I was looking at a map of the Middle East this morning, and it occurred to me that we are essentially looking at a work of historical fiction. We see these solid lines, these Westphalian nation-states like Syria, Egypt, and Jordan, but if you look at who actually holds the keys to the kingdom on the ground, the lines start to blur into something much older and, frankly, much more resilient. The myth of the unified nation-state is collapsing right in front of us, replaced by what people are starting to call the tribe-state.
Herman Poppleberry here, and I think you hit on the core tension of twenty twenty-six. We spent decades, maybe even a century, pretending that ideological movements or central governments were the only players that mattered. We thought the future was about secularism versus Islamism, or democracy versus autocracy. But today's prompt from Daniel is about the resurgence of tribalism as a primary geopolitical force, and it really highlights how the map is being redrawn by bloodlines and local loyalties. It is not just a Syrian story; it is a regional realignment that is changing the way we think about sovereignty.
It is funny because for years, the experts told us that urbanization and the internet would kill tribalism. They said that once everyone moved to the city and got a smartphone, they would stop caring about which clan they belonged to. Instead, it seems like the internet just gave the sheikhs better tools for coordination. They have WhatsApp groups with fifty thousand members. Daniel is asking about the number and influence of these groups, and I want to start with Syria because the fall of the Assad regime in late twenty twenty-four did not exactly lead to a Jeffersonian democracy. It led to a scramble for tribal buy-in that has defined the last fifteen months.
The transition in Damascus has been fascinating to watch from a technical perspective. When Ahmed al-Sharaa, the man formerly known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, took over, he knew he had a branding problem and a control problem. One of his very first institutional moves in early twenty twenty-five was not setting up a parliament or a constitutional court, but creating a dedicated Office of Tribes and Clans. He realized that while Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or H-T-S, had the guns to take the city, they did not have the social fabric to hold the country. The Office of Tribes is essentially the new clearinghouse for political power in Syria. It is where the deals get made.
And he has been busy. We saw that massive mobilization on March seventh, twenty twenty-five, where tribal forces were basically the vanguard for government clashes with Assad loyalists who were still holding out on the coast. It was not the regular army doing the heavy lifting; it was tribal militias who had been promised a seat at the table. But it is not just about loyalty; it is about transaction. Herman, you have been looking at the Baggara tribe. They seem like the ultimate swing voter in this new Syrian landscape.
The Baggara are a perfect case study for Daniel’s question about influence. They are led by Sheikh Nawaf al-Bashir, and their history over the last decade is a masterclass in survival. They have been with the regime, they have been with the opposition, they have flirted with the Kurds, and now they are a pillar of the al-Sharaa government. Why? Because tribal loyalty in the Euphrates valley tracks material security, not ideology. When al-Bashir publicly declared support for al-Sharaa in December twenty twenty-five, it was a massive blow to the Kurdish-led S-D-F. It was not because he suddenly became a fan of the new administration’s platform. It was because the Syrian Democratic Forces were failing to provide security and resources to Arab-majority areas like Deir Az-Zour and Raqqa.
This is where it gets messy for the S-D-F. They have been the darlings of Western policy for years, the reliable partners against I-S-I-S, but they are increasingly viewed as an occupying force by these Arab tribes. If you are a tribal leader in eastern Syria, you are looking at a central government in Damascus that is offering you a formal role through this Office of Tribes, versus a Kurdish administration that you feel is marginalizing you and taking your oil. It is a no-brainer. But Herman, does this formalization actually work? Can you really institutionalize a structure that is inherently decentralized and based on bloodlines?
That is the big gamble of twenty twenty-six. By trying to co-opt the tribes, al-Sharaa is essentially trying to build a state-within-a-state architecture. He is giving these leaders official positions, government salaries, and most importantly, amnesty for past actions. This buys him short-term stability, but the friction is already showing. Look at the Druze-Bedouin conflict from the summer of twenty twenty-five. That was a bloodbath. At least one thousand people were killed in southern Syria. The Druze in Sweida province basically told the Damascus government that they were done waiting for state protection and formed their own Druze National Guard.
I remember that. The Druze were accusing the government of backing Bedouin tribes against them to keep the south unstable. It is a classic move. If you are a central authority and you cannot fully control a minority group like the Druze, you empower their rivals, the Bedouin, to keep them in check. But then you end up with a situation where you have two armed, non-state actors shooting at each other, and the national government is just standing there holding the bag. It makes the idea of a unified national army look like a pipe dream, even after H-T-S officially dissolved itself in January twenty twenty-five.
Integration is the word everyone uses in the briefing papers, but the reality is more like a patchwork quilt of militias. The United Nations Security Council might have removed H-T-S from its sanctions list just a few weeks ago, on February twenty-seventh, twenty twenty-six, but that does not mean the underlying tribal tensions just evaporated. You have hundreds of tribal confederations in Syria. The Shammar, the Anaza, the Ougeidat. These are massive networks that span borders. If you are the Shammar, you have cousins in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Your loyalty is to the confederation first, the border second. We talked about this dynamic in episode eleven thirty-two, looking at the Al-Sharaa transition and the idea of buffer zones. The tribes are essentially the ultimate buffer zone.
Let's shift gears and look south, because Daniel mentioned the Negev and Gaza. This is where the tribal story gets really interesting from an Israeli perspective. We often think of the conflict in Gaza as Hamas versus Israel, but the erosion of Hamas governance during the war created a vacuum that was filled by some pretty rough characters. Specifically, the Tarabin tribe. They are a fascinating example of how one group can play three different roles simultaneously.
The Tarabin are the heavyweights of the tri-border area. They are in Sinai, they are in the Negev, and they are in Gaza. In Gaza, you have the armed faction led by Yasser Abu Shabab. These guys became the face of the aid crisis in late twenty twenty-four and early twenty twenty-five. There was that one incident where they reportedly looted ninety-eight out of one hundred nine trucks in a single convoy. And the wild part, the part that really ruffled feathers in the Israeli security cabinet, was the report that Prime Minister Netanyahu had personally signed off on arming some of these clan members with Kalashnikovs to act as a counter-weight to Hamas.
It is the enemy of my enemy strategy, but it is incredibly high-risk. You are essentially arming a group that is known for organized crime and aid theft because they are the only ones left with the muscle to stand up to what remains of the Hamas police force. We saw that battle in November twenty twenty-four where Hamas killed twenty members of the Abu Shabab gang. It is tribal warfare under the guise of counter-insurgency. It shows that when the formal state fails to provide security, people do not just sit around; they revert to the clan.
What is fascinating is how the Tarabin function differently depending on which side of the border they are on. In Egypt’s Sinai, they have been a key counter-insurgency partner for the Egyptian military against I-S-I-S affiliates for years. They know the terrain, they have the intelligence, and they have the motivation. But then you cross into the Negev in Israel, and you have about three hundred thousand Arab Bedouins, many of whom are Tarabin, living in a completely different reality. Over eighty thousand of them are in these unrecognized villages with no legal status, no infrastructure, and they are facing constant displacement.
It is a massive contradiction. On one hand, the state wants them to be loyal citizens or even security partners, but on the other hand, it treats their very existence in certain areas as a legal violation. We saw thirty-eight communities displaced in just the first half of twenty twenty-five. When you marginalize a population like that, you are essentially forcing them to lean harder into their tribal identity for survival. If the state is not going to provide you with a water line or a building permit, your only safety net is your clan. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You treat them like a separate, tribal entity, so they act like one.
And Cairo is watching this very closely. Egypt has taken a very different path with their new Union of Arab Tribes, which they announced on May first, twenty twenty-five. This is not just a social club. It is led by Ibrahim Al-Organi, a very powerful businessman who is incredibly close to the Sisi government. They even made President Sisi the honorary chairman. They are building a political party called The National Union of Egypt to be their parliamentary arm. It is a way of saying, we are done with traditional political parties; we are going to run the country through the sheikhs.
That feels like a massive shift in how Egypt manages its domestic politics. Instead of trying to build a broad-based ideological party, they are just institutionalizing the tribal leaders. It is a way to bypass traditional political opposition, especially the Islamist networks, by going straight to the local power brokers. If you control the sheikh, you control the vote. It is the ultimate tool for authoritarian control because it turns the tribe into an administrative unit of the state.
It also creates a state within a state dynamic. Al-Organi is a controversial figure because he essentially bridges the gap between legitimate business, tribal militia work, and high-level politics. He is a billionaire who controls logistics and reconstruction. If you are a young person in Sinai or the Egyptian delta, you see that the path to power is not through a democratic process or a civil service exam, but through these tribal-political conglomerates. It is a blueprint for modern authoritarianism that I suspect other regimes in the region are going to copy.
So, we have Syria using tribes to fill the void left by a collapsed regime, Israel using them as a desperate security measure in Gaza while struggling with them in the Negev, and Egypt formalizing them into a pillar of the government. Is there a common thread here, or are we just looking at a bunch of localized fires?
The common thread is the failure of the centralized, secular nation-state model to provide two things: security and identity. When the state fails to protect you or represent you, you go back to the most basic unit of trust, which is the family and the tribe. It is a rational response to a chaotic environment. The problem is that while tribalism provides short-term stability, it is terrible for long-term state-building. It encourages nepotism, it undermines the rule of law, and it makes every political dispute an ethnic or blood dispute. It is a recipe for long-term warlordism.
I also think we need to be careful not to paint all these groups with the same brush. We talked about the Druze earlier. They are a great example of why the tribe label can be misleading. They are a distinct religious and ethnic minority with a very specific, survivalist political structure. They are not Bedouin, they do not have the same nomadic history, and their goals are often diametrically opposed to the Arab tribes surrounding them. We covered their blood brother pact and their history of secrecy back in episode twelve fifty-nine, which is really worth a listen if you want to understand why they are so effective at self-protection.
That is a great point. The Druze National Guard is a defensive reaction to Bedouin encroachment that they feel is being subsidized by Damascus. It is a triangular conflict: the Druze, the Bedouin, and the central government, all playing a game of musical chairs with security. And then you have the Kurds in the northeast, who are trying to build their own proto-state while being squeezed by Arab tribes who feel like the Kurds are overstepping their bounds. It is a multi-layered cake of grievances.
It feels like the Middle East is reverting to a sort of neo-feudalism. You have these powerful lords, the tribal sheikhs or militia leaders, who control specific territories and resources, and the central government is really just the most powerful lord among equals. They have to constantly negotiate, pay off, or threaten these other actors just to keep the lights on in the capital. The borders from nineteen sixteen are still there on the map, but they do not reflect the actual flow of power.
And the external players are leaning into it. We mentioned Israel arming clans in Gaza. You can bet that Turkey, Iran, and Russia are all doing the same thing in their respective spheres of influence in Syria. They are not looking for Syrian partners; they are looking for specific tribal leaders they can put on a payroll. It is a lot cheaper and more effective than trying to win hearts and minds in a whole country. But what happens when the money runs out or the external sponsor loses interest?
We have seen this movie before. You arm a clan to solve a problem today, and tomorrow you have a warlord who controls a key highway or an oil field and refuses to let the national government through. The short-term stability that Daniel’s prompt touches on is exactly what creates the long-term instability that keeps these regions in a cycle of conflict. If you are the Baggara and you have been given a pass on your civil war crimes just to support the new government, what happens when that government tries to actually enforce a law you do not like?
What I find wild is how these groups have adapted to the twenty-first century. This is not Lawrence of Arabia stuff anymore. These tribal networks are using encrypted messaging, they are managing international business portfolios, and they are sophisticated players in the global arms market. Ibrahim Al-Organi in Egypt is a billionaire. Sheikh Nawaf al-Bashir in Syria is navigating the complexities of international sanctions and oil smuggling. They are modern political entrepreneurs who just happen to have a few hundred thousand cousins they can call on.
It is also a demographic story. In the Negev, you have a population that is growing incredibly fast, with a very young median age. If the Israeli state does not find a way to integrate the Bedouin into the formal economy and legal structure, you are going to have eighty thousand people in unrecognized villages who feel absolutely zero connection to the state of Israel. That is a security nightmare waiting to happen. When you move thirty-eight communities in six months, you are not just moving people; you are destroying social capital and creating a grievance that will last for generations.
The tribal structure then becomes the only vehicle for that grievance. It is the only thing that cannot be bulldozed. One thing that struck me in the research was the role of the Office of Tribes in Damascus regarding accountability. Al-Sharaa is using it to offer amnesty. It is a brilliant move for consolidation, but it means that any reckoning with the atrocities committed by tribal militias during the civil war is basically off the table. You are baking the crimes of the past into the foundations of the new government just to keep the peace.
It is the peace of the pragmatists. If al-Sharaa started prosecuting tribal leaders for what they did between twenty eleven and twenty twenty-four, he would have a new civil war on his hands by lunchtime. So, he gives them a pass, gives them a title, and hopes they stay bought. But that creates a very fragile social contract. If you are a victim of one of those militias, you see your oppressor being toasted in Damascus as a pillar of the nation. That does not exactly build long-term social cohesion.
It is the same thing in Egypt with the Union of Arab Tribes. Sisi is essentially building a parallel political structure. If the official parliament or the judiciary ever tries to push back against the executive, he can just lean on the Union. It is a way to make the formal institutions of the state irrelevant. Why care about a vote in Cairo when the sheikhs in the Sinai and the Delta have already signed off on the plan? It is a very effective way to manage a country, but it is not a nation-state in the way we usually think about it.
So, to answer Daniel's question about the number and influence of these groups, the answer is hundreds and decisive. In the Euphrates valley, in the Sinai, in the Negev, and in Gaza, these tribal actors are the ones who actually determine whether aid gets through, whether a road is safe, and who gets to vote. The factions that yield the most influence are the ones that have managed to bridge the gap between their traditional base and the modern state apparatus. The Tarabin, the Baggara, the Shammar. These are the names that matter more than most of the ministers in the official cabinets.
And we cannot forget the international dimension. The fact that the U-K, Canada, and the U-N have all de-listed H-T-S or its successors in the last few months shows that the international community has essentially accepted this new reality. They are saying, okay, the nation-state model failed in Syria, and we are willing to work with this new tribal-militia hybrid because it is better than the alternative. It is a massive concession to the tribe-state.
It is a concession to reality, Herman. You cannot sanction a whole social fabric out of existence. If the tribes are the ones running the country, eventually you have to talk to them. But I do wonder about the long-term implications for the borders. If the Shammar in Syria and the Shammar in Iraq decide that they have more in common with each other than with their respective capitals, those lines on the map from nineteen sixteen start to look even more like fiction. We are seeing the slow-motion erasure of the Sykes-Picot borders in favor of something much more organic and much more volatile.
I think the takeaway for me is that tribalism is not some primitive holdover that is going to go away with more education or better internet. It is a highly adaptive, modern political technology. It is what people use when the modern state fails them. If we want to understand where the Middle East is going in the next decade, we need to stop looking at the presidents and start looking at the sheikhs. We need to watch the money, too. These tribal structures are increasingly becoming economic powerhouses. Whether it is controlling smuggling routes or managing reconstruction contracts, the sheikhs are the new C-E-Os.
It is a fascinating, if somewhat grim, look at the future of governance. If the state is just a collection of tribes, what happens when the money runs out? When the central government can no longer afford to buy the loyalty of the Baggara or the Tarabin, the whole structure could come crashing down again. We are building on sand, Herman. Very expensive, very well-armed sand. But for now, it is the only game in town. The Office of Tribes in Damascus and the Union of Arab Tribes in Cairo are the new centers of gravity.
If you are not paying attention to them, you are not paying attention to the Middle East. It is that simple. The old maps are dead; the new ones are being written in the tents and the boardrooms of the tribal leaders.
Well, I think we have given Daniel plenty to chew on. It is a complex landscape, and honestly, we could probably do a whole series just on the Tarabin's business interests or the Druze National Guard's defensive strategy. But we should probably wrap it up there for today.
Agreed. There is always more to dig into, especially with the S-D-F tension in the east, but I think we hit the core themes.
Thanks as always to our producer, Hilbert Flumingtop, for keeping us on track. And a big thanks to Modal for providing the G-P-U credits that power this show. It is pretty cool that we can use cutting-edge tech to talk about one of the oldest social structures in human history.
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