Conversion of Capital 191 anti-regime diaspora came to be tapped dry. Dr. Ziadeh in DC attested that the millions of Syrians who had been displaced and rendered unemployed over the course of the war came to be wholly reliant on the support of their family members in the diaspora, which diverted aid from the political to the personal. When we talk about four million refugees in neighboring countries and nine million displaced, everyone has his family affected. My mother crossed the border into Turkey8 along with my sister. I have another brother in Jordan and a sister in Lebanon. I’m responsible for [them]. No one can afford that for two or three years, no matter the income you have. This is why the Syrian communities here [now] focus much more on their immediate families. This is not to say that members of the diaspora ceased to donate to charitable organizations or to volunteer altogether. But at the same time, the anti-regime community could no longer be relied upon by organizers to write enough checks to supply the donations needed to meet the ever-expanding needs of millions of Syrians. As Nebal of London explained, “What’s the point of asking someone, some Syrian, to donate money when you know he himself has to provide food for three, four, five families already?” Organizers also reported that protest participation had waned significantly by 2014 for all events except commemorative activities in large part because of financial difficulties. Haytham in Manchester explained that they amassed funds to pay for protesters to travel to London for “six, seven months until we were exhausted financially, because every coach costs one thousand pounds.” Nebal, an organizer with the group British Solidarity for Syria, attested that participants came to feel that their time and resources would be of better use elsewhere. At the very beginning, it was easy to go every Saturday to demonstrate. Nowadays, many in the community would say, what’s the point of spending two hours every Saturday protesting? – it would be better for me to work and make some money to send to Syria instead. And I totally agree with that. But as a symbol, it’s [important to have] big marches to mark the anniversary of the revolution, to mark the big massacres. Overall, fungible resource conversion declined as the revolution became prolonged and created an extreme humanitarian crisis. The conversion of Syrians’ social capital to the revolution was also compromised due to their dependence on insiders willing to receive and use this resource in local contexts. Many activists found that they had no one, and nowhere, to channel their skills to once their allies were killed, captured, or displaced, as discussed above. As their abilities to convert social capital 8 For detailed information about Syrian refugees in Turkey and across Europe, see Carlson and Williams (2020). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press