Representing 153 5.2.2 Joining Revolutionary Groups and Cadres Activists also represented the revolution by serving as delegates for the various arms of the Libyan and Syrian opposition in an official capacity. For Libyans from the diaspora, much of this work took place while volunteering in the Gulf region or within Libya itself. After the regime severed communications between Benghazi and Tripoli, a number of respondents were recruited by newly appointed NTC information minister Mahmoud Shamman to launch a prorevolution satellite station. Broadcasting in Arabic out of Doha, the station was dubbed Libya AlAhrar. Shamman designed this station as an alternative to Libya’s state-run channel and to promote the revolution in coordination with the NTC. Shahrazad, who had traveled to Washington, DC, during the first week of the revolution to participate in protests and lobbying, was one of the many diaspora members who helped to run the station in Qatar. She explained, Our TV station became the focal place for people to look for information. We were trying to connect with the east and the west because Gaddafi controlled the west side of Libya at that time. I had a program called Libya al-Naas, Libya The People, targeted to Libyans. My show was in the Libyan dialect [because] I was trying to get in touch with the common Libyan person and bring people together. Gaddafi at that time was trying to divide the people and say that the west is doing this and the east is trying to confuse you, the east is this and the east did that. So every night, I showed a map of Libya with the green flag on it and the new flag closing in on the green to show people visually how things are liberating and progressing in the different parts. Because they would not get the news [otherwise]. Syrians too came to represent their revolution as long-distance members of Local Coordination Committees (LCC), an anti-violence activist network based in Syria. Others joined the Syrian National Council, formed in August 2011 in Istanbul to represent the revolution to the international community, before it was subsumed by the Syrian National Coalition the following year. Playing a role as representatives was critical, recalled Marah in Virginia, because, “We have the opportunity to go on TV, to communicate with the international community and to deliver their message.” Mohammad al-Abdallah, a civil society activist who came to the United States in 2009 as a political refugee and headed the Syria Justice and Accountability Centre as of 2014, recalled, I started working with a group of activists trying to organize activities on the ground. After the Local Coordination Committees emerged, I became one of their spokespersons for six months, from almost April to October in 2011, to communicate some of the demands of Syrians to the [US] government. I had to do it, because there was a vacuum. After that, I joined the Syrian National Council when it started. Rafif Jouejati, founder of FREE-Syria, a humanitarian organization and think tank in Washington, DC, also came to translate and speak for the Local Coordination Committees. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press