74 Silenced and Split and the British government for fifteen years. At the same time, even the closure of the embassy did not end Gaddafi’s campaign of assassinations; as journalist Lindsey Hilsum writes, “As many as thirty-five Libyans were murdered in Europe over the next few years” (2012: 81). This incident had a chilling effect on the diaspora across Britain. The New York Times reported after that incident, demonstrators “scattered” and broke off contact with everyone except their most trusted friends. Hashem Benghalboun, a member of the Manchester-based anti-regime group the Libyan Constitutional Union, summed up the grim situation by stating, “Since the Qaddafi regime moved terrorism outside of Libya and to the streets of Europe, the dissidents have endured a life of tension” (Nordheimer 1984). He reported that his brother, Muhamad, survived three attempts on his life by Gaddafi’s agents and remained under police protection. Because the Gaddafi regime was keeping tabs on students, the Libyan government also proceeded to cut off scholarship funds for any persons believed to be working against the regime. The costs of speaking out against Gaddafi for high-profile dissidents were particularly high, and émigrés’ stories resembled Hollywood thrillers. Renowned Libyan writer Hisham Matar describes in his award-winning memoir The Return (2016) how not even children were exempt from the regime’s hunt for its enemies. After Matar’s father, a member of the NFSL insurgent group, escaped from Libya, Hisham’s younger brother Ziad was sent to study at a remote boarding school in the Swiss Alps. Matar writes, “For two days running, Ziad noticed a car parked on the path outside the school’s main gate. It had in it four men. They had the long hair so typical of members of Qaddafi’s Revolutionary Committees” (2016: 7–8). Ziad received a phone call from a friend of his father’s warning him to flee. After convincing a teacher to drive him to the train station, the men trailed in pursuit. Following him onto the train, they threatened him in Arabic laced with a Tripolitanian accent, “Kid, you think you are a man? Then come here and show us” (Matar 2016: 9). Thankfully, Ziad made it home to Cairo with the help of a sympathetic conductor and his father’s colleagues. On another occasion, Matar met his father, Jaballa, at the airport in Geneva. They passed “two men speaking Arabic with a perfect Libyan accent: ‘So what does this Jaballa Matar look like anyway?’ one of them asked the other” (Matar 2016: 10). Again, they evaded Gaddafi’s men. But in March 1990, his father was kidnapped in Egypt by local authorities and rendered back to Libya. He spent years in Abu Salim prison before disappearing from the face of the earth. Syrians did not report being threatened with violence in the United States or Britain, although assassinations occurred elsewhere. As Paul (1990: 5) writes, “The Syrian government has almost certainly been responsible for killing, injuring, restricting free speech, and otherwise violating the rights of persons outside of territory it directly controls” in the Middle East. According to Conduit (2019), the regime attempted to murder dissidents hiding in Iraq in the 1980s, but they were protected by the Iraqi Mukhabarat (Intelligence). https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press