Bedouin

The 1987 Library of Congress study described tribes organised by descent from a common male ancestor into bands and larger confederations, led by a mukhtar and a council (majlis), with a paramount shaykh as final arbiter. It named the Ruwala and Hassana of the Syrian Desert, the Butainat and Abadah near Palmyra (Tadmur), the Fadan groups of the Euphrates desert and the Shammar of Deir ez-Zor among the remaining wholly nomadic tribes, and estimated the Bedouin population at under 7 per cent in the mid-1980s (estimate). Horses, camels, sheep and goats were the prized livestock.

Government settlement policy and the extension of state law into the desert reduced full nomadism during the 20th century. Dawn Chatty (2010) argues that Syrian tribes nevertheless remained cohesive networks of real and fictive kinship, linked to the state through patron–client ties between tribal leaders and officials, a solidarity decades of state policy did not suppress.