150 Voice for Rebellion and Relief Protect doctrine, a global agreement reached by UN member states in 2005. As Y. of Manchester, an activist and scholar of international law, argued, The idea behind this principle is that where there’s a mass atrocity situation as in Syria, the international community has a responsibility to step in if the government is failing to protect its people. You can find a lot of differences between Syria and Libya that would make intervention less favorable in Syria. Okay, fine. That doesn’t mean that the international community no longer has a responsibility. By the end of 2013, however, it became clear to activists in the United States and Britain that their governments were not going to intervene decisively against Assad by enforcing a no-fly zone or by launching punitive strikes against his use of chemical weapons. Nevertheless, they continued to lobby for more effective assistance to vetted units in the Free Syrian Army, to request funding for civil-society-building initiatives in Syria, and for expanded humanitarian aid. Syrians attested that their lobbying work also included arguments about how regime violence enabled the spread of extremists like Ahrar al-Sham and the Islamic State (ISIS, referred to by President Obama as ISIL). As Hussam, national chairman of the Syrian American Council, recalled, Early on, I will say until [2013], we focused on pressuring and convincing the Obama administration to arm and train the Free Syrian Army. The argument is that unless we do so, Assad will continue to engage in murder, shootings, sending barrel bombs, missiles on people. And as the regime weakens, that vacuum would be filled by extremist groups such as ISIS. So there’s a threat in allowing for the FSA to be weak. As of 2014, we’re focusing on reminding the Obama administration that as they’re engaged in defeating ISIS, there is no solution to the threat of ISIS without the elimination of the Assad regime and the establishment of a strong, democratic Syria. Otherwise, the conflict with ISIS will go on indefinitely – and Assad is actually benefitting from this targeting of ISIS. Our argument is that ISIS is a result of Assad’s oppression and a result of the vacuum created through repression by Assad’s regime. So that is our main focus. Other areas include pressuring the administration to increase their foreign humanitarian aid to Syrian refugees around the world. Abdulaziz likewise attested that members of Britain’s Syria Parliamentary Affairs Group, which was formed in late 2013, did the same. We are trying to do our best to show, look, what’s going on in Syria is mainly caused by Assad, and that the extremism is because of the lack of action from the international community. I mean, if you look at ISIS, they just appeared about fourteen months ago. And the Syrian revolution has been going on more than three years and a half. If the international community, the UN Security Council, [upheld] their responsibility, we wouldn’t have reached the point where we have this extremism. Around the time that some politicos in Washington, DC, and Britain were suggesting that their governments partner with the Assad regime against ISIS, the DC-based Syrian Emergency Task Force helped to launch a major campaign to pressure foreign governments into rejecting this option. This effort, referred to by Mouaz as the “Caesar file,” publicized the testimonials and evidence of a regime defector who had photographed thousands of deceased detainees murdered by torture and starvation in regime prisons. The task force brought Caesar to testify at hearings in Congress (much to the consternation, he added, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press