Warlords on Twitter: Competing with the State Among Pro-Government Militias in Syria and Iraq

Pro-government militias are often seen as proxies of national and/or foreign governments. Events in Syria and Iraq suggest, however, that pro-government militias may also be perceived as active state-parallel organizations, which engage in civil wars to gain popular support and promote their own agendas (Aliyev, 2015). Drawing on the account of Aliyev, this paper will test the hypothesis that online narratives of these militias focus more on state-like functions they perform to increase their support-base than on celebrating war achievements, which would emphasise their role as allies of the central government. The paper is based on a content analysis of the Twitter accounts of two pro-government groups: the Syrian Defence Forces (SDF) and the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF). The tweets of these groups are coded, using two main thematic groups, which revolve around the dichotomy between war achievements and the performance of state-like duties. In a next phase, the contents are coded using more detailed thematic sub-categories. The paper considers differences in the narratives of these two organizations, due to the participation of Popular Mobilization Forces’ militias in the Iraqi elections. The findings show that the PMF shares more contents related to state-like functions than the SDF. This corroborates the hypothesis that the provision of state-like functions by state parallel militias links with the possibility of challenging the current government through elections. This finding supports the theoretical claim that these organisations should be considered as armed groups with their own agenda, which ally with the government for tactical reasons and for a limited amount of time. In other words, these militias should not be seen as instruments of the central government, as part of the literature still defines them, but as militias which emerge in particular conditions and compete with similar groups for hegemony.