SURROGATE WARFARE AND THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ‘PATRON’ USA AND ‘CLIENT’ PYD/YPG IN SYRIAN CIVIL WAR

This paper aims to assess the patron-client relationship between the USA and the pro-Kurdish PYD (Democratic Union Party)/YPG (The People’s Protection Units) in Syria with a deeper look at the logic of surrogate warfare in American foreign policy. Through this case study, its main focus is to deconstruct the mechanism of this relationship and understand its resilience, where parties have both converging and diverging interests in a risk-based security environment and call their relationship “ad hoc”. A surrogate can be defined as “an indigenous, non-national force” that acts on behalf of the patron’s interests and surrogate warfare is “a patron’s externalization of the strategic, operational and tactical burden of warfare to a surrogate with the principal intent of minimizing the burden of warfare…” (Krieg (2016, 99) Surrogate warfare, a much more specific form of proxy warfare, has long been used by various power circles to decrease the cost of wars and achieve a faster victory. In the current world order, which Acharya (2015) defines as “multiplex”, state and non-state actors act within a complex web of relations, where actors and events are highly interdependent. In such a world, patron and client relations, which create certain levels of asymmetric dependencies, can also be observed among various actors like armed non-state actors (ANSAs). ANSAs, which tend to act like states and threaten the ordinary rules of the Westphalian order, turn out to be both enemies and friends of the traditional powers. In fact, most of them willingly accept to be treated as political and military tools of greater powers to gain wider credibility and popularity. By accepting this naturally asymmetric relationship, small powers like insurgency groups, terror organizations, private military companies and mafia organs etc. pursue their own political agenda by fulfilling the requirements of the patron states. This relationship might often create extra stress on conventional alliances and cause tension which might eventually turn into new armed conflicts. Still, it continues to be an illegitimate but cheaper option for the patrons. The USA-PYD/YPG partnership, based on surrogate warfare, is a good example of a patron-client relationship where the PYD/YPG turn out to be a local power maximizer for Washington in the Syrian civil war. Still existing ISIS threat and the complex nature of the operational environment in Syria, combined with the secular ideology of the PYD/YPG and the transboundary impacts of the war continue to preserve the PYD/YPG as the most feasible partner of the USA. Receiving money and arms from Washington, PYD/YPG is quite submissive and does not establish a counter agenda. But will that be the case forever? How will that so-called “target-oriented, ad-hoc and tactical” relationship end while various regional and global actors are looking for a compromise with the Asad regime and a permanent political solution in Syria? Will American pragmatism cause another leftover, this time for the Kurds in Syria? This paper aims to find answers to these questions by benefitting from the patron-client and surrogate warfare literature to develop alternative conflict resolution approaches in Syria.