On the top floor of a towering apartment block in Cairo,
half a dozen Syrian activists are hunched over their laptops. Each man
organized demonstrations in his home town before escaping the Assad regime's intelligence
agents in the last few months. Now, armed with a list of trusted contacts that
stretches across the borders from southwest Syria to Lebanon and Jordan, they
have become a key link in the supply chain of an opposition movement that is
struggling to outmaneuver a brutal crackdown. Donations collected from Syrians
and well-wishers in Cairo are used to purchase cell phones, satellite
communications equipment, medicine, and money, which is smuggled to friends and
family members on the inside. In turn, protesters send out video evidence of
attacks, which the men in Cairo catalogue, upload to YouTube, and forward to
media outlets.
The men work with close contacts in their own villages
and neighborhoods, independently of organizing committees or opposition bodies.
Abdel Youssef fled from Ad Dumayr, a city northeast of Damascus. Syrian
authorities went door to door there searching for military defectors on
Wednesday night and he spent the day following their movements through
eyewitness accounts. As he tells the story of how he fled, a Skype window
flashes up on his screen. A woman he knows tells him that security forces
attempting to arrest a man have captured his daughter instead. "Now I'm looking
out the window," the message reads. "She is being beaten up by the security
forces because she is saying ‘Allahu Akhbar'." Abdel Youssef passes on
information like this to a contact in the Free Syrian Army, who he says use
this information to block roads and set up ambushes in an attempt to protect
demonstrations.
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