Remitting 161 “We posted a list of satellite phones, I think a hundred and fifty of them, that we as a charity had donated. I posted it in a Facebook group. I was like, if you have ten bucks, go online and [purchase] credit for it. And that’s what Libyan Americans did.” By purchasing essential items, diaspora donors helped to pay for the supplies and fuel that kept the revolution running. Other forms of aid that activists sent to Libya included basic necessities such as maps. Mohamed of Manchester explained, “I attended a meeting and there was a request for a satellite up-to-date picture of Misrata because missiles were being fired from certain locations, but they could not pinpoint where they were coming from.” As Gaddafi’s forces pummeled Misrata and the Nafusa Mountains, activists also mobilized to assist the harder-hit areas that lay outside of the NATO-protected zone. Assad of London’s World Medical Camp for Libya recalled, We started initially on the eastern side. That was liberated very quickly, so we only sent one shipment of food and medicine to that side, because after that, the big organizations got involved – the big charities and United Nations. So we moved to the west. We sent two people at the charity’s expense to Tunisia and to Malta. These guys were in charge of receiving the goods that we sent and finding a way to send them into Libya. From the Tunisian border, we used to smuggle from there into Libya. In Malta, we hired some fishing boats and some of the Libyans who came in fishing boats as refugees to Malta. We filled them with as much as we can. After that, there was a boat we used to charter to take the stuff out into Libya. We sent food, medicine, and either satellite phones or satellite-based internet systems to some of the hospitals, and we carried on doing that the whole time. For Syrians, the revolution and subsequent humanitarian disaster, which escalated into the largest refugee crisis since World War II, led diaspora activists to remit a range of resources to the revolution and humanitarian relief. Initially, as in the Libyan case, these remittances included communications equipment, such as satellite phones and covert recording devices, for the purposes of exposing events on the ground. Mohammad al-Abdallah, director of the DCbased Syria Justice and Accountability Centre, affirmed, One of the earlier strategies the government did inside Syria was when they surrounded and besieged a city, they basically stopped the communications. The response from the community here was let’s equip the activists there with satellite phones and satellite internet so they can reach out to TV stations and to media and to human rights groups and tell them about how Syria was. So that was one of the main activities that happened in the beginning, mid-2011 to early 2012. Dr. Nana of the Syrian Support Group went to Aleppo in June 2011 to observe what was going on for himself (Ward 2012). After joining the protest movement there, he recalled, I came back to the States and at that time all our activities were how to send hidden cameras in pens or in glasses or in the shape of a lighter or a watch, banners, computers, laptops, satellite phones, satellite internet, and so on. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press