By Amanda Flu

At first you might think you are in the office of a Silicon Valley tech company. There are flip cameras everywhere. Smart phones lie strewn about among computers and 3G dongles. A Wii game console has been abandoned on a shelf. But the sweet tea and thick cigarette smoke suggest otherwise. Tucked away in a popular neighborhood of Damascus in the shadow of Mount Qassioun, the parched ridge overlooking Syria's capital, this is the makeshift headquarters of Syria's video activists, and the young activists here are working late tonight.

Smiling, one of the leading figures in the room inspects his Kodak digital camera and then looks up. "This is my weapon," says Adnan, 33, appropriately enough for a technology enthusiast whose expertise in open source programming afforded him the opportunity to travel the world. Outside, a billboard offers a chilling insight into an Orwellian regime. "Freedom starts with awareness and not with ignorance," it says. "Freedom starts by complying with the regime".
Before the popular uprising which rocked this authoritarian country in the heart of the Middle East, Adnan enjoyed a lifestyle that was highly desirable by Syrian standards. "I earned good money through my tech work, traveled enough and made friends all over the world."

A career in technology is no small feat in a country whose relations with the West have been strained for decades. Sanctions imposed in 2004 prohibit American companies exporting goods to Syria if more than one tenth of their component parts were manufactured in the U.S. - a restriction that has affected some basic web services and software such as Google's Chrome browser, RealPlayer, Windows Movie Maker and Microsoft Live Writer. Despite that, Adnan's instinct has never left him. "I was never interested in anything other than technology," he says.
He returns to his computer and uploads another video documenting Syria's uprising to YouTube. It is apparently recorded in Dara'a, the restless city in Syria's far south which has paid a heavy price for daring to rise up against the 11-year rule of Bashar al-Assad.

Reports suggest well over 100 people have died there as first heavily armed state security and more recently the army have fought to impose order, culminating in an audacious assault on the city's historic mosque. The regime has made its position clear: it will kill to stay in power.
Adnan learned this when he was hit by a grenade while filming in the outskirts of Damascus. The camera did not survive the ordeal, but luckily for Adnan he returned home unscathed. "I don't know for how much longer though", he says. "The secret service is engaging in random mass arrests. They know information is being put out, despite their control, and that's why they want to arrest everybody who goes out with a camera, a computer, or even a phone."

So why is Adnan now risking everything to post these videos? "Freedom", he says. "And dignity." With journalists barred entry from Dara'a and the internet cut, Adnan and his friends have come to play a vital role in helping to tell the world what is happening there. Having spent years circumventing widespread censorship that saw Facebook, YouTube and political blogs blocked until just a few months ago when President Al-Assad's regime pushed through pre-emptive popular reforms, Adnan has learned how to find a way through.

Beside him, his team of activists sit busily tapping on their English-Arabic keyboards. Before the uprising, these young men were nothing more than a group of friends who would meet in a local cafe to socialize, smoke water pipes and play chess. All that changed when the protests began - they gave up chess and started filming protest videos instead.
One of them is an old schoolmate, Mohammed, whom Adnan credits with his transformation from techie to revolutionary. By a fateful coincidence, the two friends met for the first time in years just as Mohammed was returning to Damascus from Dara'a.

"We had been watching our Tunisian and Egyptian brothers for months but never believed this could happen here", says Mohammed, sipping at his tea. Dressed casually in T-shirt and jeans with thick gelled hair, Mohammed has a pale face and earnest expression that evoke something out of the Twilight saga more than the traditional image of a battle-hardened revolutionary activist. "I used to write novels about a generic struggle for freedom under an oppressive regime, but I never thought I would be able to place these events in my own country", he says.
He describes the atmosphere in Dara'a in the earliest days of the uprising. What began with children writing anti-regime graffiti on school walls soon escalated to street protests when the children were taken away for interrogation by the hated secret service agents, known as mukhabarat. After decades of frustration at endemic corruption and strict land regulations imposed on the city because of its sensitive location just miles from the Jordanian border, protesters cast off the fear that had helped to keep the regime in place for more than 40 years and took to the streets in their thousands.

But now the uprising has spread far beyond Dara'a to the northern city of Homs, the Mediterranean ports of Baniyas and Lattakia, the home region of the ruling Assad family and their minority Alawite sect, and even the capital Damascus. As in Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen, Syrians are calling for more freedoms, improved economic choices and an end to corruption. "I just want a country where I can go to a public office and be treated as a citizen, not threatened because I'm asking for my rights, or required to bribe to get things done," says Mohammed.
"Our generation has little possibility for self expression," says Adnan. "Try to open your own business here. See how many people you have to bribe, how many laws are unclear or non existent, how easily you can end up in jail with no evidence, just because somebody reported you. See what trust becomes in a society where everybody can report everybody, for money or revenge".

In the past few weeks, the Syrian army - with the help of the despised regime militia, the Shabbiha - has been setting up checkpoints around the country to hunt down what it calls "info traitors." It is the the heaviest deployment of tanks and armored personnel vehicles the country has seen in three decades. People have been taken directly from the streets in arbitrary kidnappings that belie the end of emergency law announced by President Bashar al-Assad to cabinet 17 April.

"So far, we are still here", says Adnan, charging his camera battery. As the most experienced of the group, he is teaching the others how to take good pictures which show landmarks and - where possible - provide evidence of the date of recording. "We are trying to navigate the information chaos created by the regime, a result of fear, state media propaganda and absence of any other voice".
The activists insist that theirs is not a sectarian agenda, despite the regime's attempts to portray them as Islamists. There is real cross-sectarian support for the protests, they say. They have a good case: represented among the activists working in the flat is the full cross-section of Syrian society - Sunni Muslim, Alawite, Druze, and Christian. The group even helped to disseminate a popular chant that has helped to minimize sectarian rifts: "One, One, The Syrian People, We are One."

Hassan, a younger activist hailing from Lattakia, is unimpressed at suggestions the Alawite minority is on the regime's side just because they are tied by religion to the ruling Assad family. "In the end, we are all Syrian. This regime is not Alawite, it's Al-Assad's regime, his private club and mafia. Even Alawites don't like it". And so he finds himself, an Alawite, fighting an uprising against an Alawite regime.
These young men - one day a group of friends, the next a network of activists - are new to the ideas of revolution, and it shows. "You can't call this a revolution," says Mohammed, "because it would require a theory. We haven't had access to free thinking and critical debates for decades, how do you expect us to elaborate a theory?"
Mohammed pauses to check the progress of a video upload, then looks up again. The light of the screen still flickering against his face, he says: "This is a struggle for change, made for the sake of freedom and human dignity."
This article was commissioned in collaboration with Meedan, a California-registered nonprofit that works to translate and amplify comment and analysis from the Middle East