The New York Times It was past 11 A.M., and Abdullah was finally waking up. The night before had gone late, he and his friends challenging and daring and fleeing from the feared mukhabarat, Syria's secret police, who for the past five months have been bent on crushing dissent in Homs. With a few hours of sleep behind him, Abdullah rolled off his mattress and began tapping out details of their exploits on his laptop. The clashes had been fierce and lasted hours, past the muezzin's call to prayer at dawn. “We won't bow to anyone but God,” the protesters declared. The mukhabarat replied with tear gas, buckshot and bullets. “Hot” was how Abdullah described it as he typed. As safe houses go, the room he slept in was lavish. A wide-screen television shared space on the wall with framed Koranic verses, rendered in sloping gold script. The hot wind of the Syrian summer billowed the thick drapes like sails in a storm. There was a mattress for each of the four men, all in their 20s, who slept surrounded by their smartphones and laptops and satellite phones and speakers. Abdullah, a 26-year-old computer engineer and pious Muslim, is a wanted man. He joined the first protest in Homs in March, and since then he has emerged as one of the dozen or so leaders of the youth resistance. His savvy with technology has made him a target for the police, and this was the fifth place he had slept in less than a week. He hadn't been to his family's home in two months. Around his neck he wore a tiny toy penguin that was actually a thumb drive, which he treated like a talisman, occasionally squeezing it to make sure it was still there. I sat next to him on the mattress and watched as he traded messages with other activists on Skype, then updated a Facebook page that serves as an underground newspaper, then marked a Google Earth map of Homs with the spots of the latest unrest. “If there's no Internet,” Abdullah said, “there's no life.” The other young men in the room began to stir. Abdullah's friend Iyad (last names of the activists will not be used, in order to protect their identities), brought in tea and emptied ashtrays. They all soon started talking with an excitement that belied the danger to which they have grown accustomed. By day, a measure of normal life unfolds in Homs: stores and government offices are open, and people go about their business. Checkpoints have proliferated, though, and the most active youth try to stay off the streets, worrying that they are easier to identity in the daylight. By night, they gather in scores, sometimes in the hundreds, in open defiance of the regime. In Iyad's living room, they bragged about spreading nails in the streets to flatten the tires of security-force vehicles and described to me how they load onions into plastic pipes and fire them by igniting hair spray. When security forces surged toward one of their comrades, they shouted to him: “You've got 20 guys around you! Blow yourself up!” “They just fled,” Abdullah said, smiling as he recalled the security forces retreating in fear from the imaginary explosives. The Syrian uprising began in mid-March in the hardscrabble town of Dara'a, about 160 miles from here, after 15 teenagers were arrested for writing antigovernment graffiti on school walls. The teens were reportedly beaten, and some of them had their fingernails pulled out. Their mothers were threatened with rape. The revolt spread quickly from Dara'a throughout the country and has become the most violent in the Arab uprising, rivaled only by Libya, but Libya was a civil war. More than 2,200 Syrians have been killed and thousands more arrested in the relentless government crackdown. Protests after Friday prayers have become ritual, and in response to them the military and security forces have assaulted many of Syria's largest cities — Latakia, Homs, Hama, Deir al-Zour and, of course, Dara'a — the violence so pronounced that the United States and European countries have demanded President Bashar al-Assad end his 11-year reign. Iyad, a young father who named his newborn daughter after Dara'a, showed off a bandaged right knee that was grazed by a bullet. Abdullah pulled up a picture on his computer of one of Homs's first martyrs, a 19-year-old named Amjad Zantah, who was killed during the government's attempts to crush the earliest protests in the city. I'd been covering the uprising since its beginning, but the question that still eluded me was how the Syrian youth — the shabab — keep fighting in the face of such withering violence. How can laptops and cellphones and bags of nails and pipes that shoot onions be any match for one of the Arab world's most fearsome police states? And how can an eclectic array of leftists, liberals, conservatives, nationalists, Islamists (themselves diverse) and the disgruntled and downtrodden prove unified enough to bring it down? “Tunisia won, Egypt won, and we're going to win ourselves,” Abdullah said when I asked him about the odds they were up against. “There's no going back.” His words reminded me of an anecdote from Islamic history known by all these youths, schooled as they were in a country that celebrates a glorified Arab past as state propaganda. In the eighth century, the Muslim general Tariq bin Ziyad led his troops to Gibraltar, then burned his own army's ships after the soldiers disembarked. “Oh, my warriors, where will you flee?” he asked them. “Behind you is the sea, before you, the enemy. You have left now only the hope of your courage and your constancy.” Abdullah and the others understood the story's meaning. “We know the Syrian revolution is here,” Iyad said, pointing to his sinewy biceps. “It's up to us.” __
