Fledgling network at centre of Syria protests

New York Amid the mass of reporting and commentary around the bloody events in Syria, one aspect has largely gone unnoticed: the extraordinary role played by an online group that despite its infancy has managed to place itself at the centre of the unfolding crisis.

Avaaz is only five years old, but has exploded to become the globe's largest and most powerful online activist network. In Syria, it has become an important player in the crisis, acting as a coordinating hub and logistical supply route for the protest movement.

It was also centrally involved in the planning and co-ordination of recent operation to evacuate four Western journalists in which 13 Syrian activists died under government shelling.

The tragic loss of life, combined with Avaaz's increasingly pivotal role in the unfolding of the Syrian uprising, has raised inevitable questions about such a young organisation.

In particular, questions have been asked about whether an internet campaign with such a limited track record is equipped to be operating in such a brutal war zone.

Inexperience

The accusation of inexperience clearly irritates Ricken Patel, Avaaz's Canadian-British co-founder and director. He stresses the personal experience embodied in Avaaz's senior team the 20-odd war zones that Avaaz's campaigns manager previously worked in; the time served by its campaign director at the US state department and Amnesty; and his own four years in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sudan, Afghanistan.

"I spent four years right up close to this stuff, this isn't new for me," he says as we speak in Avaaz's New York headquarters.

Syria has certainly been risky. The group was quicker on the draw in responding to the first signs of the protest movement than most aid organisations, even than most media outlets that pride themselves in getting speedily to difficult places.

To begin with, Avaaz sent a team of staff organisers to Lebanon after spotting the first signs of a nascent protest movement in Syria. Contact was then made with Syrian activists inside the country, and go-betweens recruited, notably Wissam Tarif, a highly respected Syrian pro-democracy leader who is widely consulted by journalists and senior western diplomats.

From there its involvement in the Syrian Arab spring drew it steadily further and further into the conflict.

First off Avaaz sent in hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of communications equipment satellite phones and internet connections known as BGANs (Broadband Global Area Network) that gave the protesters a link to the outside world.

Citizen journalism

As with earlier Arab spring engagements in Tunisia and Libya, they realised that equipment alone was not enough: the protesters needed to know how to use it if they were to be effective. So Avaaz sent in trainers who could give grounding in how to use the satphones as well as basic training in citizen journalism.

"Verification was a key element," says Patel. "We could get stuff out, but the media didn't know what they were looking at, or couldn't be sure where it had come from. So we began playing the middle man, verifying information. That was in some ways the greatest value we brought to maintaining the oxygen of international attention on these protest movements."

Reports coming from Avaaz-trained citizen journalists in Homs and other key conflict zones, channelled through the Avaaz communications hub outside the country, has been a major source of information on the uprising and the regime's bloody response, used by news outlets around the world.

Getting in the equipment involved opening up smuggling routes across the Syrian border into hotbeds such as Homs and its most badly bombed neighbourhood Baba Amr, which led Avaaz seemlessly into the next phase of its engagement. With the smuggling routes open, it could help get $2 million (Dh7 million) of blood bags, tetanus shots, respiratory machines and other medical supplies into the country, bringing relief to communities that were desperate for help and that more establishment institutions like the ICRC had failed to reach.

It has also smuggled 34 international journalists into the trouble zones. Marie Colvin, the Sunday Times journalist, entered using another conduit, but the French photographer Remi Ochlik who died with her as a result of Syrian government shelling was helped in by Avaaz.

Journalists who went in with Avaaz's help have at times also needed help in escaping the violent suppression of the Syrian regime. So it was that Avaaz came to be involved in the evacuation mission of four western journalists last Sunday night. So what precisely was its role in that mission?

"We provided the communications hub where messages could come and be relayed between the Syrian activist networks," Patel explains.