102 Coming Out and Coming Together Square–esque sit-in movement in Homs were brutally crushed by a military siege in late April. During a subsequent siege in Daraʻa, a young teenager named Hamza al-Khateeb was detained by regime forces. On May 25, his corpse was returned to his family displaying evidence of burns, broken bones, and dismemberment. Images of his body circulated on the Internet and were broadcast on Al Jazeera, stoking outrage inside and outside of the country.5 As the Syrian army moved to quell protests in Baniyas, Homs, Latakia, Hama, the Damascus suburbs, and other cities in May with lethal force, their brutality provoked defections and increased anti-regime sympathies. As reports circulated about mass detainment, torture, rape, and massacres of entire families by al-Shabiha loyalist militias, the death toll hit approximately one thousand five hundred in July. But even as protests and riots continued through the fall of 2011, the regime retained control over broad swaths of the population and its territory through a range of coercive tactics, including stoking fears of an Islamist-extremist takeover among minorities. The pitting of an Alawitedominated security force against a Sunni majority and the Kurdish minority stoked further ethno-religious divides on the ground. As the International Crisis Group reported (2011c: 2), Denied both mobility and control of any symbolically decisive space (notably in the capital, Damascus, and the biggest city, Aleppo), the protest movement failed to reach the critical mass necessary to establish, once and for all, that Assad has lost his legitimacy. Instead, demonstrators doggedly resisted escalating violence on the part of the security services and their civilian proxies in an ever-growing number of hotspots segregated from one another by numerous checkpoints. As a result of these dynamics, the Syrian revolution unfolded in phases that were distributed unevenly across the country. The uprising was first characterized by pockets of protest and riots that gradually spread to many cities and towns, but it did not constitute a national rebellion until many months later. International condemnation did little to temper the regime’s brutal approach. In December, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights reported the death toll as having reached approximately five thousand; by the end of 2012, that figure would increase at least tenfold. Syrians in the diaspora went public in their opposition to the Assad regime over the course of 2011 and beyond. This was because the three factors enabling Libyans to wield voice also became operative in the Syrian case: (1) the engulfment of their significant others into the conflict; (2) the embrace of risk-taking and cost-sharing for moral and ethical reasons; and (3) the perceived decline in the regime’s capacity to target individuals abroad. However, the pace at which Syrians went public was staggered because regime control in Syria was largely held in the initial months of the uprising. Correspondingly, 5 See Munif (2020: ch. 1) for a detailed discussion of regime violence and “necropolitics” in Syria during the uprising. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press