It would take a revolution and nearly half a million dollars to undo the damage Mezyan Al Barazi suffered one night in 1977. That was the moment he discovered he was an enemy of the state—in the dark hours of the evening before his university exams. At the age of twenty-six, Al Barazi was a diligent student. He had spent the day poring over notes, preparing for his final paper for his agricultural engineering degree from the University of Damascus.

A firm knock rattled his door. He opened it to find a knot of uniformed men with Kalashnikovs, members of Syria’s intelligence services. The men pushed their way inside, telling Al Barazi they needed to search his apartment for illegal weapons. One of Al Barazi’s uncles was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, a political party banned in 1964 after the coup that had brought Syria’s secular Ba’ath party to power. But Al Barazi was not involved in politics—or religion. “They asked me, ‘Where do you pray?’” says Al Barazi. “I said, ‘I don’t pray.’”

The armed men scoured his bookshelf looking for religious texts, finding only his copy of War and Peace. “Why don’t you come with us,” said one of the men.

“But I have my final exams tomorrow,” protested Al Barazi.

“Don’t worry about that,” said another.

Al Barazi was brought to a nearby prison, where he spent a cold, sleepless night forced by the guards to sit and then stand, sit and then stand, until dawn came and he was served a breakfast of olives and bread. Later that morning, he was led to an interrogation room and asked a few innocuous questions before being finally allowed to leave. The government had kept him, Al Barazi realized, just long enough for him to miss his exams.

Al Barazi’s trouble with the authorities had begun a few months earlier, when he was taking inventory as part of his job as an inspector at a warehouse run by the Ministry of Agriculture. He had grown up in the lush countryside near the city of Hama, but he had come to Damascus to study. What he discovered there disturbed him. Behind the bustle of traders and hum of government, a deep rot was spreading. Some of his fellow students had paid for their grades. Others had run afoul of the government after their teachers reported their political leanings to the intelligence services.

At his job in the ministry, Al Barazi was witness to continuous low-level graft. Farmers bought all their supplies directly from the government, which limited stocks and set prices. His coworkers gamed the system; it was easy to order a little extra fertilizer or a few more nails and sell the excess on the black market. One day while examining the books, Al Barazi uncovered something more significant. Some 2,000 tons of iron were unaccounted for—twice as much as the warehouse was supposed to have in stock.

For Al Barazi, his job as inspector meant keeping the books honest. He investigated and linked the missing iron to a confidante of the Ministry of Agriculture. But when he presented his claims to his superiors, they brushed him aside. They were clearly unhappy to find him causing trouble where, in their eyes, there had been none. “I redid the stock taking and proved them wrong,” Al Barazi recalls. “That’s when they put me under the microscope.”

It was not long after he made his report that members of the intelligence services began dropping by Al Barazi’s apartment. He wasn’t arrested or explicitly threatened. The men would sit with him for casual conversations over tea and Arabic sweets, inquiring about his family, asking about his studies. Sometimes the questions were pointed. Perhaps he would like to work with them? Wouldn’t he like to carry a gun? Was he planning to run away from Syria after graduating?

He didn’t know it then, but Al Barazi was already on his way to exile. He came from a family well known to Syria’s intelligence services. One of his father’s cousins, a politician named Muhsin al-Barazi, had served two months as prime minister in 1949 before he was executed in a coup. The family had once owned large swathes of rural land between Hama and Homs, but much of it had been nationalized by the Ba’ath regime. By the time Al Barazi was a student in Damascus, all nine of his uncles had fled the country. Businessmen, artists, and dissidents, they were scattered across Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Australia, and the United States.

It took another two years after his arrest for Al Barazi to follow them abroad. In the Syrian university system, graduating students were all required to take their final exams on the same day. There was no way to make up a missed test, so Al Barazi had to wait another year before taking them again. But twelve months later, on the eve of the exams, he heard the same knock on the door. Once again, his house was searched. Once again, he was casually interrogated. And once again, he was held in prison overnight—just long enough to miss the tests.

The next year, on his third try, Al Barazi arranged to take the tests in an examination center outside of Damascus. He finished the exams as quickly as he could and then, paranoid that the police were waiting at the door, jumped out the classroom window, leaving Syria that day on a flight for Kuwait.

By the time Al Barazi believed in his country again, more than three decades had passed. No longer was he a naive young man fighting the system on his own. He had become the leader of one of the hundreds of networks of Syrian exiles, a diaspora of men and women hounded from their homes, but ready to use every means at their disposal to strike back at the regime that had stolen their country from them decades before.

This is the story of the Syrian diaspora, of the exiled businessmen, housewives, students, and professionals who crowdfunded a rebellion-turned-civil war, then became the saviors of last resort for civilians caught in its aftermath. Between 1970 and 2011, President Hafez al-Assad and his son and successor, Bashar al-Assad, chased hundreds of thousands of middle-class professionals into exile. They fled one by one, year by year, each with their own reasons for leaving, their own experiences of humiliation or obstruction at the hands of the government.

Exile was convenient for both sides. For those fleeing, it was a chance to start anew. For the Assads, it was an easy way to rid themselves of those they found undesirable. They looked on approvingly as troublemakers and critics departed. Each family that escaped Syria joined previous waves of emigrants. By the time the Arab Spring sent its first sparks across the region in 2011, an estimated ten million Syrians were living abroad, compared to twenty-three million still inside the country. Many of the exiles had done well for themselves. Some, like Al Barazi, who had founded a flourishing agricultural supply company in Abu Dhabi, had even accumulated fortunes. Together, they turned out to be one of the Syrian government’s biggest strategic blunders: a self-imposed brain drain that drove the country’s ambitious professionals abroad, where their resentment was free to grow and compound—along with their means to do something about it.

Since 2011, Al Barazi alone has spent more than $400,000 of his own money supporting the revolution. An official with the Syrian National Council, the most prominent opposition group, estimates that diaspora businessmen have sent between $1 billion and $2 billion just to the armed groups challenging the Assad regime. Another prominent businessman puts the figure of all aid—lethal and humanitarian—higher still, at $20 billion, the equivalent of 50 percent of the country’s prewar gross domestic product.

In Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Jeddah, and dozens of other Arab cities, donation plates are being passed in private homes. Dinners are being held to raise funds. The life savings of thousands are being poured into the revolution, and many are taking on debt to keep the cash flowing.

In the beginning, the money went to peaceful protesters. Trucks filled with Samsung phones and cameras enabled activists to document their demonstrations and publicize the government’s lethal crackdowns. As armed groups organized themselves against the regime, the diaspora sent money, cigarettes, flour, and sometimes guns. To civilians caught up in the fighting, the exiles delivered medical supplies. As millions of refugees fled the country, they bought diapers, wheat, and blankets and made sure they reached the camps.

It is unlikely we will ever know exactly how much money the Syrian diaspora poured into fighting the Assad regime. No accounting exists of its hundreds of decentralized networks spread across dozens of countries. But one thing is clear: four years into a bloody civil war, the only reason that many in the country are still fighting—and surviving—is because of money and assistance provided by those who fled long ago.

In February 2014, as fighting raged in Syria, Al Barazi stood in a two-car garage in one of Dubai’s posher developments, rows of villas broken up by artificial lakes and streets lined with palm trees. The garage itself was modest, with scratches in the floor where boxes of flour and bags of winter blankets had been dragged repeatedly across the polished concrete. It was also satisfyingly empty. Al Barazi and his associates had just sent off a container to a warehouse in Sharjah, an industrial center ninety minutes’ drive north of Dubai—the first stop on the way to Syria.

Now sixty-three years old, Al Barazi wore a well-trimmed, graying beard. The years had taken most of his hair but left his posture untouched. His body was muscular under his thick leather jacket. He had called together a meeting of several of the Syrian expatriates involved in the supply effort, in order to review their latest shipments into the war zone. Like the goods they had just dispatched, the space in which they stood had also been donated—it belonged to a middle-aged schoolteacher named Roula who had fled Syria in 1995. From the garage, they moved into her house to talk logistics over sweet tea and cardamom coffee.



A shipment of supplies for Syrian refugees in Jordan, packed in the backyard of one of the tansiqiya members. September 2012. Courtesy of Mezyan Al Barazi. The supply operation had grown by the month since its inception at the beginning of the Arab Spring. Al Barazi’s group of exiles had begun by gathering goods at their homes. When that became unwieldy, they moved to parking lots, and finally into Roula’s garage, which was now a collection point in an industrial-scale shipping operation. Once her garage was full, goods were moved to a warehouse in Sharjah, provided free by a Syrian trader in Dubai—renting a facility would have cost the group more than Dh100,000 ($27,230) per month, which was untenable. “The warehouse donor gets angry if we don’t send at least two containers a week,” said the group’s de facto shipping manager, Osama, who at that point had lived in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for eighteen years.

From Sharjah, the goods were loaded onto a container that traveled by sea alongside private commercial shipments to Turkey, where it was offloaded onto trucks heading toward Syria. Moving a container from Dubai to the Syrian border cost Al Barazi and his associates about $5,500—a sum covered by anonymous donors.

Between October 2013 and February 2014, the group moved thirty-four shipping containers of donated goods—nearly two a week—into Syria. In addition, during the summer months of Ramadan in 2013, the group sent 425 tons of food to needy Syrians trapped in the war-torn country. “The people inside Syria send us lists of what they need,” said Roula.

The Syrian exiles treated the requests as shopping lists, raising funds and heading to supermarkets to buy the goods. They also collected donations in kind—400 down comforters from a Dubai hotel manager, 750 pairs of shoes and slippers from a British woman sympathetic to their cause. “If they need rice, I have a friend I will call,” said Osama. “In two days he will give me thirty tons of rice. We have so many people supporting us, and whatever they can give, they will.”

At the beginning of the revolution, volunteers in Syria were able to collect the donations at the border. But as the conflict sharpened, each shipment required a round of intelligence work. Contacts were called in order to find out which roads were safe to travel on and which armed group controlled each stage of the route the goods would have to take. “We buy all the checkpoints,” says Al Barazi. Nonetheless, the group had several containers stopped by extremist rebel groups. Other aid sent to Syrian government-controlled crossing points never made it across the border.

As their goods traversed the route, Al Barazi and his friends tracked their progress. Each time they changed hands, a contact would send a message on WhatsApp or post a photo on Instagram. On his computer and Samsung smartphone, Al Barazi kept video clips of boxes of gloves, blood bags, basic medical supplies, flour, sugar, diapers, and clothing—proof that the goods he had sent had reached their destination.

“I used to feel guilty” being safe in exile, Roula said. “But if we were not here, no one would help. No one else can. No one can reach them except Syrians outside.”

In early March 2011, Al Barazi remembers speaking with a Syrian friend about the Arab Spring. Protesters in Tunisia and Egypt had forced the dictators ruling those countries to resign and flee. In Libya, demonstrators were clashing with security forces and rebels were taking up arms against Muammar Gaddafi’s government. For Arabs of Al Barazi’s generation, who’d grown up certain they would die without ever seeing a change in government, the developments were world-shattering. Al Barazi remained unable to conceive that similar events could take place in his home country. “Nothing will happen in Syria,” he told his friend. “Only a nuclear explosion will bring change.”

Five days after their conversation, the first scattered demonstrations broke out in Damascus and Aleppo. Videos of unarmed demonstrators shouting for change were on YouTube, on television, on Al Barazi’s phone. Impossible images. “This is proof of God,” his friend said. Who else besides the divine could unseat Bashar al-Assad?

Al Barazi in his office. October 2012. Courtesy of Mezyan Al Barazi. Such was his astonishment that Al Barazi decided it was time to reclaim his nationality. For nearly a decade, he had run from his citizenship whenever he could. He cringed when his accent was recognized in cafés. When he heard someone speaking the Syrian dialect, he turned and walked the other away. “I’m Lebanese,” he would say if someone asked. But as demonstrators rose against the government in Syria, Al Barazi began reaching out to the Syrians abroad he’d been trying to avoid. Almost immediately, he realized that hundreds of others were doing the same.

The first place where he reclaimed his citizenship was Facebook; the site records him as having started working at “The Syrian Revolution” in April 2011. His timeline was transformed—from photos of travel and family to inspirational quotes and news about the uprising.

Among the first fellow sympathizers with whom Al Barazi made contact were a young couple named Wissam and Aswan. They lived in an apartment just a block from his office in Abu Dhabi, but he had never met them before. Like Al Barazi, they came from families with histories of political dissent. And also like him, they had avoided Syrians in their new country. The regime had imprisoned Wissam’s uncle, and his father—fatally ill at the time of the arrest—had spent his final days haunted by his brother’s captivity. Wissam had fled with his wife in 2005 to Abu Dhabi, where he found work as a midlevel manager at a government agency.

The transformation they underwent during the outbreak of the revolution was similar to Al Barazi’s and typical of the Syrian expatriate experience in the wake of the uprising. Wissam and his wife had felt they needed to be careful even after they had settled abroad. “We [Syrian exiles] were all very worried about one another, because everyone thought the other was from the intelligence services,” says Aswan, a soft-spoken young mother. Their fellow citizens were surely spying on them. Their embassy was guaranteed to contain members of the Syrian intelligence services—how could it not, with such a sinister regime? “We were very afraid to speak about the revolution,” Aswan recalls.

Yet they couldn’t help themselves. “We were dreaming,” says Wissam. “We needed to share our dreams with other Syrians.”

One day in a shopping mall, Wissam recognized the soft glide of Syrian Arabic and stopped the stranger to see if he had heard correctly. A few days later, he remembered that a local television presenter was from Syria. Diving online, he networked through his friends and colleagues until he found her mobile number. Each new contact made his or her way into a circle of exiles who were increasingly open about their desire to see the fall of the regime in Damascus. On Facebook, Wissam’s posts grew bolder, evolving over just a few months from ambiguous references and veiled criticism to blatant insults against the Assads. By November, eight months after the start of the revolution, he had uploaded a photo of his two older children, each brandishing the red, green, and black of the Free Syrian flag. To expose one’s children to political dissent would have been unthinkable for Syrians only months earlier.

After years of hiding their political beliefs, the critics of the Syrian government had come out into the open, and it was the supporters of the regime who were masking their allegiances. Assad’s violent response to the protests shifted world opinion within weeks. There were also signs that Gulf countries—particularly Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and the UAE—would back the opposition. The supporters of the regime were allowed to stay—even to move their money to hubs such as Dubai. But they did so under the strict, unspoken rules that had long governed the lives of their opponents: don’t cause trouble or leave.

The diaspora was caught off guard as the demonstrations accelerated. Mostly of an older generation, they watched, awestruck—even embarrassed—by how young people stood up to the regime they had run from. Facebook erupted with videos of snipers taking aim at civilian protesters, and YouTube blistered with the sound of gunfire. But it quickly became clear that while those who fled Syria hadn’t fought Assad and his soldiers back then, they could do so now using a weapon few inside the country could wield: large sums of money.

In the thirty-four years since he had jumped out the window after completing his exams, Al Barazi had built a modest fortune. It hadn’t been easy. He got married and had children, then made a career in Kuwait. After thirteen years of painstaking networking with local businessmen, he’d been offered a high-paying government job that came with an apartment and a car—a rarity for an expatriate. On July 30, 1990, he fronted costs to set up the office, expecting swift reimbursement. Two days later, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, beginning the first Gulf War. As troops moved towards the capital, Al Barazi and his family boarded a plane with the equivalent of just $5 in cash. He was headed back to Syria.

At first, his forced return seemed like a fortuitous opportunity. He specialized in irrigation, and in the 1990s, Syria was spending about 70 percent of its agricultural budget on channeling water to its croplands. The country had long imported food from abroad, and Hafez al-Assad wanted to increase Syria’s domestic production. The government poured assistance into the agricultural sector, buying strategic crops, subsidizing inputs, and offering low-cost loans.

“I bought a wrench and started work,” Al Barazi recalls. Within a year, his new company had become the most successful bidder for technical irrigation, winning the largest single contract ever granted in the sector. Between 1985 and 2000, Syria’s irrigated land nearly doubled. And by 1993, Al Barazi’s business was worth a staggering SYP23 million (Syrian pounds, or roughly $460,000). At the height of his success, he was managing a modern showroom of irrigation machinery. Combining slick salesmanship with a back-breaking work ethic, he had become the Syrian representative for international brands such as the US’s Irridelco International and Curtis Dyna-Fog and Greece’s Polyglas.

But in Assad’s Syria, danger attends success, and soon, says Al Barazi, “I reached the level that I should not exceed.” The harassment began quietly. Competitors started winning contracts—one for tractors, another for fertilizer—even though their machines were of lower quality and their bids inflated.

In 2000, Hafez al-Assad died of a heart attack and was succeeded by his thirty-four-year-old son Bashar, a London-trained ophthalmologist with little political experience. Many Syrians and Western officials hoped the young Assad would prove a reformer, and at first it seemed he would. In his early years in office, Bashar al-Assad closed a notorious prison, allowed soft political critique, and opened up the economy.

But the so-called Damascus Spring proved short-lived. Assad handed lucrative bits of the privatized state to just a few loyal families, including his own (his maternal cousins in particular). His neoliberal reforms dismantled the patronage-based welfare state that had placated the urban and rural working poor. As whispers of discontent mounted, the regime worked harder than ever to silence them. Dissidents disappeared off the streets. Families didn’t know why or even if their loved ones were being held; after months, sometimes years, they could only assume the worst.

By the early 2000s, Al Barazi was paying bribes for everything from procuring supplies to parking his car. He felt obliged to visit the local intelligence office weekly, often with folded bills of cash in hand. One particular civil servant came to his office every Thursday to collect his cut as if it were a salary. He never asked for payment, of course, but everyone in Syria—including Al Barazi—was adept at reading between the lines by then.

One day, Al Barazi walked into his secretary’s office and announced: “I have forgotten why I came here,” meaning back to Syria. As he tallied the incoming profits, he realized his company wasn’t keeping up with the demands for bribes. “I was working with millions but ending up empty,” he says. “Finally, I left. I left everything: the money, the showroom, the engineers. Had I stayed, I would have gone crazy or become corrupt. The temptation was too great.”

Al Barazi landed in Abu Dhabi in 2003, bankrupt once again and certain that he would never return to Syria. The Gulf countries had more money, less corruption, and greater opportunities than Syria, he told himself. The UAE is arid, but the government was interested in finding ways to farm. Al Barazi decided he would build the same company, an agricultural business, with the same brands he’d represented in Syria. This time, though, it would be bigger. He would prove to the world it wasn’t he but Assad who had failed back home. For nearly a decade, he thought of little else.

Kalaat Jendal, a mountain village outside Damascus and the site of an ancient fort, was once a tourist attraction. Circa 1987. @Omar Al Bahra

Six

Syrians abroad were sure that Assad would fall in a matter of months, as had happened to the leaders of Egypt and Tunisia in 2011. So Al Barazi and his friends poured everything they had into aiding the revolutionaries and mitigating the initial humanitarian fallout. Businessmen supplying retailers in the country added boxes of donated cell phones and cameras to their shipments. Housewives sent winter blankets and raided their children’s closets for extra shoes. They packed flour into plastic bags and bought sugar in bulk for those fleeing the country.

Meanwhile, Syrians from all over the world were wiring thousands of dollars to their relatives to help them cope. By November 2011, the Syrian pound had lost 25 percent of its value relative to the dollar, and prices were shooting up. What was happening in the country would pale against what was to come, but to the diaspora it already looked like a crisis.

Leaders were emerging among the exiles. In September, Al Barazi changed his “work” to Events Manager of a newly created Facebook group, the Syrian Expatriates Coordinating Committee. He was already at the center of a group of Abu Dhabi Syrians that had grown to about 100 core members—most of them recruited through social media. “We were engineers and teachers and doctors, and slowly we started getting to know one another,” recalls Al Barazi.

The Abu Dhabi group was one of dozens being formed across the Middle East. Al Barazi sometimes spoke to his fellow expatriates on Skype or messaged them via Facebook. Jeddah in Saudi Arabia—home to a number of well-to-do Syrian businessmen—was the locus of activity. In Kuwait, young professionals from eastern Syria started gathering after work in cafés and restaurants. “We designed Facebook pages and prepared videos,” remembers Taha, an expatriate involved in the efforts. When demonstrators inside the country uploaded video footage or photos, the diaspora circulated them among news stations and chat sites.

A 2014 campaign poster created by Syrians in the UAE to help gather food and other goods to send to Syria for Ramadan. Al Jazeera, the Qatari news network, played a key role as well. Activists in Syria wanted Samsung Galaxy phones, since the devices could broadcast directly to the channel, which was covering the Arab Spring day and night. Online payment and SMS systems allowed exiles in the rest of the Middle East to top up activists’ phones directly.

The Syrian diaspora was quickly joining a long line of exile movements that had inserted itself into conflicts back home. The civil war in Sri Lanka, which lasted twenty-six years, was fueled in part by the ethnic Tamil diaspora living in Canada. Leaders raised thousands from individual families and as much as $79,000 from individual businesses. In the 1960s, the Eritrean Liberation Front became known for “shakedowns” of diaspora members, and in the 1970s, the Irish Republican Army turned to the largely Catholic Irish-American diaspora for everything from moral support to money.

What made the Syrian case special was not just the sheer scale of the funding, but also the new tools of revolution made famous by the Arab Spring: social media. With apps such as Facebook, Skype, and various tools for instant messaging, friends and family far from Syria could ask the people inside what they needed, then arrange to have it bought, packaged, and delivered through a web of checkpoints, border crossings, and armed groups. Sponsors of rebels and private militia could speak to their soldiers through WhatsApp, Viber, or a host of other messaging services. The only limitation was the cell phone signal. In addition to providing real-time communication between those in the country and those abroad, the network effectively eliminated the need for a centralized organization within the diaspora. Anyone with a smartphone could—and did—become their own relief agency.

In Abu Dhabi, Al Barazi channeled the single-mindedness that had made and remade his business into the effort to reclaim his homeland. There were no limits to what he would spend from his savings; Just tell me what you need, he’d reply to any request. Even on days when the hopelessness of the struggle threatened to rise within him, he used his deep baritone to rally spirits at meetings and to beseech his fellow expatriates not to give up. On Facebook, he lightened the mood with crude jokes about the Assad family, cursing their souls and begging God for forgiveness for his wrath. He ended emails with an insult to the regime: Bashar al-Assad, the dog.

Al Barazi and fellow organizers began meeting face to face once a week to fill requests from Syria, coming together as a tansiqiya, or an informal organizing committee. Similar committees were forming inside Syria, and they connected with parallel diaspora groups to forge supply chains. At first activists wanted cameras, mobile phones, and chargers—the tools to coordinate and document demonstrations. Central to the success of the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia had been getting the message out to the world. In Libya, the plight of the revolutionaries had prompted a military response by the United States, the United Kingdom, and fourteen other countries and led to the death of Gaddafi. Those fighting the regime in Syria were sure that for their country victory would come just the same.

With each passing week, the death toll rose, but it always seemed to fall short of what it would take to build true international outrage. The Syrian government killed dozens of civilians at first, but never more than a few at a time. Then it was hundreds. By late summer 2011, rights groups counted more than 1,500 dead—most of them shot, shelled, or tortured to death by the Assad regime. By November of that year, the United Nations (UN) put the number at 3,500.

As the horrors compounded, Al Barazi was sure the world’s patience with the Syrian regime would run out. And at first, it seemed he was correct. In August 2011, the United States, Great Britain, France, and the European Union all demanded that Assad resign. “President Assad believes that he can silence the voices of his people by resorting to the repressive tactics of the past,” President Barack Obama of the United States said on August 18, 2011. “But he is wrong…. It is time for the Syrian people to determine their own destiny, and we will continue to stand firmly on their side.”

Children in the Al Amara neighborhood of old town Damascus. Circa 1989. ©Omar Al Bahra

Seven

One brisk Thursday evening in the spring of 2014, Al Barazi slipped into a side entrance of Abu Dhabi’s Le Méridien hotel. The establishment was well past its prime, a rundown landmark on the furthest edge of the city. But it was nevertheless packed with men in suits and women with perfectly flat-ironed hair teased into busy updos. The gathering was meant to start at 8 p.m., but the Syrians—who, as a rule, are tardy—had arrived early, sweeping into the grandly named Versailles Hall banquet room with a sense of anticipation.

Al Barazi greeted the head of every family with a handshake and a smile, if not a hug and a kiss. After half an hour of making the rounds, he found his chair, leaned back, and exhaled with satisfaction. Along with his suit, the Free Syrian sash he wore around his neck gave him a regal, imposing air. As he eyed the room, a young Syrian girl weaved through the tables with a basket of roses, giving one to each woman.

Attendees filed toward the buffet as a brawny Christian man with a three-day beard took to the stage to play Syrian favorites on his lute. Someone cued the Syrian national anthem. Al Barazi stood, reared his head back, and, surrounded by his people, began to sing. Over the next four hours, Abu Dhabi’s Syrians raised Dh10,000 ($2,700) to send back home.

By the summer of 2011, fundraising events like this became an integral part of tansiqiya activities across the diaspora. The exiles had planned to keep their compatriots inside the country supplied for a few months, perhaps a year, before pressure from the rest of the world wore Assad down. But the months kept passing, and the expenses grew. To raise money, the Syrians started to self-tax their social lives. Instead of simply gathering for tea or lunch, they turned every occasion into a charity benefit. First in people’s homes and then in banquet halls and public parks, the expatriates imposed fees for showing up: Dh150 ($40) per person attending the dinner, for example, with a hat passed around afterward for more.

Increasingly emboldened, Al Barazi’s Abu Dhabi group began placing ads in the local newspapers, lamenting Syria’s plight and providing a generic email address for anyone interested in helping out. Through fundraising and donations, the tansiqiya managed to pull together a monthly budget of about $400,000, with Al Barazi himself contributing about $1,000 a month.

Individual activists such as Wissam’s wife, Aswan, found additional ways to raise money. Along with a handful of other women, she started crocheting scarves and sashes in the Syrian national colors to sell to colleagues and friends. The wares were snapped up, so she and Wissam found a Chinese supplier to make mugs, mouse pads, flash drives, and pins. Their downtown Abu Dhabi apartment soon became a showroom for revolutionary apparel. Al Barazi was an enthusiastic client, and his office was soon littered with Syrian paraphernalia.

When not raising money, the expatriates spent it. They stockpiled blankets and winter coats and all manner of foodstuffs in their garages and living rooms. The tansiqiya simply plugged its shipments into established merchant networks and added them to existing orders, such as crates of electronics from factories in East Asia. Traders have moved from the Gulf to the Mediterranean and back for centuries, and as recently as 2009, Syria accounted for about one out of every five dollars traded with the six Gulf countries. What were a few more boxes of cell phones, clothing, or food?

Diaspora groups such as Al Barazi’s quickly proved able to deliver aid to areas that even the largest international organizations struggled to reach. Between 2011 and mid-2014, the United Nations was legally required to work with the Syrian government through the government-run Syrian Arab Red Crescent in areas designated by the authorities. As a result, many neighborhoods held by the opposition remained without official aid for years. To be sure, there were areas that the diaspora couldn’t get to either, but their networks of contacts and facilitators were far superior to any official agency’s. For example, it could take the UN weeks to establish how many people lived in a village and to figure out what they needed. An exiled Syrian originally from that same village could have that information in hours over WhatsApp.

But by the end of 2011, Al Barazi and his friends were facing a dilemma. New types of requests had begun to arrive from inside Syria. The international condemnation had been unable to stop the Syrian government’s brutal crackdowns. Abu Akhram—a member of Al Barazi’s group—remembers it this way: “Instead of cameras, the activists started asking for guns.”

Military men cut in line to fetch bread from a bakery in 1987. Under Hafez Al Assad’s rule, many bakeries opened two windows, with one reserved for the armed forces and intelligence services. In recent years, the regime has targeted bakeries in rebel-held areas on bombing runs, killing civilians lined up for their daily bread. ©Omar Al Bahra

Eight

Al Barazi’s tansiqiya was divided over whether to provide the fighters with weapons and ammunition. From the safety of cafés and apartments, they weighed their unease against the insecurity of their families back home. It was becoming clear that the protest movement they’d been funding from Abu Dhabi was metastasizing into a civil war. The regime would continue to crack down. The demonstrators wouldn’t give up. Weapons would be relatively easy to procure. On Syria’s eastern border, Iraq was struggling to emerge from a decade of conflict. The country was awash with light arms and middlemen willing to traffic them.

In Abu Dhabi, the debate split primarily along geographic lines. “It depended [on] which area someone was from,” says Al Barazi. “The people from Damascus were against violence because they belonged to merchant families.” Exiles from the rest of the country had fewer qualms. Other factors came into play as well. Some of the group’s intellectuals feared armed conflict would quash any hope for democracy in Syria. Others, including more established businessmen, worried that funding military actions would anger their host governments in the Gulf.

The Abu Dhabi tansiqiya ultimately decided that the war wasn’t theirs to win—or support. The reason was twofold, remembers Al Barazi. “First, we have to help civilians because they are the revolution,” he said. Without them, there was nothing to fight for. But even more important was the worry that the fires of military engagement, once ignited, would rage out of control. “No matter what you send,” he argued, “it is never enough.” There is always more fighting to be done.

Al Barazi places his Free Syrian sash over a statue of Nelson Mandela while visiting South Africa. 2013. Courtesy of Mezyan Al Barazi. But even as Al Barazi and his friends focused their attention on civilian needs, the networks they had formed put them in a position to witness the rush of money following the fighters. Soon they began to hear about colleagues and friends in the region helping the Free Syrian Army—an umbrella name adopted by early rebel groups—or other bands of armed men. Businessmen in Dubai will help us, newly formed brigade members told the exiles during phone calls, excitedly recounting grandiose promises. Many of the fighters were family and friends.

As the Syrian government escalated its campaign of violence, people in the diaspora found it difficult not to support the rebels, at least morally. And there were plenty of ways to help without buying bullets. Weapons and ammunition were becoming increasingly available in the country, but supplies such as flour, sugar, and cigarettes were just as valuable to undernourished fighters.

The Abu Dhabi tansiqiya elected not to fund the fighting as a group, but its individual members were left to consult their consciences. “If you want to help, do it privately,” was how Al Barazi put it. He himself would elect to do so only once. A ragtag brigade of young neighborhood men, including some of his relatives, wore him down with daily requests. Rumors were swirling that Assad was about to deploy chemical weapons. “We need masks, just masks,” they pleaded during phone calls and in WhatsApp messages. Al Barazi found a place to procure the masks and organized the shipment. Everything, he says, was paid for out of his pocket.

If anything, the rise of armed opposition in the country increased the flow of funds from a barrage of sources into the Syrian conflict. In 2012, a Syrian sugar magnate named Firas Tlass—believed to be the second richest man in Syria—fled the country. In an interview in The Daily Telegraph later that year, he said he would devote his fortune to funding the opposition, including the Free Syrian Army.

Many in the diaspora had personal reasons for funding the rebels who were striking back at the Assad regime. In 1982, Hafez al-Assad deployed helicopters, soldiers, and artillery to crush an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama, killing some 30,000 people. Many of the survivors fled to Saudi Arabia or Qatar and had been nurturing their hatred for decades.

Governments got involved as well. Qatar’s military intelligence service was searching for ways to fund rebels; but, lacking the networks to do so, they turned to Syrian businessmen—including exiles sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood—who promised they had the connections needed to rally money and arms. In July 2012, Qatar also sponsored the creation of the Syrian Business Forum, a coalition of opposition businessmen that promised to devote their fortunes, with Qatari support, to the rebels. Through these and other channels, the government would spend as much as $3 billion trying to unseat the Assad regime, according to a 2013 estimate by the Financial Times.

Meanwhile, in Kuwait, the conflict was perceived by many to be unfolding along sectarian lines, between the Assads—who belonged to the minority Alawite offshoot of Shia Islam—and the broader Sunni majority. Kuwaiti Sunni clerics and politicians began to fundraise openly for the rebels, gathering friends and neighbors in their large tea rooms to solicit funds and recruiting Syrian expatriates to help. Armed with lists of potential donors, the Syrian exiles went door to door making the case for funding the civil war. Once the money was secured, they used it to recruit fighters and provide them with weapons and supplies.

As money poured into Syria, it not only fueled the conflict—it also splintered the opposition into a multitude of small armed groups competing for funding. “When you give money to fighters, you buy loyalty,” says Al Barazi. Fighters sought to please donors, tweaking their ideologies or growing beards to appear more pious to religious-minded funders. Some groups even renamed themselves in honor of their benefactors. The Sheikh Hajaj Al Ajmi Battalion in the village of Al Bukamal, for example, named itself for a young, charismatic Kuwaiti cleric later designated by the United States as a financier of terrorism.

Al Barazi’s warning about violence creating the bottomless pit of need had become a reality—and it made the work he was doing more difficult still. As networks of middlemen coalesced around the arms trade, they grew unwilling to carry other, less well-paying wares. As one of Al Barazi’s friends complained, by 2013 it had become “easier to deliver a gun inside Syria than medicine.” Rebels took the place of unarmed protesters, and the impetus behind Al Barazi’s tansiqiya began to fade. “The move to arms relegated us—it made us unimportant,” says Abu Akhram. “We realized by late 2012 that, as a civic group, we were being left behind.”

Weary from a journey into Damascus from a neighboring village, an elderly man reclines by the side of the road in the Al Hijaz neighborhood. Circa 1990. ©Omar Al Bahra

Nine

As violence spread across Syria, it seeped into the diaspora’s work. In 2013, the Syrian government put the Palestine refugee camp of Yarmouk, a thriving suburb just miles from central Damascus, under siege. Syrian rebels had started using the neighborhood as a base to slip into the capital. With more than 150,000 people packed into a single square mile, it was easy to disappear—especially since a growing number of the residents were becoming sympathetic to their cause.

The Syrian army sent in soldiers. Government fighter jets bombed a school. The army set up a ring around the camp, preventing tens of thousands of remaining residents from leaving and stopping others from going in. Soon, Yarmouk began to starve.

Al Barazi had friends in Yarmouk, and from Abu Dhabi he scrambled to find a way to break the siege. At first, he thought the blockade would last just a few days. But it soon became clear that the troops were there to stay. Local clerics issued fatwas so that cats and dogs could be cooked to eat. Families chewed on grass or boiled it in water. By January 2014, at least fifty people had died from a lack of food and medicine.

Al Barazi reached out to a member of a charity run by Syrian doctors living abroad. Hospitals and medical personnel had been targeted by the Syrian government, and Al Siraj tried to fill the gap, smuggling in some fifty health workers to field hospitals, garages, and basements. Several of the doctors working with the charity had attended events hosted by Al Barazi’s tansiqiya and shared harrowing stories from their mission.

Beyond its bravery and access, Al Siraj had resources. In December 2013, the group posted a photo of its monthly spending on Facebook showing a total of $263,400. Indeed, the group had found donor support among some of Syria’s most prominent exiles, including two of the richest men in Doha: brothers Moataz and Ramez Khayyat, whose construction firm, UrbaCon International, had won contracts to build facilities for soccer’s 2022 World Cup. The company’s Syrian offices, equipment, and land had been seized by the regime in 2011, and the brothers claimed a loss of at least $200 million. Having relocated permanently to Doha, they said they had spent hundreds of thousands on relief work since the revolution had started. In 2014, when several businessmen provided a total of $5 million worth of flour and wheat to Syria, the Khayyats paid $600,000 of it.

Al Barazi’s contact in Al Siraj said the group could smuggle supplies through the blockade, with payments to guards to look the other way. At first, the operation seemed to have been a success. Al Barazi confirmed that small amounts of supplies had reached their destination. But soon, friends and family members began to complain, claiming that Al Barazi’s intermediary in Yarmouk was mishandling the aid. He had made a list of beneficiaries and was delivering help only to them.

It was not easy to work out what was happening, and Al Siraj said it was unaware of the alleged favoritism. Yet Al Barazi knew that sorting through the tensions was vital. When aid made its way through the blockade, distribution points were at risk of being swarmed by desperate residents scrambling for supplies.

In the meantime, word got around of Al Barazi’s success at running the blockade. Others in the diaspora began to harass him, asking him to put them in touch with his intermediary. The inquiries grew strangely aggressive. Previously he would have simply assumed that his fellow exiles wanted to send aid through the intermediary as well. Now, though, he was sure something else was going on. Did rivals wish to steal the aid? Or the money?

A few days later, Al Barazi’s phone buzzed with a message. It was a photo of the intermediary in Yarmouk, dead. There was nothing else—no explanation, no context. Since the beginning of the conflict, Al Barazi had seen plenty of pictures of the dead. But this was the first time that death had struck someone because of the work Al Barazi was doing.

For weeks, Al Barazi struggled with the implications. His contact’s death forced him to confront the growing ambiguities of the Syrian conflict. Had the murder been a warning from the regime to those trying to break the siege? Had it been carried out by corrupt aid groups or businessmen seeking a monopoly on supplies going into Yarmouk? Or was it an accident? Al Barazi assumed it was all of these things and none of them. In the end, it didn’t matter, because it was a reminder that every possible adversary could have pounced.

One day several weeks later, Al Barazi pulled out his phone and flipped through his pictures until he found a picture of the dead man from happier times. When it was taken, the man was just forty-three years old. He wore his brown hair artfully disheveled. Al Barazi kept the picture on his phone as a reminder that death could strike from any direction.

An effort that had started as humanitarian aid had become entangled in the war economy. Those struggling in Syria were no longer battling only for the future of their country; millions of dollars were at play, and the opportunities for greed, envy, and violence were endless. Reaching out to the wrong person at the wrong time with the wrong information could get someone killed.

But not reaching out seemed worse. On January 17, 2014, Al Barazi posted an account from inside the blockade on his Facebook wall. “I asked my [friend] in the besieged camp Al Yarmouk yesterday: ‘Did you get any assistance?’ ‘We got a barrel [bomb] that resulted in eight martyrs and twenty wounded,’ he replied.” Al Barazi’s next post was directed at Bashar al-Assad: “Damn your soul,” he wrote.

“Please don’t urinate here,” a sign advises under Damascus’s Victoria Bridge, near the stronghold of a notorious pro-Assad militia. A passerby shows his subtle dissent. Circa 1983. ©Omar Al Bahra

Ten

Over the next six months, Al Barazi’s tansiqiya would find that violence defined their work more and more. Each time they put together a shipment of food or medicine or clothes, the group had to check and double-check who, if anyone, was left to receive it inside Syria.

One recent container had been ready to go when Syrian government planes bombed its destination, the small town of Morek. The residents fled down the road, joining other displaced Syrians in a squalid makeshift camp, but as Al Barazi was preparing to redirect the shipment, the planes struck again. Having spotted the tents and roadside fires, they attacked, killing fifty-two women and children who had survived the destruction of their village. The aid intended for the village sat in a warehouse in Dubai, in need of a new recipient.

Getting cash to family and friends, meanwhile, had become nearly impossible. In order to limit the risks of terrorist financing, the UAE had shut down most money wiring services to Syria. One exchange house still conducted transactions, but sending money was risky. The Syrian government monitored the banking system for transactions that might indicate the recipient was an opposition liaison. In order to avoid detection, donations had to be split into dozens of smaller transfers and sent indirectly via people in cities and towns surrounding the final destination.

Businessmen could serve as unofficial brokers, but that was costly and difficult to arrange. “There are people fleeing the country, and they want to get their money out [of Syria],” explains Rani, an expat involved in a tansiqiya in Dubai. “We say, ‘We’ll give you money here [in the UAE],’ and they release the [equivalent amount of] money inside.” By late 2014, the war had cost the Syrian pound three-quarters of its value, and people outside Syria could disguise money for the rebellion as an opportunistic currency play.

Yet even as sending aid got harder, Al Barazi’s family in Syria became more dependent on him not just for help, but for survival. Since the beginning of the conflict, twenty-four members of his extended family have died fighting the regime—and today their sons, daughters, wives, and mothers turn to Al Barazi as a lifeline, fleeing in planes or buses he pays for to housing he arranges. A sister-in-law lives in an apartment he owns in central Damascus, a vestige from better days. Armed men recently came knocking on the door, demanding that she leave. Through a lawyer in Damascus, Al Barazi was able to forestay her eviction—but for how long, he can never be sure. “At any moment, they are waiting to take her,” he says, as if adding, that’s just how it is.

Meanwhile, in Abu Dhabi, the tension has begun to rip through the diaspora. After watching four years of endless atrocities, some expats’ views about the war radicalized or grew deeply religious. Others fell to more venal temptations. A member of the Abu Dhabi tansiqiya was caught skimming. In order to preserve unity, the group expelled him—but quietly. “The man was a thief in Syria,” says Al Barazi, “and he is a thief now.”

Amidst it all, Abu Dhabi’s tansiqiya is expanding as the existing diaspora absorbs hundreds of thousands more Syrians fleeing to the Gulf and Europe, as well as millions in neighboring countries including Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon. In the UAE alone, expats estimate that some 100,000 Syrians have recently arrived. In countries such as Jordan, the preexisting Syrian diaspora has multiplied times ten.

Unlike the middle-class businessmen who fled decades ago, the new arrivals are often destitute—and increasingly dependent on their more established relatives and friends. “Each one of us here is sustaining fifty people,” says Abu Akhram of the Abu Dhabi group. “The diaspora has been able to help the people and the revolution to survive.”

Farmers from outlying villages hawk vegetables in downtown Damascus across from the headquarters of the Syrian Arab News Agency. ©Omar Al Bahra

Eleven

Every Friday afternoon, Abu Dhabi’s seaside corniche bustles with families picnicking in the sun. A few times a year, the tansiqiya posts a call on Facebook for its ranks to gather on a shady patch of grass, where they dine on mezze and grilled meat and sip cool yogurt drinks. Al Barazi shows up early; he pitches his chair toward the front of the lawn to watch the crowds arrive.

After everyone has accepted a glass of juice and eaten at least a handful of dates, the wallets snap open. A doctor from Dubai counts bills, pausing to tell his son not to ride his bike across the picnic blanket. A mother of three hands over several hundred dirhams. Tansiqiya members collect the donations in unlabeled envelopes without ever saying a word about the bills changing hands.

The Syrian diaspora is fast running out of money. Fundraisers that once would have pulled in more than $10,000 now barely top a couple thousand. By some estimates, the fighting in Syria has destroyed nearly half the country’s economy, and attending to the accompanying suffering has cost the diaspora most of its accumulated wealth. Four years of neglect have driven Al Barazi’s company into the ground. Consumed with Skype calls to Syria and requests for assistance, Al Barazi failed to seek out new contracts, and one by one the old ones expired. Once again, Syria has claimed his life savings and destroyed the business he built. Where he used to contribute $1,000 a month to the cause, he now struggles to send even $300. “This conflict is getting long,” he says.

Even if the fighting were to end today, the depleted savings of thousands of Syrian expatriates would slow down the country’s recovery. Four years ago, Al Barazi would have been well placed to expand his business back into a stable Syria; he could have invested in a showroom, recultivated abandoned farms, and helped resuscitate the country’s agricultural industry. Instead, he and fellow exiles spend their money shipping seeds to besieged areas of Syria, where subsistence farming is the latest survival strategy.

Al Barazi may have been bankrupted again, but this time he got something for his money. The conflict in Syria has destroyed the country he came from, but in doing so, it created a community where there was none; built a nation—of exiles, yes, but a nation—that did not exist before.

These days, for the Syrians gathered at the seaside, the funds being raised are of only secondary importance, says Al Barazi. In exile, the tansiqiya can build an ideal of Syria that no longer exists back home. In the memories of the diaspora, the country takes on a luminescence tinged with nostalgia: the recollection of a land foreign to war and violent death. That idea of Syria has long existed in their imaginations, but only now, abroad, does it have ground to stand on.

On a few Fridays a year, Al Barazi lives in the country he always dreamed of. Sunnis, Druze, Christians—there’s even a family of Alawites—sit and eat together. They leave their bags unwatched and entrust their children to friends they have just met. Here on the corniche crowded with picnickers, there’s no trace of the conflict tearing apart their homeland. They are simply friends enjoying lunch on a lazy afternoon.

Credits

Godfathers and Thieves is Story No. 7 from Deca, first published September 2015.



Author: Elizabeth Dickinson

Lead Editor: Sonia Faleiro

Editors: Stephan Faris and Marc Herman

Art Director: Madeleine Eiche

Copy Chief: Mia Lipman

Fact Checker: Zanna K. McKay



Copyright © 2015 by Elizabeth Dickinson

About the Author

Elizabeth Dickinson’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Economist, Politico Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the Financial Times, among others. She was the first Western journalist to chronicle the private Kuwaiti donor network funding Syria’s opposition and has written extensively about Gulf financing of conflict. Dickinson is the author of Who Shot Ahmed, the true life murder mystery of a 22-year-old videographer shot in cold blood at the height of Bahrain’s Arab Spring. She is a former Gulf Correspondent for The National newspaper, assistant managing editor at Foreign Policy magazine, and Nigeria correspondent for The Economist.

About Deca

Deca is a cooperative of award-winning journalists bringing deeply reported, global stories straight to your phone, tablet, or computer. We are Rania Abouzeid, Elizabeth Dickinson, Sonia Faleiro, Stephan Faris, McKenzie Funk, Vanessa M. Gezari, Marc Herman, Mara Hvistendahl, Richard Poplak, Delphine Schrank, and Tom Zoellner. To subscribe, download our iOS app, buy individual stories for Kindle or Web, or learn more about Deca, visit www.decastories.com. You can follow us on Twitter at @decastories.

Endnotes

1. About these photos

Omar Al Bahra’s first camera was a well-kept secret. By the 1980s, Syria had set strict limits on photography, including the amount of film that could be bought and sold annually. Most cameras left in civilian hands were clumsy and old, but a few lucky journalists and artists managed to get something better. A young woman working at the Japanese embassy offered to help Al Bahra—for a fee. One day, she returned from Tokyo carrying a shiny new SLR in her diplomatic pouch.

From the moment he began to shoot, Al Bahra’s new passion was a high-stakes affair. Film was expensive at 16–18 lira per roll, and it was usually smuggled across the border from Lebanon. More cameras started to pop up in the market during the Lebanese civil war; soldiers had stolen them from civilian houses there. The quality was mixed.

There were other costs, too. “I wanted to record life in Damascus, but it was very difficult,” Al Bahra recalls. “Anywhere I would shoot a photo, I would have intelligence forces stopping me, and they took me many times to the muhabbarat,” or secret police.

Al Bahra was defiant, continuing his work until he emigrated to the United Arab Emirates in 1994. Still, with every visit back home, he took the chance of documenting the daily churn of the capital city.

During his last visit to Damascus in 2003, Al Bahra was detained by the police. They ran him through a labyrinth of security agencies, each one interrogating and then releasing him, saying another branch would take over. After seven days, Al Bahra was put under house arrest. He paid to be released and fled abroad, where he remains today, relishing in the memories of a capital whose spirit refused to be suppressed.

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