Breakdown of Conflict Transmission 119 Initially, most people truly believed the nonviolent path was the only path. It started changing, [but] the change didn’t happen overnight. That transition first included: what do you do with soldiers who defect? These people are being tracked down by the government and killed, and their wives were being raped and their parents were being shot. So there was a debate, can they defend themselves and their own families and villages? The first transition was yes, they have the right, actually they have the responsibility to refuse these orders. And when they go in hiding, if the government is pursuing them, they have the right to defend themselves and their families. And the next phase became, what about these soldiers defending their whole village, their whole town, or their neighborhood? Because the regime is coming to practice collective punishment on the cities. Can they defend their own villages and neighborhoods? The answer was yes. And then the next question becomes, what if a young man joins them because there weren’t enough defecting soldiers to defend the village? What if a young man says, I will join you? Yes. And that transition eventually became, what if we [the revolutionaries] raid [government forces] before they raid us? What if we go and raid a Syrian army base and take the weapons so that they don’t use them against us? Yeah, that sounds good, too. He added, wryly, “I know from here, it sounds great to be Gandhi.” Yet, because regime forces and militia known as al-Shabiha were hunting down pacifists and defectors, this left the opposition with no choice but to fight back. Belal, despite having initiated dialogue with the regime in the past, also came to side with the revolution by the end of the summer. He said, When people rise up for a change, you should accept that. I learned that here [in the United States]. People were going out in their bare chest, they’re resisting, they’re asking for change. And they were met with weapons, machine guns, and attacked. Basically they were paying the price with their life. Even we supported that they carry arms because they were getting killed and slaughtered. As violence worsened significantly over the course of 2012, activists reported that many members in their respective communities came to sympathize with the uprising within a year of its onset. Sabreen, a youth activist from Southern California, reported that different events, including a slew of massacres occurring in people’s hometowns and cities, “hit different people at different points. So there wasn’t one specific event. [But] you can’t really go back on all those massacres, you can’t go back on all those deaths. And you can’t just accept the regime after all that.” The escalation of the conflict over the course of 2011 gradually brought different politicized factions into alignment with the view that the regime must fall. As a result, Syrians converted many preexisting organizations to the Arab Spring (see Table 4.2). Groups such as the Syrian American Council, which lay relatively dormant since its founding in 2005 due to the threat of transnational repression (see Chapter 3), and elite-led organizations like Ammar Abdulhamid’s Tharwa Foundation and Dr. Radwan Ziadeh’s Center for Political and Strategic Studies, immediately converted their groups to the Arab Spring. Activists also converted professional service organizations, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press