Cyberdissidents.org co-founder Nir Boms wrote for the Wall Street Journal on the continuing conflict in Syria: "They come in every day now, the body counts from Syria, consistent and painful: 141, 201, 152, 81 (a lucky day, that was). This past Sunday, 566 bodies were found, 483 of them in Damascus and its suburbs alone, according to the Local Coordination Committees of Syria, a network of...

  Last week, CyberDissidents.org’s Arabic Program Manager, Ahed Al Hendi, presented at the 2013 Milton Wolff Conference in Vienna, Austria.  He highlighted the Syrian liberal movements and the failure of major news outlets to cover it objectively.    Al Hendi said that there have been four competing narratives in Syria since 1970. He divided the narratives into two...

Internet and telecommunications services were shut down across Syria for the first time in the country’s history. While Assad’s regime has used this tactic before in an attempt to silence opposition forces, it was limited to the specific cities that were under attack. The Syrian Minister of Information, Omran Zoabi, claimed that the government is not responsible for the the shutdown and that...

Syria’s Islamist rebel factions released a video message Sunday, rejecting the country’s newly formed Western-backed National Coalition that promotes cultural diversity and tolerance, declaring Syria, an Islamic state.These statements made by armed extremist groups were denied by many Syrian activists. The video was made on behalf of one of the largest rebel groups in Aleppo: Jabhat...

They came for me on December 14, 2006. Plainclothes police carrying automatic weapons stormed into an Internet café in Damascus and grabbed me and a friend. They brought us in a car to the headquarters of the Syrian secret police. Around midnight they dragged me from my holding cell to the man I would come to know only as "Captain Wissam." He was a tall, dark-skinned officer. He...