Syria Snapshot: Who are the "New Opposition"? (Shadid)

Anthony Shadid, in an article published before yesterday's mass protests in Syria, writes for The New York Times:

An opposition drawing its strength from Syria’s restive streets has begun to emerge as a pivotal force in the country’s once-dormant politics, organizing across disparate regions through the Internet, reaching out to fearful religious minorities and earning the respect of more recognized, but long divided dissidents.

The Local Coordination Committees, as they call themselves, have become the wild cards in what is shaping up as a potentially decisive stage in Syria, with some protests spreading Thursday to Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city, and the government tentatively reaching out to the opposition next week. The success of the young protesters may determine whether that change is incremental, as the government has suggested, or far more sweeping, as the protesters themselves have demanded.

Their success has stemmed from an ability to stay decentralized, work in secret and fashion their message in the most nationalist of terms. But that very success has made them a mystery to the Syrian government, which prefers to work with more recognized opposition figures who came together in a rare meeting in Damascus on Monday. American officials admit they are also trying to gauge the young protesters’ importance in a time of tumult.

“For so long, the opposition was in quotes — ‘the Syrian opposition,’ ” said an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It wasn’t coalesced or organized; it was more oppositionists or activists. Now it’s a real opposition, and even if they have multiple levels, they get the need to organize and come with a unified voice.”

As in other Arab revolts, new dynamics have emerged as the demonstrations in Syria have gathered momentum in past weeks, particularly in cities like Homs and Hama. The youthful demonstrators who make up these coordination committees have bridged divides of sect, religion and class to try to formulate a leadership. As in Egypt, they were able to build on years of local dissidence that had already created informal networks of friends and colleagues.

“Reporting the news, that’s how we started,” said Rami Nakhle, an activist in Damascus who fled to Lebanon this year and helps organize the committees’ work.

Even before the uprising, activists had smuggled in cellphones, satellite modems and computers in the event that the demands for change across the Arab world spread to Syria. They did, and even in the earliest days, activists there managed to offer a narrative of the uprising that was revealing, incomplete and — in the government’s mind at least — biased. In the weeks that ensued, protesters said, activists coalesced into committees that reached out to one another.

Mr. Nakhle said the first committee arose in Daraya, a restless suburb of Damascus, and the best-organized are in Syria’s third-largest city, Homs, which has emerged as a nexus of the uprising. There, activists came together in committees in the revolt’s second week, with eventually 22 people helping coordinate as many as 100 people on the ground to document the demonstrations, said Omar Idlibi, a spokesman for the committees who helped organize the work in Homs before fleeing to Lebanon.

“It was like a small news agency,” he said.

American officials and activists say that, nationwide, 100 to 200 people are fully engaged in the committees, with the majority of them overwhelmingly young. Across Syria, as many as 35 activists who are acknowledged as committee leaders try to communicate by Internet chat room each day at 10 a.m., though only 25 log on at any one time. Committees have charted different directions: in Hama, activists have occupied the city’s Aasi Square in nightly protests; in Duma, a Damascus suburb, the committee has sought to begin a campaign of civil disobedience, urging residents to stop paying water, electricity and phone bills.

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