Transnational Repression 75 However, the Assad regime succeeded in killing several dissidents in Germany and Spain, as well as thirteen persons in Jordan in 1981 (Conduit 2019). In light of these murders, respondents attested to the terror they felt when embassy officials summoned them and verbally threatened them and their families. For these reasons, interviewees reported avoiding regime institutions whenever possible. A common sentiment expressed in our conversations was that being inside the embassy to renew one’s passport or conduct some other business felt like being back home in Syria. Worried about being interrogated and kidnapped from the embassy, Tha’er, a Kurdish Syrian youth activist, reported that he even told his family to call the police if he did not contact them within two hours of his appointment.1 In addition to being at risk themselves, activism abroad put both Libyans’ and Syrians’ relatives at home in danger. While some families had already made the moral and strategic choice to mobilize openly in spite of these costs, the proxy punishment of loved ones typically remained a constant source of anxiety for exiles and non-exiles alike. Respondents who were active before the Arab Spring explained that their relatives had been summoned by the dreaded Intelligence and threatened because of their opposition activities in the diaspora. Monem, a Libyan American from California, attested that “My father was harassed consistently while I was abroad.” Sondes, whose father founded the one-man anti-regime group Libya Watch in Manchester, recalled, “We’d get calls from my grandfather through the government, who were pressuring him ‘tell your son to stop it.’” Others were punished through imposed separations, as when the Assad regime “issued a travel ban on all my family members,” according to Dr. Ziadeh, who escaped persecution during the Damascus Spring by gaining refuge in the United States. Those who were not already “on the radar” of regimes had to keep it that way, as a British Libyan named Sarah recalled, or else their parents, grandparents, siblings, and cousins might suffer in their stead. Libyan and Syrian respondents on both sides of the Atlantic widely also reported that informants were embedded in their communities for the purposes of surveillance; some were known regime loyalists, while others were perceived as having been coerced to inform in exchange for scholarships to study abroad. Tamim Baiou, a Libyan American who was not politically active before the revolution, attested that “we knew that we were being watched and reports were sent on us.” When Gaddafi’s security apparatus was raided during the fall of Tripoli in 2011, this was confirmed; Tamim obtained his Intelligence file from a friend and recalled that it included “a report about all the details about my wedding” that had taken place years before in California. It was incidents 1 Gualtieri (2009: 162) mentions in her work on Syrian immigration that “under the current president of Syria, Bashar al-Asad, there is a new Ministry of Expatriates.” Given that infiltration and repressive social controls permeated every aspect of Syrian governance at home and in the mahjar, this ministry undoubtedly took up surveillance of the diaspora as part of its mission. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press