affiliate called the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), whose reputation for ruthlessness has shocked even the strictest of the Islamist rebels. Earlier this month, ISIS ceded territory that had come under assault from other rebel groups—including Jabhat al-Nusra, another brigade linked to Al Qaeda—but regained some of it in fierce fighting in the past week, which has claimed over a thousand lives.
As the war took a more sectarian and extremist turn, so, too, did its private funders. As the grandmothers, wives, brothers, and even children in Kuwait who had donated to the rebels watched as the conflict turned fratricidal, they wondered what they had given their money to. But the funding didn’t stop—instead, it simply flowed in more extreme directions. Moderates like Herbash have essentially been eclipsed by donors who have fewer qualms about the tactics of the most violent jihadist groups. When I spoke to Herbash in October, he lamented the emergence of hundreds of new rebel brigades, each one accountable only to its own funders.
Private funding from around the Persian Gulf to the rebels peaked in 2012, just as the once peaceful revolution was transforming into an armed uprising. This was no coincidence: in Kuwait, groups and individuals had pushed for—and funded—the creation of new brigades, which they had helped to shape ideologically. Fund-raisers appealed to potential donors with a simple Koranic verse: “He who prepares a jihadist for the sake of Allah has received the reward of being a jihadist himself.” The words were splashed on posters and put into tweets. Kuwaiti Sunnis opened their pocketbooks. The rich transferred funds directly, and more modest contributors sold their cars and their best jewelry in order to send cash to Syria.
Herbash won’t say how much money he has raised, only that it is not enough. His home is always open for donations, and his phone is always on. During special fund-raising campaigns, he hosts evening discussions where donors can contribute money and bring their questions or concerns. According to the poster for an event this past summer, Herbash was among eighteen donors who opened his home for a campaign “to prepare twelve thousand jihadists for the sake of Allah.” (One of the other donors who participated told me that his own efforts had raised three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in a single night.)
For the rebel fighters, winning money from donors has been a cutthroat competition. New brigades designated representatives in the community of Syrians in Kuwait to solicit donations. In Kuwait’s diwaniyas (the spaces in private homes used for evening gatherings), competing Syrian representatives sparred over which brigade could claim the most martyrs and which had fought the most difficult battles. The competition for funds sparked what one Syrian called “the YouTube phase” of the war, in which each brigade produced videos to publicize its importance and its manpower, many of which included words of praise and thanks for individual benefactors.
When Herbash adopted the Syrian cause, he already had big-tent appeal. In his years in local politics, he had won the support of religious hard-liners, for his unassailable poise, and of moderates, for his consistent advocacy of greater democracy in Kuwait. (That reputation made him a formidable political opponent, and in 2010 his diwaniya was stormed by government forces as part of a crackdown on the domestic political opposition.)
By early 2013, Herbash had built a reputation as one of the most effective, and one of the most moderate, fund-raisers for both the Syrian opposition and humanitarian relief. He was unafraid to criticize the rebels and unambiguous in his denunciations of violence against civilians. “We are keen on working with some of the moderate brigades, which we trust won’t cause any problems if the regime falls,” he said in October. “I am talking about brigades that are keen on protecting the Syrian people, because for sure we don’t want to repeat what happened in countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq; we want to provide support for moderate Islamic brigades.”
But the conflict in Syria has not favored moderation, inside the country or abroad. Atrocities have mounted, battles have taken a greater civilian toll, and logic can’t explain away the horror. Funders have gravitated toward extremist by pinning a sectarian or absolutist narrative to their recipient brigades. Many Kuwaiti clerics have taken to giving Syrian fighters advice on social media about how to behave—a sort of reply to the brigades’ postings on YouTube and Twitter.
Today, Herbash’s diwaniya is an exception among the increasingly extreme donors backing the Syrian uprising. Last summer, a high-profile group led by the Salafi cleric Shafi Al Ajmi raised money to “liberate the coast” of Syria. That operation, carried out by brigades that included ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra, resulted in massacres of Alawite civilians. Before the offensive, Ajmi had promised that the donations would be used to “buy what is needed to expel the Safavids” (a Salafist pejorative for Shiites). Some clerics have received government censure for their outwardly sectarian tone—Ajmi was barred from his own television show, for example—but their work largely continues, facilitated by social media, a surplus of suffering in Syria, and deep connections with wealthy contributors around the Gulf.
Herbash and several other moderate fund-raisers, meanwhile, have found themselves in the strange position of campaigning against other anti-Assad groups in Syria, particularly ISIS and its ambitious leader, the Iraqi Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. When infighting between rebel groups in Aleppo flared up last week, Herbash denounced on Twitter what he called Baghdadi’s “sedition.” In another tweet, from December, he wrote, “God help the people of Aleppo, for they face assault from Hezbollah in the front and ISIS in the back.” “The Free Army in Syria needs one thing,” he said, when we met in October. “If the world wants to help it for real, it needs to be a national liberation army, and not an army that serves Saudi Arabia or America or Turkey or Jordan or Qatar, because we’re talking about different agendas now.”
Herbash continues his work with undiminished zeal; he is one of the few private donors who still believes that the moderate rebels of the F.S.A. should, and could, win the day. But many Gulf citizens, disgusted by the sectarian rhetoric and merciless bloodshed, have ceased giving money, leaving moderate fund-raisers with a thinning flock. “The popularity for the Syrian crisis in the beginning was maybe a hundred or ninety per cent,” one Syrian in Kuwait involved in the fund-raising process said. “Now that’s not more than five per cent. They were generous at first, but they changed.”
Dalaa Al Mufti, a liberal Syrian-Kuwaiti writer, told me that this disillusionment has affected humanitarian aid as well. A year ago, so many donated blankets had piled up on the back staircase of her well-manicured home that her family had trouble going up and down. Mufti had independently solicited money and supplies from her friends and family and, eventually, from the general public. (She sent it to Syria through a network of expatriates based in Kuwait.) When I first met her, in February of 2013, she told me that Kuwaitis were so desperate to give that she spent all day fielding text messages and tweets about donations. One Kuwaiti woman, Mufti remembered, began to cry on the phone, worried that she wasn’t doing enough to help the Syrian people. When asking for donations, Mufti told me at the time, “I’ve never heard a no.”
But now the contributions have dried up. “People say to me, This is not what we sent our money for—so they could kill each other,” Mufti said. “Some people have told me directly that, with what is happening, they wish Bashar would stay, because dictatorship is bad, but a political dictatorship is much easier than a religious dictatorship. Of course, there is a sect of people who are all for this. They say, Kill the Shiites, but the enlightened people will say, That this is not what we wanted.”
Elizabeth Dickinson, a former Gulf correspondent for The National, is the author of “Who Shot Ahmed? A Mystery Unravels in Bahrain’s Botched Arab Spring.” She lives in Abu Dhabi.
Above: Free Syrian Army members in Darkoush. April 21, 2013. Photograph by Esa Alexander/The Times/Gallo Images/Getty.
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