Trust Was Too Expensive: What Syria’s Fractured Opposition Teaches Ethiopia About Coalition-Building

By Brook Kidané 

Part II

Syria’s armed opposition never became one movement. It became something more useful — predictable enough to coordinate. For Fano, Tigrayan and Oromo political-military actors weighing whether cooperation is possible without trust, that distinction may matter more than any single battlefield lesson.

Twenty-nine factions gathered outside Damascus in October 2013 and announced they had become one army. They had not. Within weeks, several were fighting each other again, while others held. That contradiction, announcing unity and practicing something far more modest, repeats itself so often in the Syrian opposition’s history that it stops looking like failure and starts looking like a method.

The first article in this series asked why armed and political rivals ever decide they need one another. In Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance’s Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara commanders reached that conclusion only when the alternative, facing the Taliban alone, became visibly worse than the discomfort of sharing a battlefield with old enemies. That is the logic of necessity. It explains why cooperation becomes thinkable. It does not explain how it actually happens.

Syria answers the harder question. Suppose Fano-aligned formations, Tigrayan political and armed actors, Oromo political and armed actors including the OLA, and the various regional, civic and diaspora constituencies orbiting them all arrive, separately, at the Afghan conclusion — that survival alone is harder than survival together. What happens the next morning? They still do not trust one another. Many have fought one another, or watched their people die in operations linked to one another’s constituencies. They disagree about the shape of the Ethiopian state, about federalism, about territory, about who represents whom. A shared enemy has never been enough to erase any of that, in Syria or anywhere else. So how did people who despised and suspected each other manage to fight in the same battles, hold the same roads and, in the end, help bring down a government that had outlasted a decade of predictions of its collapse?

The Syrian civil war is usually narrated as a story of fragmentation, and it was one. But fragmentation is only half of what happened. Underneath the chaos, Syrian opposition factions spent thirteen years building and abandoning dozens of coordination structures: military councils, joint operations rooms, regional fronts, Islamist alliances, cross-faction pacts. Most of them failed. A handful did not. Read carefully, that record is not a chronicle of Syrians “uniting.” It is a long, often brutal experiment in a much narrower and more transferable question: how much cooperation is possible between people who do not trust each other, and what has to be built to make that cooperation survive contact with reality?

That is the question this article puts to the Ethiopian moment, not as prescription, but as a laboratory whose failures are as instructive as its successes.

Trust Was Too Expensive

Start with a distinction the Syrian case makes unavoidable, because so many of its coalitions collapsed on exactly this point.

Trust, in the everyday sense, a belief that another actor is honest, well-intentioned, and will not exploit you when the opportunity arises, is expensive to build and catastrophically easy to destroy. It requires history, repeated exposure, and enough time for suspicion to erode. Syrian factions in 2012 and 2013 did not have that time, and neither did they have shared history that ran in a friendly direction. Salafist brigades, secular Free Syrian Army units, tribal militias and Kurdish self-defence forces did not trust one another’s intentions and often had good reason not to.

What they sometimes had instead was predictability, a much cheaper and more attainable commodity. Predictability does not require believing the other side is virtuous. It requires knowing, with reasonable confidence, what the other side is obligated to do, what it is forbidden from doing, what happens if it breaks the arrangement, and who will notice if it does. A commander does not need to believe a rival faction loves him. He needs to believe that if that faction seizes weapons meant for the joint operation, or opens a side channel with the regime, there will be a cost — reputational, financial, or military — that the rival faction would rather avoid.

This is the substitution at the heart of every functioning Syrian coalition: narrow commitments, observable behaviour, and consequences for violation, standing in for the trust that was not available. Where opposition structures tried to skip this step — announcing full merger, demanding total transparency, assuming shared purpose would be enough — they collapsed quickly. Where they built the scaffolding of predictability first, cooperation sometimes outlasted the individual commanders who started it.

For Ethiopia’s fractured opposition landscape, this is the idea worth sitting with before any other. Fano-aligned actors, Tigrayan political and armed constituencies, and Oromo political and armed actors do not need to resolve their historical accounts, their competing narratives about who did what to whom during the Tigray war or the Amhara and Oromia conflicts, before they can cooperate on anything. They need arrangements narrow enough that keeping them does not require abandoning grievance, and clear enough that breaking them is visible.

A Movement Is Not an Army

The uprising that began in 2011 was, for its first year, closer to a mass protest movement than an insurgency. When the Assad government’s crackdown made peaceful organizing lethal, local committees that had been coordinating demonstrations began arming themselves — but they did so town by town, often street by street, with whatever weapons defectors, smugglers or foreign donors could provide. By the time anyone tried to impose order on this landscape, hundreds of independent armed groups already existed, each answerable to a town, a neighbourhood, a mosque, or a single charismatic commander.

This is the condition every subsequent coordination effort had to work against, and it is worth naming plainly because Ethiopia’s opposition landscape shares its basic shape. “Fano” is not a single chain of command; it is a label that covers Amhara militia formations with different leadership circles and different relationships to Amhara regional politics. “The OLA” is not free of internal variation in leadership and objectives. Tigrayan political and armed structures went through their own visible split after the Pretoria agreement, with different factions taking different views of what the TPLF and TDF’s relationship to Addis Ababa should look like. In every case, the coalition problem exists twice: between the named constituencies, and within them.

Syria’s early opposition never solved this problem completely. It managed, at moments, to build structures that functioned despite it — not by eliminating fragmentation, but by finding coordination mechanisms shallow enough that deeply divided actors could still stand inside them without giving up their separate chains of command.

The Operations Room

The single most transferable Syrian invention is not a coalition in the political-science sense at all. It is the joint operations room, ghurfat ‘amaliyyat, a structure so simple it is almost anticlimactic, and so durable that variations of it appeared, dissolved and reappeared for over a decade, right up to the coalition that entered Damascus in December 2024.

An operations room does not ask factions to merge. It does not ask them to share a single command, a single treasury, or a single political program. It asks them to agree on one thing: for a specific, bounded operation, in a specific place, participating factions will coordinate movement, share tactical information relevant to that operation, and avoid actions that would expose one another. Each faction keeps its own fighters, its own funding, its own leadership, and, critically, its own name. What is pooled is narrow. What is preserved is almost everything else.

This is why operations rooms could bring together factions with radically incompatible long-term visions. Nationalist Free Syrian Army units and Salafist brigades that agreed on almost nothing about the future Syrian state could still occupy the same operations room around Aleppo in 2015, because the room’s mandate never asked them to agree on the state. It asked them to agree on a battle plan and a set of rules for that battle. When the operation ended, so, often, did the arrangement — but the participants had just accumulated one more data point suggesting the others could be worked with, narrowly, again.

The lesson generalizes beyond anything military. A political operations room — a body convened for one bounded purpose, such as coordinating a joint statement on a specific policy question, or presenting a unified negotiating position on a single, narrow issue — asks far less of Fano-aligned actors, Tigrayan actors and Oromo actors than a merged political front would. It does not require them to answer the largest questions dividing them. It asks only whether they can agree on this one thing, observably, for this one purpose. That is a much lower bar, and Syria’s history suggests lower bars get cleared far more often than high ones.

Small Agreements Build Bigger Ones

Watch the Syrian record closely and a pattern shows up more consistently than any grand strategic design: coalitions that survived tended to be built out of a sequence of narrow, successful cooperative acts rather than a single sweeping agreement. The Southern Front, formed in Daraa province in February 2014, is the clearest illustration.

Southern Syria had structural advantages the north lacked — a single foreign patron network coordinating support through a Military Operations Centre based in Amman, a more socially cohesive rebel base drawn heavily from Hauran’s tribal and agricultural communities, and a geography that made both extremist infiltration and regime reinforcement harder. None of that produced unity on its own. What it produced was roughly fifty separate factions — some estimates put the eventual figure closer to fifty-eight — that agreed to receive coordinated support through a single channel and, crucially, to participate in field-level operations rooms that grew organically as trust, such as it was, accumulated. Western officials came to describe the Southern Front as the best organized of the mainstream armed opposition, and it captured the Nasib border crossing with Jordan in 2015 in one of the opposition’s more significant operational successes.

But the Southern Front’s own historians are careful not to overstate what it was. The Carter Centre, monitoring the conflict closely, described it in 2015 as a loose coalition without a real unified command or organizational structure — factions that agreed on a shared name to receive coordinated support, not a merged army. That looseness was not a flaw the Southern Front eventually fixed. It was the condition that let fifty distinct commanders, loyal to different towns, tribes and patrons, stay inside the same umbrella for years without any one of them being able to dominate the others.

The Southern Front’s eventual weakening came from outside, not from an internal failure of coordination. After Russia’s 2015 intervention shifted the military balance, and after Jordan and Russia began coordinating directly over the heads of the factions the Military Operations Centre had built, southern factions turned from fighting the regime to fighting reconciliation deals and, in places, each other — a reminder that even a relatively well-built coordination structure cannot survive its external patrons deciding to change the rules without it. That warning belongs in its own section below.

For a hypothetical Ethiopian coalition, the Southern Front’s real lesson is not “form an umbrella group.” It is that legitimacy and durability came from years of small, observable joint successes, not from a founding document. A coalition among Fano-aligned actors, Tigrayan actors and Oromo actors that tried to leap straight into a shared political program covering federalism, territory, and the future constitutional order would be repeating the mistake of Syria’s weakest coalitions. One that started by agreeing on something narrow — a joint statement, a shared position on a single contested policy, a commitment not to undermine one another publicly — and let successful small agreements accumulate into larger ones, would be closer to what actually worked.

The Islamic Front and the Limits of “Merger”

Not every Syrian experiment chose the narrow path, and the ones that did not offer an equally important warning.

In November 2013, seven major Islamist factions — among them Ahrar al-Sham, the Damascus-based Jaysh al-Islam, and Aleppo’s largest fighting force, the Tawhid Brigade — announced the dissolution of their separate identities into a single new organization, the Islamic Front. Unlike an operations room, this was explicitly framed as merger: one spokesman called it “the complete merger of the major military factions fighting in Syria,” and for a moment it looked like exactly the kind of unification Syria’s opposition had been told, by outside observers and impatient patrons, that it needed.

It did not survive as announced. Constituent factions retained separate leaderships, separate fighters loyal to separate commanders, and separate relationships with the outside backers who funded them. The Front’s own analysts at the time worried openly that its success depended on securing enough independent funding to avoid fragmenting “like so many Syrian rebel alliances before it” — and by 2015, that is essentially what happened, as member factions drifted back toward independent action and eventually into other configurations entirely.

The problem was not ideology; the Islamic Front’s constituent factions were closer to each other ideologically than the Southern Front’s much more heterogeneous membership. The problem was that the merger asked more than the underlying relationships could bear. Commanders who had spent two years building independent reputations, patronage networks and fighting forces were asked to fold all of that into a shared identity in a single announcement, without the years of accumulated small-scale cooperation that might have made such a step survivable. The declaration of unity substituted for the process of building it.

This is the trap a Fano–Tigrayan–Oromo coalition would need to actively design against. The temptation, especially for outside observers and diaspora audiences eager for a single unified front, will be to demand or celebrate an early, dramatic declaration of merger — a single command, a single spokesperson, a single political program. Syria’s Islamic Front suggests that such declarations, made before the underlying predictability has been earned through practice, tend to be more fragile than the fragmented reality they claim to replace.

The Fear of Being Absorbed

If there is a single emotional current running under every failed Syrian coalition, it is not ideological disagreement. It is the fear, on the part of a faction’s leadership and its fighters, that cooperation is the first stage of being absorbed, outvoted, or ultimately discarded by a partner strong enough to eventually not need them.

That fear shaped the entire relationship between the exile-based political opposition — the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, based largely in Turkey — and the armed factions actually fighting inside Syria. Field commanders increasingly saw the exile leadership as a body that claimed authority over them without sharing risk, resources or accountability with them. That resentment, which boiled over publicly after the Coalition’s 2013 leadership changes, was a direct contributor to the decision by several major factions to explicitly reject the Coalition’s authority and look instead toward the Islamic Front and similar structures — organizations built and led by people who were actually on the front lines.

The lesson is not that political leadership abroad is illegitimate. It is that any coordinating structure perceived as claiming authority disproportionate to its risk, its local knowledge, or its accountability to the constituencies it claims to represent will generate exactly the resistance that unravels coalitions. An Ethiopian coalition architecture would need to take the fear of absorption as seriously as any territorial or ideological dispute — through mechanisms such as bounded mandates that specify precisely what the coalition body can and cannot decide on behalf of its members; representation formulas that do not simply reward whichever constituency is currently strongest militarily; supermajority or unanimity requirements on genuinely existential questions, such as territorial claims or constitutional structure, while allowing simple cooperation on narrower matters to proceed by ordinary agreement; and a clear, written distinction between powers exercised by the coalition and powers that remain exclusively with each constituent organization.

None of this eliminates the fear of domination. Syria’s record does not support the idea that any institutional design can. What it supports is the more modest claim that specific, transparent limits on a coalition body’s authority make the fear more survivable — because a faction that fears absorption can point to a written boundary and ask whether it has actually been crossed, rather than relying on trust in intentions it does not have.

The Problem With Foreign Friends

No honest account of Syrian coalition-building can avoid the role of external patrons, because external patronage shaped almost every coalition’s incentive, and did so in both directions.

The Southern Front’s coordination through the Amman-based Military Operations Centre is often cited as a coalition-building success — and in the sense of enabling southern factions to receive support through a single, relatively predictable channel rather than dozens of competing bilateral relationships, it was. But the same mechanism that built cohesion also, eventually, became the instrument of the Southern Front’s political constraint: when Russia and Jordan began coordinating directly on southern Syria’s future in late 2015, the factions that depended on the Amman channel discovered that their patron’s calculations had shifted without their input, and that dependence on a single coordinated channel had become a point of leverage that could be used against them as easily as for them.

Further north, the picture was more openly fractious. Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia backed different factions, sometimes competitively, and their competition was regularly blamed — by Syrians themselves and by outside researchers — for reinforcing exactly the fragmentation that unified political and military coordination was supposed to overcome. A faction confident of a steady supply line from one patron had less structural incentive to accommodate a coalition partner backed by a rival patron; the coalition’s internal cohesion became hostage to relationships none of its own members controlled.

Ethiopia’s opposition constituencies operate in a different but not unrelated environment, with diaspora funding networks, regional state relationships, and international attention that vary significantly across Fano-aligned, Tigrayan and Oromo actors. Syria’s experience suggests the danger is not external support itself, but external support that is allowed to become a veto point inside the coalition — a channel through which one patron’s shifting calculations can override an agreement the coalition’s own members reached with each other. Institutional responses worth considering are not exotic: disclosure requirements so that no member conceals which external relationships it maintains from the others; a shared principle that no constituent organization will make unilateral commitments in the coalition’s name to an outside government or donor; and collective, rather than individual, engagement with external actors on questions that affect the coalition as a whole. Syria shows these are difficult to enforce and were, in fact, rarely fully honoured — but their absence is a documented cause of collapse, which makes their presence, however imperfect, a documented point of leverage.

Fatah Halab and the Ceiling of Coordination Without Unity

By April 2015, Aleppo’s fractured opposition — dozens of factions ranging from mainstream Free Syrian Army units to hardline Islamist brigades — formed Fatah Halab, a joint operations room eventually counting more than thirty participating groups. It is one of the clearest illustrations in the entire Syrian record of coordination substituting successfully, for a time, for unity: factions that disagreed profoundly about ideology and the shape of a post-Assad Syria nonetheless synchronized their assaults, shared a single military spokesman for public communication, and coordinated humanitarian access during the siege of eastern Aleppo.

Fatah Halab is worth studying precisely because it demonstrates both the strength and the ceiling of the operations-room model. Its strength was scale: an operations room can absorb dozens of distinct, ideologically incompatible organizations because it never asks them to resolve their incompatibility — only to synchronize a narrow set of behaviors. Its ceiling showed up in late 2016, when internal rivalries that the operations room had never been designed to resolve — disputes over territory, over captured commanders, over the growing dominance of certain factions within the shared structure — spilled into open fighting between its own members even as the regime’s siege tightened around all of them. The Fastaqim Union and the Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement, both founding Fatah Halab factions, ended up in direct combat with each other inside the very city they were jointly defending.

The takeaway is not that operations rooms are worthless because they eventually strain. It is that they are built to solve a specific, narrow problem, synchronized action, and were never designed to resolve the deeper disputes over power, territory and legitimacy that eventually reassert themselves. Ethiopian actors should not expect a coordination mechanism, however well designed, to substitute permanently for a genuine political settlement of the disputes that separate Fano-aligned, Tigrayan and Oromo constituencies. What a well-built coordination mechanism can do is buy time, generate evidence of good-faith behaviour, and create the kind of accumulated predictability out of which a more durable political settlement might eventually become possible. That is a real function. It is also, Syria insists, a limited one.

Deconfliction: Containing the First Disagreement

Every coalition, however narrow, eventually produces a disagreement its founders did not anticipate. What separated Syrian coalitions that survived their first serious internal dispute from those that did not was rarely the severity of the dispute itself. It was whether any mechanism existed to contain it before it became public, personal, and irreversible.

Where such mechanisms existed at all, they tended to be informal — a respected commander, a local religious or tribal figure whose standing crossed factional lines, or simply a habit of face-to-face meetings between commanders who had fought alongside each other long enough to prefer talking to shooting. Where no such mechanism existed, disputes over a captured checkpoint, a defector, or an accusation of collaboration with the regime could escalate within days into the kind of inter-factional violence that discredited the opposition as a whole in the eyes of the civilians it claimed to protect.

This is perhaps the single most concrete institutional recommendation Syria’s record supports for any Ethiopian coalition architecture: a standing, named mechanism — independent of any single constituent organization’s leadership — for containing disputes before they escalate. This need not be elaborate. It needs to be pre-agreed, so that when the first serious disagreement between Fano-aligned and Tigrayan actors, or between Oromo and Amhara-aligned constituencies, inevitably arises, there is already a known channel for raising it that does not require either side to first capitulate or first escalate. Syria’s failed coalitions did not lack good intentions when their first crises hit. They lacked a door to walk through that was not either surrender or war.

Trust Is Not One Thing

It is worth returning to the distinction this article opened with, because Syria’s history lets it be made with more precision.

What Syrian factions rarely had was personal trust, a belief in one another’s character, or strategic trust, a belief that another faction’s long-term goals were compatible with one’s own. Both of those remained scarce for the entire war and remain scarce among Syria’s post-Assad political factions today. What functioning coalitions managed to build instead was something narrower: operational confidence, a reasonable expectation that a partner would behave predictably within the bounds of a specific, limited agreement, because the cost of not doing so — loss of resupply, loss of reputation, exclusion from future operations — outweighed the benefit of defection.

This is not a small distinction, and it is not merely semantic. Operational confidence can be built through repetition even between actors who will never develop personal or strategic trust. A commander who watched a rival faction honour a ceasefire during a joint operation three times running has genuine evidence — not of the rival’s character, but of the rival’s behaviour under those specific conditions. That evidence is real, transferable, and, crucially, does not require either side to abandon its suspicion of the other’s ultimate intentions.

Does Syria’s history actually support the proposition that repeated cooperation under narrow, enforceable agreements produces enough operational confidence to sustain broader coalitions over time? The honest answer is: sometimes, and unevenly. The Southern Front sustained years of relative internal cohesion this way. Fatah Halab sustained roughly eighteen months before internal rivalry outran the mechanism built to contain it. The Islamic Front, which skipped the accumulation phase and declared merger outright, lasted barely more than a year in its announced form. The pattern is consistent enough to take seriously and uneven enough not to romanticize. Institutional trust, in other words, can be built. It is not guaranteed by the attempt, and it decays without maintenance.

What Syria Never Solved

A series this deliberately cautious about overselling its own argument owes the reader an honest account of Syrian coalition-building’s failures, because they were not marginal.

Syria’s opposition never developed a widely accepted national political centre that armed factions on the ground treated as genuinely authoritative — the exile political leadership’s persistent gap between claimed authority and actual accountability was never closed. It never resolved its relationship with Kurdish-led forces, whose military effectiveness against the Islamic State was matched by their political estrangement from much of the Arab opposition, an unresolved fracture with consequences that outlasted Assad’s government itself. It never built a resource-sharing mechanism that most factions considered fair, and disputes over foreign funding, captured territory’s revenue, and control of border crossings recurred throughout the war, feeding some of the most damaging instances of inter-factional violence. And it never fully solved the domination problem: coalitions built to prevent any one faction from dominating the others were, more than once, quietly reshaped from within by the faction that turned out to be strongest — a dynamic visible in the way Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham consolidated authority over rival factions in Idlib during 2019 and 2020 well before it led the coalition that took Damascus.

These are not footnotes. They are the load-bearing failures of the Syrian case, and any Ethiopian reader tempted to treat Syria as a template rather than a laboratory should sit with them before drawing conclusions. Coordination mechanisms solved a real but bounded problem. They did not, on their own, solve the deeper political disputes that kept re-erupting beneath them.

The Window That Coordination Made Usable

By late 2024, the structure that would lead the final offensive against Assad’s government had itself gone through the same evolution this article has traced. What began in 2019 as the Fatah al-Mubin operations room — bringing together Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, the Turkish-backed National Front for Liberation, and smaller formations in Idlib — was restructured over 2023 and 2024 into the Military Operations Command, a more centralized coordinating body that by November 2024 was directing, by its own account, roughly a dozen participating factions and tens of thousands of fighters. On 27 November 2024, it launched what it called Operation Deterrence of Aggression. Within days its forces had entered Aleppo. By 8 December, Damascus had fallen and Assad had fled to Russia.

It would be a serious misreading of this history to say the Syrian opposition “united” and toppled Assad. It did not unite, in any sense the earlier sections of this article would recognize. Turkish-backed factions in the north operated through a separate command structure and were not, by most accounts, coordinated with the Idlib-based operation in its opening days. Kurdish-led forces held their own territory and their own arrangement with the departing regime’s remnants, entirely outside the offensive’s chain of command. The coalition that entered Damascus was Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham’s coalition, built on years of it absorbing or marginalizing rival factions inside Idlib — a coordination structure with a dominant centre, not a coalition of equals.

What had genuinely changed, and what made the offensive possible, was a convergence of separate factors that had nothing directly to do with opposition unity: a regime whose army was exhausted and underpaid after thirteen years of war; an economy in visible collapse; Hezbollah, badly weakened by its own war with Israel through 2024, unable to reinforce Damascus the way it had in 2013 and 2015; Russia, absorbed in Ukraine, unwilling or unable to intervene at the scale it had in 2015; and Iran’s regional position significantly degraded. Into that window of vulnerability walked a force that was, for the first time in years, organized enough — not united, organized — to move fast, hold what it took, and prevent the kind of internal fracturing that had squandered previous opposition gains.

Thirteen years of disagreement did not disappear in November and December of 2024. Enough coordination had finally been built, in one part of a still-divided opposition, to convert a strategic opening into a political collapse. That is the precise claim the Syrian case supports, and it is a very different claim from the story of unity Syria is sometimes given credit for. It is also, for an Ethiopian reader thinking about Fano, Tigrayan and Oromo actors, a more useful one — because it suggests that the relevant question is never whether deep disagreement can be eliminated before an opportunity arrives. It is whether enough coordination exists, in the parts of the opposition capable of building it, to use the opportunity when it does.

The Political Floor, Not the Political Ceiling

If Syria offers one transferable concept above the others, it may be this distinction, and it deserves to be stated plainly rather than left implicit in the case studies above.

A coalition’s political ceiling is everything its members might eventually agree on — the full shape of a future state, a shared account of history, a common answer to every contested question. Syria’s factions never got near their ceiling, and coalitions that tried to legislate toward it early, like the Islamic Front’s declared merger, tended to break under the attempt.

A coalition’s political floor is something much smaller: the minimum set of propositions its members need to hold in common for cooperation to be safe at all. Syrian coordination structures that endured tended to operate near their floor, not their ceiling. Fatah Halab’s members did not agree on Syria’s future constitution. They agreed that, for the duration of the Aleppo campaign, none of them would attack the others, and that captured territory would be administered according to rules set in advance rather than by whoever grabbed it first.

For Fano-aligned actors, Tigrayan political and armed constituencies, and Oromo political and armed actors, the floor might look something like this: an agreement that no constituent organization will attempt to impose its preferred final settlement — on federalism, on territory, on the shape of the Ethiopian state — on the others by force, and that disputes about that settlement will be pursued through the coalition’s own agreed mechanisms rather than unilaterally. That is a genuinely minimal proposition. It does not require Fano-aligned actors to accept Tigrayan positions on federal structure, or Oromo actors to accept Amhara positions on contested territory, or any of them to accept a common historical narrative about what happened to whom. It requires only that force be taken off the table as the method for resolving disagreements between coalition partners — which is a far lower bar than unity, and, on Syria’s evidence, a far more achievable one.

Coordination Is Not Unity

It is worth saying once more, plainly, because it is the idea this entire instalment has tried to earn through evidence rather than assertion: a coalition can be plural, asymmetric, temporary, narrow and decentralized, and still be strategically consequential. Syria’s political science literature spent years measuring the opposition’s failure against a standard of unity it never approached and, arguably, never needed to approach. What moved events — Fatah Halab’s synchronized assault on Aleppo, the Southern Front’s capture of Nasib, the Military Operations Command’s convergence on Damascus — was coordination: bounded, specific, often temporary, and never resolving the deeper disputes underneath it.

Ethiopia’s opposition constituencies do not need a single command structure, a shared historical narrative, or an agreed constitutional program to become strategically consequential together. They need enough narrow, observable, enforceable agreements that each constituency can reasonably predict how the others will behave inside the boundaries of those agreements — and enough small successes accumulated from keeping them that predictability begins, cautiously, to shade into something worth calling trust.

Syria took thirteen years to answer the question this article has been asking, and its answer was never complete. What it produced, in the end, was not proof that fragmented, mutually suspicious actors can achieve unity. It was proof that they do not need to. They need to become predictable enough, in specific enough ways, at specific enough moments, to act together when it counts.

That is not a small thing to have learned. It is also not, on its own, the end of the story. Coordination gets fragmented actors through a battle, a season, sometimes a war. What Syria’s factions still have not fully worked out — what almost every one of the coalitions examined here eventually ran into and could not resolve — is how cooperation survives once the shared enemy is gone, once power has to be divided rather than merely defended, and once yesterday’s coalition partners become today’s rivals for what comes next. That is a different and, in some ways, more dangerous problem than the one this instalment has addressed. It is also precisely the problem Lebanon spent seventeen years trying, and largely failing, to solve — and it is where this series turns next.

Part I is available here

Editor’s Note: Views in the article do not necessarily reflect the views of borkena.com  

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