One of the most understudied aspects of the Syrian conflict may be the role of the bedouin communities. Al-Badou, a word linguistically related to Badiya, or desert, has historically referred to tribally-organized and livestock-herding Arab communities descended from the ancient tribes of the Arabian Peninsula. While the wandering bedouins of old have mostly been consigned to history, or at least to the social and geographic periphery, their cultural heritage lingers. Kinship ties through tribe, clan, and family still matter greatly in many of Syria’s Sunni Arab rural areas and recently urbanized communities.1
Bedouin or bedouin-descended populations dominate the sparsely inhabited desert that stretches from Homs, Hama, and the Qalamoun region in the west to Palmyra, Raqqa, Hasakah, Deir Ezzor, and the Iraqi border in the east. Tribal communities are also well established in the Aleppo countryside in the north, in parts of the Ghouta agricultural belt around Damascus, and in the southern Houran region, as well as in cities throughout Syria, to which rural populations have migrated in search of jobs and education over the past few decades.