Volunteering on the Ground 167 Some volunteers arrived to help the Free Libya Army break the summer stalemate. Abdulssalam, then in his fifties and living in California, arrived in Benghazi from Cairo using his American passport, to join the thuwar (revolutionary forces) to “pay my share for the revolution.” His brother, who had been living in Libya, connected him with the Libyan Martyrs Militia. They took my name and said they would call me when they were ready. One day early in the morning, [my brother] called me and said go to the airport, there was a flight that was going to take me to Nalut. With no training, nothing – zero. It took us about five hours to get permission to fly, because of NATO. Then we went to Misrata. At that time there was heavy fighting. We landed on the road, on the highway. You’re scared, you don’t know what’s going to happen. Members of the diaspora also became members of the “supporting cast” for the National Transitional Council, as Fadel from Washington, DC put it. Dina from California volunteered as the press coordinator for the interim prime minister. Mazen R. from Seattle joined the NTC to help with logistics, as he explained with a wave of his hand, because “wars are logistics.” He ran the NTC’s Oil and Finance Department and coordinated the Temporary Finance Mechanism, which enabled the NTC to receive outside funding by borrowing money against frozen assets to keep the country functioning during the war. As the finance mechanism coordinator under NTC minister Ali Tarhouni, Mazen R. worked to keep oil and electricity flowing to Benghazi and distributed cash in the Nafusa Mountains. He said, “I was a volunteer the whole time, so there was no salary or anything. I had three phones that wouldn’t stop ringing, each for one area: One for the Temporary Finance Mechanism, one for the fighters, and one for the administrators.” Like Mazen R., Syrians from the United States and Britain ventured across state lines to volunteer in Syria and its border zones. Dr. Nana from Miami, for instance, escorted journalists into Syria, as when he brought reporters from CBS’s 60 Minutes team into Syria in the fall of 2012 (Ward 2012). “We went inside Aleppo,” he said. “I hosted them in my family’s house with all my family members and we showed them the city, we show them the destruction. We also introduced them to those leaders of the Free Syrian Army.” In addition to working on the front lines as brokers and interpreters for journalists, others participated directly in protests. Ibrahim al-Assil of the Syrian Nonviolence Movement traveled from Britain back home to Syria in 2011 in order to participate in civil resistance before being forced to escape through Lebanon that same year. He said, “In mid-2013, I started to visit Syria again from the north. Going to Aleppo and at that time even to Raqqah before it was occupied by the Islamic State.” He and his colleagues from the Syrian Nonviolence Movement did so because, We had different goals. One of them to coordinate and to meet people we work with inside Syria. For me personally, I felt that after being outside Syria for a year and a half, it became more difficult for me to understand what is going on. If you are Syrian and https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press