[On the other side, equally passionate messages
are bombarding the offices of American lawmakers from Syrians and
Syrian-Americans who support Mr. Assad’s government — or simply oppose the
armed uprising. They use antiwar slogans and symbols and stress the growing
influence of militants linked to Al Qaeda among the rebels.]
By Anne Barnard
 |
Mohammad Hannon/Associated Press
Syrians at an antigovernment protest in front of the Syrian Embassy in Amman,
Jordan, last month. Many who favor a strike have e-mailed American lawmakers.
|
BEIRUT,
Lebanon — The video from Kafranbel, a rebel-held village in northern Syria,
has been sent by e-mail to members of the United States Congress and posted
repeatedly on their Web sites — often in long strings of comments about Syria
that have flooded unrelated posts about health care or the openings of new
constituent offices.
Quoting Ronald Reagan and Martin Luther King
Jr., the video shows village residents who have
lost family members in President Bashar al-Assad’s crackdown on the Syrian
uprising as they plead for American military strikes on their own country.
“You have to say yes!” one little boy shouts. A
young girl adds, “You should feel ashamed, because you can save our lives but
you never want to try.”
On the other side, equally passionate messages
are bombarding the offices of American lawmakers from Syrians and
Syrian-Americans who support Mr. Assad’s government — or simply oppose the armed
uprising. They use antiwar slogans and symbols and stress the growing influence
of militants linked to Al Qaeda among the rebels.
“You shouldn’t be standing against terrorism in
Afghanistan and Mali, and when it comes to Syria, supporting it,” said Johnny
Achi, a Syrian-American electronic engineer who has lived for decades in Los
Angeles. He is visiting Damascus as he helps run a Facebook-based campaign to mobilize Syrian-Americans to
lobby their representatives against military intervention.
As Congress prepares to debate whether to
endorse President Obama’s proposed strike on the Assad government,
administration figures have spread out to press their case, including Secretary
of State John Kerry, who on Sunday made an effort to line up Arab support for
intervention.
Simultaneously, on a more grass-roots level, the
publicity war among Syrians to get their own messages out about the issue is
also reaching a crescendo — and is just as assiduously focused on Capitol Hill
and the American public.
Each side has increased efforts to connect with
Americans on what it sees as common values, with the opposition stressing the
fight for political rights in the face of a violent state crackdown and Mr.
Assad’s supporters stressing the secularism of his government.
The Syrian government is pushing hard,
too. Parliament
members have sent letters to their American counterparts in
Congress, and Mr. Assad used a television interview with Charlie Rose to
assert that his government was not behind the chemical attacks that have
ignited international outrage.
Grass-roots activists are building on expertise
developed over the past two years as they used the Internet and social media to
get information out about Syria. Informal armies of antigovernment activists
have long pumped out videos of dead children being pulled from rubble, of
warplanes attacking neighborhoods, and of security forces torturing prisoners,
even as government supporters have shared videos of rebels killing prisoners or
desecrating shrines.
Yet with lawmakers primarily focused on their
own voters, the limits of citizen media
campaigns across oceans and front lines are being tested. The
question for Syrians is whether their voices — those of the people most
directly affected — will be heard.
Mr. Achi’s group takes credit for helping change
the minds of some fence-sitters, like Representative Michael G. Grimm,
Republican of New York, who recently withdrew his support from Mr. Obama’s
plan.
But others are not sure. K. Ibrahim, 33, fled
Syria after being detained twice for anti-Assad activism and now runs a social
media campaign to challenge the government’s claim that its opponents are
primarily Islamist extremists. Yet she said she doubted her work would affect
American decision makers.
“But for us, what can we do?” said Ms. Ibrahim,
who asked to be identified by only part of her name for her safety. “We have to
keep on shouting.”
Both sides work from a common assumption that
most Americans paid little attention to Syria until the question of direct
American strikes came up. (One brief history of Syria on a pro-strike Web site begins, “There
was once an evil dictator named Hafez al-Assad.”) They assume that American
voters operate from a basic antipathy to Middle East interventions after the
Iraq war, and from a fear of Islamist extremists.
“It’s perhaps the first time they heard about
Syria or tried to find Syria on a map,” Ms. Ibrahim said. “And they’re like,
‘Qaeda, Qaeda, Qaeda.’ Come on, you’re getting this out of context. You don’t
have just a choice between Qaeda and Assad.”
Ms. Ibrahim, a member of Mr. Assad’s minority
Alawite sect, organized a response to a social media campaign by United States
service members who were posting pictures of themselves with signs such as: “I
didn’t join the Marine Corps to fight for Al Qaeda in a Syrian civil war.”
In her countercampaign, young Syrians have posted pictures of themselves engaged
in decidedly non-extremist activities — drinking beer, wearing tight clothing,
even laying out hashish on a table — with slogans like “I’m Qaeda? Seriously?”
Each side draws heavily on Syrians outside the
country — not just Syrian Americans with the power of the vote, but activists
elsewhere who have more security and better electricity and Internet
connections.
Mr. Achi’s Facebook campaign is mirrored by
others run by antigovernment expatriates in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, countries
that have backed the rebels. Each side in turn accuses the other of lacking
true grass-roots credentials — of acting as proxies for governments — and each
denies it.
Yet some Syrians are reaching out from inside.
Ugarit Dandash, a Syrian reporter for Al Mayadeen, a Lebanese television
station that leans toward Mr. Assad, has posted videos of Syrians sitting on
roofs and near military installations on Mount Qasioun, overlooking Damascus,
saying a strike would happen “Over Our Dead Bodies.”
On the other side, in Kafranbel, Raed Fares, a
former real estate agent, has won a measure of fame for his town with his
humor-laced English-language protest banners aimed at Western audiences.
Working at first with cellphone cameras and
sporadic and insecure Internet connections, Mr. Fares and his team eventually
obtained video cameras and a satellite link, though they still struggle to find
diesel to power their generators.
The video he personally sent to Congress, he
said in a Skype interview, was his best and his most crucial.
“I think Congress and the American people need
to know what the Syrian people inside Syria feel and think about the strike,”
he said. “We are going to vanish if they leave us alone.”
Beyond the video’s heavy use of soaring music
and images of children, its script aims directly at American skepticism about
another war and recent protests that featured antiwar slogans.
“If you are really against the war, then you
should support the U.S. strikes that can actually end the war,” Kenan Rahmani,
a Syrian-American activist in Kafranbel, said in the video.
But that argument points to the extra challenge
their side faces: The opposition is divided on the strike. The attack Mr. Obama
seeks permission for is a limited strike, not the attempt to topple Mr. Assad
or the full-scale supplying of arms to rebels that people in Kafranbel have
often called for. And while some opposition activists see the strikes as too
limited, others oppose any American intervention, saying it would undermine the
independence of their movement.
Whether either side is having an effect is
unclear. But an innocuous Aug. 29 post about health care on the Facebook page
of Mike Rogers, a Congressman from Michigan, had garnered 1,962 comments by
Sunday, most about the strikes, from people with Arabic names, many claiming to
be inside Syria.
“Say YES!” one said. “Children need you.”
“NO,” another said. “It will only help Al
Qaeda.”
