Brokering 159 Ahlam contacted her to facilitate the entry of journalists into Yemen. However, this activity was rare when compared to broadcasting for Yemenis in the two host-countries. 5.3.2 Brokering between Allies on the Ground Libyans and Syrians additionally worked to connect various parties of the conflict inside their respective home-countries to one another. This coordination was crucial, as Abdo G., a British Libyan, told me, because ad hoc revolutionary forces were often disorganized and isolated from one another. For example, Monem, who was living in San Jose, California, at the start of the revolution, heard from contacts in his parents’ hometown of Khoms, Libya, that “all political activists and people that were doing activities in Khoms were being killed.” In response, he sought to help the resistance movement by asking his brother to deliver satellite phones to trusted contacts in Tunisia for delivery to Khoms. Using his smartphone, Monem “connected them with the central command in Misrata and Benghazi. One of the guys in Misrata was the point of contact with NATO,” he explained, “and I said, please, I have information for you because the cells in Khoms could not communicate with Misrata directly.” In this way, Monem helped to link these fighting forces to one another. Syrians in the United States and Britain also brokered between dissidents inside of Syria to help them coordinate civil disobedience. Alaʻa Basatneh, a Syrian American college student who became the subject of a documentary called #ChicagoGirl: The Social Network Takes on a Dictator (Piscatella 2013), performed this work from the Illinois suburbs. She assisted activists in Syria by serving as an intermediary between clandestine organizers, helping to plan protests and plot escape routes using Google Maps. This brokerage enabled activists inside of Syria to keep their identities hidden from one another for protection. Nebal in London, co-founder of the group British Solidarity for Syria, explained how he also came to be a middleman for the Syrian Revolution General Commission in Aleppo. After going on British television to discuss the revolution at a time when “not a lot of Syrians were speaking out in the media,” he recalled, I was contacted by people from Aleppo saying that we need a contact from outside Syria and we’ve seen you on TV, and we think that we can trust you. We’ll provide you with photos, we’ll provide you with videos. It was me and another girl in Saudi Arabia, working with these guys inside Aleppo, a core of five people from different areas who don’t know each other. And they should not know each other so that if one is caught, he can’t tell about the others. This happened in another [case] – one was caught, and all the nine working with him were caught because he had no choice but to tell about it. So that’s why it was our duty to connect them, to agree about the timing and the place of the demonstrations and then spread it to all other activists inside, so that if one of them was caught, he doesn’t know any other ones. They were providing me with information https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press