180 Converting Resources to the Cause There is no transparency. From where are [the SNC members] getting the money to hold their huge meetings? We’ve never seen any of their sources. And was this money used to buy arms? And then sent to whom? We don’t know. From whom? We don’t know. And I don’t want to be part of that. I told the head of Muslim Brotherhood frankly, if we don’t know from where you are getting the money . . . I have no interest. You cannot use me. Use someone else. [With this] mistrust, corruption, lack of transparency, no accountability, no responsibility – who will trust you? How could United States of America trust you? How could the Syrian people trust you? Dr. Ziadeh also withdrew in November 2012 after being with the council for almost a year because there was “too much in-fighting, too much losing focus.” Sabreen, an activist from Southern California, left her position working for the Syrian Interim Government’s Assistance Coordination Unit in Turkey for similar reasons. She explained, In the unit, there was a lot of corruption going on. People were directing humanitarian aid to some of their hometowns so they would gain credibility in it. And the people who founded this unit – who are some of the most legitimate people I’ve ever met in my life – a lot of them left because they couldn’t handle the corruption. People that stayed are the ones who went on strike basically. So then we went on strike and they decided to bring us a new CEO who turned out to be just as corrupt. The opaque dealings of various groups representing the anti-regime movement also undermined ties between veteran activists abroad and their allies on the ground. Malik al-Abdeh, co-founder of the Syrian Justice and Development Party and Barada TV in London, withdrew from publicly supporting opposition forces after he uncovered a scandal implicating a member of the Syrian National Council.4 Malik said, 4 According to Malik, Around February 2012, one Syrian opposition figure who was big within the Syrian National Council, his brother was murdered in Aleppo in mysterious circumstances. So he went on Al Jazeera and said my brother is a martyr, the regime killed him because they couldn’t get to me so they killed my brother instead. On the same day, an armed group from Aleppo called the Abu Amara Brigades claimed on their Facebook page that they had killed him because he was a regime spy. Then later that day, they took down this post from their Facebook. So I thought, this is interesting. It’s one or the other, it can’t be both. So I got one of the journalists at Barada TV to look into the story. Eventually we spoke to the members of the Abu Amara Brigades and they said, yeah, we killed him because we warned him several times, he was with the pro-regime militia, was using his restaurant as a meeting place and he was supporting them . . . I asked them, why did you take it down on the Facebook? Well, he said that what happened was the brother of the guy who was killed was so embarrassed by the fact that his brother was supporting the regime and he’s supposedly this opposition guy. There were bribes going down. So I said, are you prepared to go on the record and say this? They’re like, yeah, fuck it. We’re going to go on the record and expose this. Okay, fine. So I said that this is investigative journalism at its best, right? So to be fair, we need to phone the guy [in the Syrian National Council] to get his story. We called him and spoke to his right-hand man, his personal secretary. The personal secretary went crazy. He said, we’re gonna fuck you up. Tell Malik that ‘this is like a personal challenge. You mustn’t https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press