Continuation of Foreign Policy with Other Means: Syria’s Support for Armed Opposition Movements Abroad during the Cold War

Talk by Siarhei Bohdan (Regensburg) in the series "War. Peace. Security".

Despite its weak economic foundations, geopolitical vulnerability and internal instability, the Syrian Baath Party government succeeded in supporting for decades armed movements in the Middle East that have transformed the region. Damascus obtained resources from larger countries to pursue such risky and costly policies and secured their military and diplomatic cover. Rather than becoming a proxy in the “Global Cold War,” it preserved its autonomy by forging dynamically shifting alliances with seemingly incompatible partners—the Soviet Union and conservative Arab regimes, Gaddafi’s Libya and Iran under the Shah and the Ayatollahs. Some murky deals were also made with the West.

Paradoxically, Damascus became better known for its support of foreign armed groups that have failed (e.g., different Palestinian factions) than for backing those that have succeeded. Meanwhile, it has facilitated the rise of several major players in the region and the victory of some of them. So, the Shiite Islamist revolutionaries toppled the powerful Shah’s regime in 1978–79 thanks also to Syrian support at the most critical stage of their struggle. The leading Kurdish parties of recent decades in Iraq and Turkey—the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)—emerged and grew with Syrian support in the 1970s–1990s.

The lecture will examine the ability of even smaller nations to pursue an interventionist course by backing armed opposition groups in other countries—during the Cold War and now. Concurrently, we will discuss the factors that drive and enable them to do so. These issues will be investigated primarily on the examples of the Assad regime’s relations with Shiite Islamists in Iran and Lebanon, as well as its ties with Kurdish organisations in Turkey and Iraq.

Since 2024, Dr Siarhei Bohdan is a research associate at the Professorship for Transregional Cultures of Knowledge, Department for Interdisciplinary and Multiscalar Area Studies (DIMAS), University of Regensburg, holding a PhD in PoliticalScience from the Free University of Berlin (2016). From 2019 to 2021, he worked as a research associate with the Freigeist Junion Research Group »The Cold War's Clash of Civilizations« at the Center for Global History (Friedrich Meinecke Institute) at the Free University of Berlin. One of his key interests is the global history of the USSR, particularly its role in socialist internationalism, Soviet development aid to the Global South, and the activities of Communist parties in countries such as Afghanistan and South Yemen. Another significant area of his research is Russian-Chinese relations, including regions like Xinjiang and Afghanistan. Siarhei also explores transregional religious history and the interactions between radical regimes in the Middle East, such as Syria, Libya, Iraq, and the PLO, with socialist countries like the USSR, Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia, and the People's Republic of China.

Organized by the Leibniz ScienceCampus "Europe and America in the Modern World."