January 10, 2012 | Quote
Syrian Americans Anxiously Monitor Uprising
“Sometimes I tape them, because it’s a part of our history,” said the 43-year-old mother of two, who took a leave from her job as an Arabic teacher to help the uprising that began in Syria last spring and has been met with a violent crackdown. It’s a family enterprise: Her husband, Ammar Abdulhamid, 45, a longtime activist, and their children, Oula, 25, and Mouhanad, 21, also spend their nights as virtual revolutionaries. …
The Abdulhamids say that they have received unsettling messages, including death threats, and that the warnings are getting more brazen.
“For you and your group here in Washington we will liquidate you one after another, wait and see,” a post from an unknown sender to Yusuf’s Facebook page said recently.
“Usually they send private messages,” she said, “but this was public.”
The threats have not deterred the family, whose activism began years ago in Syria. In 2002, they founded a minority-rights organization in Syria that criticized the government. In 2005, after the organization accepted funding from abroad and Abdulhamid publicly called the president “an idiot and a Fredo Corleone” — a reference to the spineless middle son in “The Godfather” movies — the family fled to the United States and received political asylum.
Once here, Abdulhamid worked with the State Department training Syrian citizen journalists. He is currently a fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy.
The family has started the Syrian American Network for Activists and Dissidents (SANAD), which has raised nearly $10,000 to send to refugees and families of those arrested or killed. The Abdulhamids also have sent cameras, satellite phones and smartphones to activists in Syria.
Before this year, Syrian Americans tended to see political activism as dangerous. When the uprising started in March, support here was sparse.
“At one point you could count us on one finger, the ones supporting the revolution,” Abdulhamid said. But as the crackdown continued, more Syrian Americans came forward. …
Recently, the Abdulhamid family sat in their home’s sunroom, where Mouhanad’s iPhone periodically burst out with the sounds of cheers, screams and whistles from a rally that day in Syria.
Yusuf often speaks with people who can hear bullets outside their houses. Sometimes a regular correspondent will disappear without warning.
It is, she says, hard to be so far away.
“I need to be with my people, my friends,” she said. “Here in America I have no role, I’m just one person who sleeps, who eats and so on. . . . I want to be there, even if I get killed.”
“Stop!” her son said. “We’ve lost enough. We’ve left everything behind. Your brothers were in prison, your father was killed [decades earlier, when Assad’s father was Syria’s president]. It’s enough. You keep saying you want to go — it’s hurting me, it’s hurting us. Please stop saying that, please!” Tears welled in his eyes.
“Okay,” his mother said quietly. This was not the first time this argument had erupted.
Oula, too, said she wishes she could be in Syria. Instead, she has been connecting with other young Syrian Americans via social media.
She brought her face close to her laptop screen and, with a big smile, spoke to someone in Syria as if she was addressing the entire country.