Living in hiding to help bring down Syria’s regime

Only a crack of light from a tiny window high up the back wall of the room gave away that it was daylight. But it didn’t really matter to the four young men who sat close together on thin foam mattresses, staring intently at their laptop screens, their sleeping patterns dictated more by the needs of news channels than by day and night.

A bare bulb hung overhead, and a small electric heater glowed orange-red. Small video cameras and empty cardboard boxes for satellite modems were entangled with stray wires in the corner.

Metal bars had been laid across the inside of the front door for extra protection. Each time the men left, the bars slid out with a heavy clunk. Outside the door, they had left women and children’s shoes to make people think it was a family home.

This is the life of the Syrian media activist. For months these men, and people like them in cities and towns across Syria, have risked their lives to bring news of their uprising against the regime of President Bashar Assad to television screens and newspapers around the world.

During an undercover trip to restive Duma, a town outside Damascus, a reporter was allowed to take a rare snapshot of their claustrophobic, furtive existence.

One moment matter-of-factly describing how they killed a man believed to be a spy, the next appearing haunted by the decisions they’d made, all said their lives had become unrecognizable. Friends and even family members who have chosen not to join the revolution have had to be cut out of their lives, in case they might now be spies for the regime.

“Now the activists I work with are some of my best friends. But I don’t even know their real name!” said Omar, a man in his early 30s.

When Ali, in his late 20s, joined the media activists in April, he left behind his wife and child. It became too dangerous for him and for his family if he stayed at home, he explained.

So he and his three Duma colleagues went underground, moving every two months among safe houses whose locations are kept secret to all but the most trusted contacts, adopting noms de guerre to minimize retribution against their families, speaking on phones using SIM cards registered to the dead, always traveling on back roads to avoid military checkpoints.

“It is difficult to keep finding new homes,” said Yahya, just 17. “One of us tells the landlord they are looking to rent the home for their new wife and child, and then we all come inside and lay low.”

During short moments of relief, sitting on the bare carpet of the room that is both their living and sleeping quarters, eating a meal of takeout chicken and fries brought to them by a friend, the four men tease one another over who is the “most wanted” by the regime, swap stories of near-misses when they venture out into the streets, and crack jokes over pro-regime statements made on state television.

“A few weeks ago in Idlib, there was a mass protest with thousands of people chanting, ‘Death to Assad!’ We saw the pictures and videos and spoke to friends there. State television reported that people had ‘come outside to celebrate the fact that it was raining.’”

Yet always present in the room is a sense of foreboding, an awareness of the immense risks the men are taking.

Just talking to foreigners about such matters is against the law, the men said. “Speaking on Skype, this is the biggest offense,” Ali said with a rueful smile.

Venturing out is rare, limited to bare-essential trips and never on a whim. Preparing to leave the house on a Friday — the day on which Duma is essentially placed under military cordon because of the large-scale protests that have been held after prayers in the mosques — Ali Skype-chatted with fellow activists across town.

Frowning, the young men consulted with one another: “Avoid this area, they say there are soldiers here,” Yahya advised. “A witness says our street is clear,” Omar said.

Following the lead of other countries’ revolutions in the so-called Arab Spring, Omar told of how small pockets of activists began coordinating through social networking sites and communicating via Skype. “These networks have grown and grown, until we began to live our lives and run our revolution through the Internet.”

Because of the high risk of being followed, physical meetings are dangerous and have increasingly been replaced with online conferences.

“This is our life,” Yahya said. “We eat, we sleep, we go out to record protests. The rest is done virtually.”

Now the regime cuts electricity and cellphone signals after protests to stop people from sending out news and communicating, the activists said.

“So we bought generators and satellite connections. They were smuggled into the country across the borders from Turkey and Lebanon,” said Yahya, the videographer for the group. “The Internet modems have to come in the same way as the weapons.”

The members of the group gave up their day jobs months ago, when the role of briefing foreign journalists, for the most part barred from Syria, started to take up all their time. Yahya had been a student, and the other three, including a teenager named Hassan, worked in the clothing industry.

The need to live life in secret extends even to one another.

“We try to know as little as possible about each other. I don’t want to know anyone’s real names. Because then if we are captured I might not have a choice over the information I give,” Omar said. “They [security forces] know how to torture to the point where you have no choice.”

Ali agreed: “Once one person is arrested, the whole circle of contacts is at risk. Life now is about always watching your back, always thinking before you move. You can never trust anyone.”

Activists in Duma said they were weeding out “spies”: people believed to be in the employ of the regime to inform on the opposition. In one case, this ended in the disturbing death of a shop owner.

Activists, viewing the man as a spy, smashed his shop, warning him that if he continued to “harm civilians” he would be killed. Later, at a funeral for a protester who had been felled by a sniper, the activists said they saw the man in the crowd, wearing a disguise. They attacked, and found he was taking photographs of the faces of activists.

“He begged for people to save him, but nobody did,” Ali said. “We killed him in a special way. There were no weapons used; the crowd beat him to death in the main square of the town.”

The straightforward nature in which Ali described the brutal act highlighted a reality for these men: For them, there is no going back.

“We will be killed if we do that, and all these months will have been in vain,” Omar whispered, as if to himself.

Months of living in the cold, bare room have taken a toll on these young men. The need for human contact was evident.

Lying on the thin mattresses covered with blankets, lighted only by the flickering images from the muted television, Yahya and Ali lay asleep, cuddled into each other in the fetal position, as much for comfort as for warmth.

The correspondent, who was not accredited to report in Syria, is unidentified to protect sources in the country.