Published by
Al-Araby
Al-Araby
When the first protesters were gunned down on the streets of Syria in March 2011, the world witnessed their deaths through grainy videos uploaded onto the internet by activists. The Syrian regime, fearing that the mass pro-democracy uprising would lead to its overthrow, directed its security forces at the protesters, detaining and killing activists in their thousands. Syria, largely closed to the outside world, became one of the first conflicts to be monitored, chronicled, and archived almost exclusively by citizen journalists and amateur researchers. Thousands of miles away, investigators wor…