110 Coming Out and Coming Together in the square and injured hundreds (Ishaq 2012). The massacre backfired, however, by drawing international condemnation and stoking key defections. Saleh’s former ally and commander of the First Armored Division, General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, announced that his unit would defect to protect the protesters. Sadeq al-Ahmar, another prominent figure in the Hashid confederation (and of no relation to Ali Mohsen), also came to side with the revolution. This gave the sit-in movement in Sanaʻa armed protection by Mohsen and his division. At the same time, other protests and sit-in movements across Yemen remained exposed. The regime continued to target them with regularity, leading to dozens of deaths each week. The Yemeni diaspora did not experience the same degree of threats or fear as their Libyan and Syrian counterparts, as Chapter 3 describes, owing to the regime’s relative weakness and inability to effectively intimidate Saleh’s opponents abroad. Several activists, particularly those from the South, were concerned that they might have trouble returning to Yemen for going public. That said, many of these individuals took that risk out of a sense of moral obligation. Arsalan of Sheffield said that his family worried about potential retribution from the regime, but “I couldn’t stand to stay home and watch TV while my brothers and sisters were being killed back home and not do anything.” Furthermore, unlike their Syrian counterparts, no Yemeni diaspora respondents reported covering their faces at protests or witnessing others doing so, and only one interviewee guarded his identity online. Respondents reported that regime violence also undermined the sway of the regime over students on state-sponsored scholarships. Hanna, who had been active before 2011 organizing with southern Yemenis in New York, recalled, In the beginning, a lot of Yemenis, mainly from the North, were pro-Ali Abdullah Saleh. So that was one of our main challenges. [At] the first rally that we had, we had a group come rally against us. And it was mainly people from the embassy, mainly students that the regime was paying for, they said well, we’re paying for your schooling, you have to come out to this rally and support the regime against the other activists. [But] a lot of them, after the killings and after just the tortures and a lot of things that were going on, [those] Yemenis came to our side. So the pro-government rallies started dissipating. Furthermore, while a core group of activists had already begun mobilizing on behalf of the revolution in February and March, the Friday of Dignity Massacre on March 18 spurred a dramatic spike in protest participation in the diaspora. Adel of Michigan described it as a “turning point” because the killings motivated many who were not previously active or were pro-regime to join their calls for Saleh to step down. Idriss of Washington, DC, recalled, “At that point, there was no going back. Whatever happens, we weren’t going to stick with Saleh anymore.” Respondents attested that they found the footage of the protests appalling. As Ali from the DC-area community described, Personally, what motivated me most was all those videos I watched on Facebook and on the news. All those young people getting killed by Saleh’s army. I felt like I have to do https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press