Volunteering on the Ground 165 In addition to facilitating relief, diaspora activists also helped to monitor the work of international aid organizations. After visiting one UN Refugee Agency campus, Abdo G. of Libya Link attested that the conditions were appalling. Libyans lacked food, toilets, and supplies for basic hygiene. His group responded, pressuring officials by threatening to report the conditions to the press unless the situation improved. Likewise, Salam, a Libyan American, addressed this problem by supplementing services and negotiating with the managing officials. I thank the UNHCR for everything they did, but the amount of care that I thought was humane was very different from what they thought was humane. I understand, as an agency their resources are limited. So as a charity, we did what we could. We provided a mobile hospital and a refrigerated pharmacy. My role fit in with trying to coordinate with the internationals because I speak English. He also rented apartments for Libyan refugees in Tunisia, negotiated with Tunisian authorities to allow Libyan fighters to receive medical treatment, bought fuel to send into Libya, and purchased walkie-talkies and “all types of communication devices.” Salam stressed the fact that “it was a free for all. Whichever way we can help, we were going to help.” As the Free Libya Army and NATO liberated additional territory over the summer, other members of the diaspora went home to help their compatriots directly, and even to join the fight itself. Adam of Virginia recalled that in addition to his combat training in Benghazi, We were helping with the journalists, doing translations. There were also a few startup newspapers and they were all [run by] young guys. We were helping with the English side. This is all going on while we were training. Finally, once we were done training, my brigade leader was like, all right, you’re going over to the western mountains. And it was literally like taxi drivers, students, doctors, regular bakers-turned-soldier. It was college students like me who are now holding an AK and we’re in charge of five other guys. a long driveway and a gate. He said that by communicating with journalists via email and using moles who worked within the hotel, they would make arrangements for the journalists to venture outside the gate, ostensibly for a cigarette, and then jump into a waiting car (Many journalists got deported after their escapes were discovered). Niz explained that the poor training of the security services provided opportunities for them to exploit as a guerilla movement: You have to understand something, I’m not trying to belittle what we did or what anyone did, and I’m not trying to belittle what the risks were, but Libya has been very neglected for forty-two years. Not only from an education or healthcare or infrastructure point of view, from every aspect you can think of, but also the quality and the standard of training and expertise of the intelligence service. And the security services. Put bluntly, I think there were a lot of them, they were brutal, they were aggressive, but they weren’t intelligent and they weren’t well-equipped and they weren’t well-trained. This situation made such high-risk resistance possible. See Bassiouni (2013) for more information on the lack of preparedness and investment in the Libyan Army by the Gaddafi regime. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press