To fortify Aleppo and shield it from the revolution, the Syrian regime appealed to its various business, religion, and the tribe-based allies across the city. Among the last, a group of tribes from the Bab al-Nayrab neighbourhood came to operate alongside the security forces to crush the uprising. This was an alliance, however, which brought with it divisions and disagreements among these tribes. Fleeing their strongholds in the then opposition-controlled eastern neighbourhoods, loyalist tribesmen established militias in the western areas of the city that had remained under regime control. The militia offered a structure of shared aims and interests through which the regime and tribes were able to connect. For the regime, these militias served as a necessary tool for enforcement, in a period when its military forces were taking part in many battlefronts elsewhere. For the tribes, the militias offered an umbrella under which to protect and preserve the interests of their members, while also serving to generate new chiefdoms and reinforce existing ones. After the end of regime military operations in Aleppo in December 2016, the military significance of the Bab al-Nayrab tribes diminished. Small and medium-sized militias fell in numbers or were disbanded. Only the foreign-backed militias were able to remain and grow as they went to fight on other fronts. In a city whose eastern half had been destroyed completely, and whose traditional elite had, for the most part, been forced to flee, the tribal groups had different sources of capital for their political, economic and social influence. This included the military roles they had assumed, and the positions their chiefs had held within the regime networks that came out of the war. Since 2016, Bab al-Nayrab tribal leaders have occupied several seats in official representative structures, most notably the People's Assembly. They have also, with key actors outside of the tribal milieu, been involved in taking control of the most profitable sectors of the shadow economy, which is, apparently, bigger now than the city's formal economy. These chiefs have also succeeded in strengthening their social position, both in relation to their own and other tribes - in particular those which were poor or fragmented - and in relation to urban Aleppo, which has been weakened by the loss of its traditional intermediaries.