Syria's video activists give revolution the upper hand in media war

Armed with camera phones activists are posting hundreds of videos on the internet every day documenting the civil war

Luke Harding in Aldana, northern Syria
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 1 August 2012



"In April last year Ahmad Mohammad left his village in northern Syria filled with its pomegranate trees, figs, and goats, and moved to Lebanon. He came back five months later with a certificate in mobile phone maintenance – a weapon more powerful than Bashar al-Assad's helicopters and tanks.

While he was away Mohammad learned how to upload videos to YouTube – a website banned by the Syrian regime. "Nobody in Syria knew how to do this," he said. In the meantime Syria's revolution snowballed from a handful of protests into a seething nation-wide revolt, characterised by nightly anti-regime gatherings, shootouts with the security forces and a growing number of casualties.....

For its part, Syrian state TV remorselessly brands the Free Syrian army "terrorists" and "al-Qaida". Its main Addounia channel broadcasts a mixture of soap operas and pro-regime propaganda. Syria's official news agency, SANA, meanwhile, maintains the situation inside the country is normal, that calm has been restored, and the weather is pleasant. Syrian regime trolls tweet hate-mail to journalists who have slipped into the country, as the government's control crumbles. "I pray every night that you die," one message sent on Saturday to this Guardian journalist.

Despite these half-hearted efforts, the regime has comprehensively lost the electronic war against its YouTube generation enemies. And by slow degrees, it is losing the other battle too. "