(TRIPOLI, Lebanon) — Approaching his 18th birthday, Hamza, a merchant sailor from Syria, resigned himself to the fate awaiting him when he reached adulthood: A year and a half of mandatory military service.
Then last year, the uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad erupted with demonstrations calling for change. Troops dispatched by Syria's autocratic regime shot protesters and shelled opposition towns, killing thousands of civilians.
That altered the plan for Hamza, and for a growing number of young Syrians who are dodging the draft out of fear that military service will force them to kill their countrymen — or get killed themselves.
"I couldn't go because the army is supposed to protect people, but all this army does is protect Assad," said Hamza, now a wispy-bearded 19-year-old with thick biceps from his work at sea. He fled Syria this year to Tripoli, a city on Lebanon's Mediterranean coast. Unable to work, he lives in hiding in a small apartment here with six other draft-dodgers.
Young Syrians have long avoided the draft by traveling abroad, cooking up medical excuses or using connections and bribes to get their names off the rolls. But anti-regime activists in and outside Syria say the number has shot up during the 15-month conflict that the U.N. says has killed more than 9,000 people.
Some hide out in opposition areas in Syria, avoiding checkpoints where they could be jailed or conscripted. Others flee the country, opting, at least for now, for an impoverished existence far from their families.
The extent of all this is hard to gauge since the Syrian government does not comment on its military. But in a hint that the army is under strain, Assad issued an amnesty this month: He gave draft-dodgers inside the country 90 days to report for duty without punishment, and 120 days to those abroad.
The government has not said how many have accepted the offer.
So far, the drop in conscripts has not noticeably lessened the state's advantage over the opposition Free Syrian Army, largely because draftees are less committed than professional soldiers.
"The guys they call up now are not the guys who are going to stick by them," said Joseph Holliday, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War who is studying the Syrian army. "Anyone they can get to fight for them loyally is already taking part."
Others warn that efforts to replace draft-dodgers with regime loyalists will exacerbate sectarian strife. The opposition is mostly Sunni Muslim, while Assad's regime and security forces give outsized power to Assad's sect, the Alawites.
Both sides use sectarian appeals to rally their forces, raising the risk that Syria's violence could mirror that which has torn apart its neighbors Lebanon and Iraq in recent decades.
"This revolution, which is turning into a civil war along sectarian lines, is only going to become more sectarian as time goes on," said Syria expert Joshua Landis at the University of Oklahoma.
