178 Converting Resources to the Cause He said, “We were connecting people together so people who wanted to go over there to help out would have [other] people that would wait for them and look after them.” Ayat recalled, There were a lot of journalists who we gave instructions to go to the Egyptian border, and we had our relatives go meet them and bring them in early on. Technically, anybody could’ve driven in, but it was very early and nobody really knew how to assess the situation. So we said, okay, if it makes you feel better, they’ll drive you in. Taken together, activists’ preexisting cross-border connections and the newfound alliances forged over the course of the revolution enabled them to get information out and resources in. According to Assad of London, this was all made possible through Contacts. You know that theory, six degrees of separation? In Libya, it’s probably three. If you think about the logistics, they’re almost impossible to do in these circumstances. But because people knew each other, and we could talk to each other, and this person vouch for this person and this person vouch for that person, we managed to create the network that actually functioned. As Sarah of London recalled, “Everyone tried to use their own contacts and expertise” in some way, often at the request of revolutionary forces themselves, to address needs on the ground. 6.1.2 The Decimation of Syrians’ Network Ties over Time While Syrians initially had sufficient network ties to undertake the same kinds of interventions as their Libyan counterparts, these critically important relationships were decimated over time by the regime’s systematic targeting of activists in Syria and its depopulation of the country. Lina of Chicago, for instance, recalled that as of 2013, “I stopped doing any of the Skype work anymore [because] a lot of the people I knew are dead or they disappeared. Most of the people I knew in Homs, they all died, one after the other.” Razan from Britain similarly attested that the hemorrhaging of activists from Syria left her without a clear way to contribute to the revolution. I had a lot of contacts with people on the ground, [working] with them secretly, translating articles for them. They’d be inside Syria or they’d tell me we’re going offline; if anyone asks about us, don’t worry, we’re going to go to such-and-such base. All of this happened the first year of the revolution. Those are probably the best kind of moments of my life, where I actually felt like I was part of the revolution, because I was helping facilitate protests inside wherever it was by being in contact with these people. But then I lost contact with [almost] all of them. They either left Syria or died. Ibrahim al-Assil in the United States, who continued to work with activists on the ground as of 2014, confirmed that the overall number of available volunteers had been slashed drastically by regime repression. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press