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Syria's Sons of No One

(New York Times Magazine) Anthony Shadid - The clashes in Homs 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, Syria's secret police, replied with tear gas, buckshot and bullets. Abdullah, a 26-year-old computer engineer and pious Muslim, 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. I'd been covering the uprising since its beginning, but the question that still eluded me was how the Syrian youth 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?
2011-09-09 00:00:00
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