168 Voice for Rebellion and Relief even if you are in the US or UK, you are part of what’s going on, but being geographically far away is not helpful for understanding what’s going on. From another side, activists and people on the ground aren’t always willing to listen to people who have been outside Syria for a long time because they feel that [those outside] are emotionally disconnected. Many of them started to say, you don’t feel us – especially when you are asking them to stay peaceful. They say you don’t know the brutality we face, you don’t know the horror of the Syrian army, the Syrian Shabiha [loyalist militias and thugs]. So I felt that I need to start to go back to Syria to understand what’s going on. That will help us to plan for our movement in a better way and to get more in touch with other activists, to rebuild the trust with people on the ground and to be more effective. For physicians like Dr. Ayman Jundi in Manchester, going home also enabled volunteers to lend their labor and expertise in medicine. We went down [to Syria] and did a few courses. We’ve been organizing trips for people to go and operate in field hospitals. That kind of activity started very early on. Very quickly, the [Syrian British Medical] Society became seen as an arm of the revolution, but it’s not a political organization. It’s just, as it happened, the medical need is in the areas that are being bombed by the regime. The regime’s hospitals are still functioning, they’re still working, they’re getting their supplies – not so the hospitals on the other side! So the emphasis of the Society has been where the need is. Others transported medical aid and equipment to liberated zones. Ousama of the Syrian Bristol community, for example, drove ambulances as part of a volunteer convoy into Syria several times, which he arranged in coordination with medical councils. We used to take the powder called Celox, very famous in Canada, used by loggers who cut trees using chainsaws. It stops bleeding straight away. In the city of Aleppo, they formed the medical council and they started coordinating all the activities, overseeing about eighteen hospitals in the north. So we found that the best way is to take everything to them. They sort it out and they see where everything is needed and they divert it. Because there are a lot of amputees as well, one of the things we concentrate on taking is wheelchairs and crutches. Mohamed Taher Khairullah, an activist and the mayor of Prospect Park in New Jersey, also began to travel into Syria in December of 2012 to deliver humanitarian relief. He said, It started as an individual effort and it developed into joining an organization. Right now I work with Watan USA, which is a 501(c)(3) organization. We’re approved by the IRS and we’re tax deductible. I’ve been to Aleppo and many villages in the governorate of Aleppo, Idlib, Hama, mostly to deliver aid and to make contacts on the ground for future projects. Because the needs are rapidly changing, I stay in touch with people who do work on the ground, and through them we assess what we need to do. Obviously, as an organization, we also have projects that are consistently running such as school and two bakeries. Only one Syrian I interviewed attested that he had fought with the Free Syrian Army before 2013. He did not come from a political family or have any experience in political activism before the revolution. This interviewee first https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press