Escape from the Cult of Assad 61 were arrested, leading to a new wave of exile. Activists Ammar Abdulhamid and Khawla Yusuf, a married couple, moved to the suburbs of Washington, DC in 2005 after being threatened by the regime during this crackdown. They continued their activities abroad by establishing the Tharwa Foundation in 2007. They dedicated this organization to promoting democratic change, nonviolent resistance, and minority rights in Syria. Ammar also produced a six-part series titled FirstStep, broadcast through the Syrian Justice and Development Party’s Barada TV channel out of London, to advocate for a nonviolent revolution in Syria. Dr. Radwan Ziadeh, who had been an invited guest of the SAC inaugural event in Chicago a few years earlier, was forced into exile in 2007. He established the Syrian Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Washington, DC, as an outspoken regime critic and academic. In a related case, Ayman Abdel Nour, a former Christian member of the Syrian Baʻath Party had been forced to join his extended family in California after demanding reform. From exile he established a website called All4Syria in Arabic as a place to discuss political change at home. Artist-activists in exile like Marah Bukai, who settled in northern Virginia, remained an outspoken critic of the regime. Another figure named Rami Abdulrahman (born Ossama Suleiman), forced to leave Syria in 2000 (MacFarquhar 2013), founded the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights from his new home in Coventry, England, in 2006. This one-man operation, much like Dr. Abdul Malek’s Libya Watch, was dedicated to drawing attention to human rights abuses and the plight of political prisoners.12 All of these individuals, in conjunction with their contacts on the ground, would come to play important roles in the 2011 revolution. Overall, the United States and Britain came to host several anti-regime organizations in the 2000s that were primarily headed by individual exiles. The formation of the Syrian American Council was the only attempt to establish a membership-based advocacy organization during this period. However, as Chapter 3 explains, SAC organizers remained unable to recruit members 12 Unfortunately, Mr. Abdulrahman did not respond to my requests for an interview in 2014 – however, this was likely because he was simply too busy, running an organization and a private business full time during this period. The New York Times reported in 2013 that Mr. Abdul Rahman spends virtually every waking minute tracking the war in Syria, disseminating bursts of information about the fighting and the death toll. What began as sporadic, rudimentary e-mails about protests early in the uprising has swelled into a torrent of statistics and details . . . Mr. Abdul Rahman rarely sleeps. He gets up around 5:30 a.m., calling Syria to awaken his team. First, they tally the previous day’s casualty reports and release a bulletin. Then he alternates between taking news media calls – 10 on a slow day, 15 an hour for breaking news – and contacting activists. (MacFarquhar 2013) since the onset of the Syrian revolution, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has played a leading role in broadcasting work during the uprising and subsequent war, and has generally earned a reputation as being a trustworthy source of information among NGOs (MacFarquhar 2013). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press