164 Voice for Rebellion and Relief 5.5 volunteering on the ground Libyans widely reported volunteering on the ground in order to contribute to the rebellion and relief directly. Volunteers initially flocked to Cairo to amass supplies and drive them into Benghazi as it was being liberated and faced regime shelling. Amr Ben Halim recalled, “We would travel fifteen hours by car to drive all the way into Libya [to make] deliveries [from Egypt], but also we wanted to see what’s going on and see what help we could offer.” Assia from Kentucky echoed that many volunteers, including her brother, went to Benghazi to “fill the gaps” of what needed to be done. Ahmed of Enough Gaddafi! attested that he and other volunteers filled these roles on the fly in order to help the effort. From Cairo, there just happened to be this team of journalists who were looking to get into Libya. We were like, well, let’s go! We started as their translators and their fixers. We got to Benghazi on the twenty-fifth or the twenty-sixth of February to see what we could do to better coordinate a couple different things. Number one, when medical supplies came into the country, we made sure that they actually got to where they were supposed to go to different hospitals in Benghazi. The other things were to try to make sure that different journalists who came in actually had an appropriate understanding of the context that they were reporting on. We did our best to set up the right interviews for different folks, and tried to translate as much as possible. Libyans also worked within regime-controlled territories. Dr. Niz Ben-Essa, a young Libyan doctor from Cardiff, managed to catch what he attested was the last flight into Tripoli to join the protest movement. After demonstrators were mowed down by live ammunition and arrested en masse, Niz joined an underground resistance unit called the Free Generation Movement.14 Their clandestine group undertook a number of activities that included stealing Internet and satellite-based communications equipment from regime installations for the resistance. Niz explained that they did so because they knew that “If we don’t have a means of communicating with the outside world, much of what we do here is going to be fruitless.” The Free Generation Movement also facilitated independent media reporting from inside Gaddafi’s stronghold by helping foreign journalists escape their government-enforced lockdown. He recalled, We were smuggling out the international media, who were effectively under arrest in the Rixos Hotel, to demonstrate that there was resistance and opposition to Gaddafi in Tripoli. Because Gaddafi was spinning the idea that everyone in Libya loved him and that there were no protests in Libya, no problems in Libya, it was just Al Qaeda elements causing trouble. We were taking journalists to speak to people and see sporadic small protests happening in Tripoli.15 14 15 Niz communicated with journalists via Skype during his time as a leading dissident in the Free Generation Movement, which worked underground in Tripoli during the Libyan revolution to sabotage regime censorship and infrastructure; see Kofman (2011) and McKenzie (2011). Having visited the Rixos Hotel during my fieldwork in Libya, I asked Niz how it was possible that he and his colleagues smuggled journalists out past the hotel’s fortifications, which included https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press