De smugler nødhjælp ind i det lukkede land, hjælper flygtninge med at komme over grænserne og træder i det hele taget ind i stedet for de traditionelle hjælpeorganisationer, som ikke må operere i landet.
AMMAN, 30 March 2012 (IRIN): In a trendy coffee shop in the Jordanian capital, Amman, 20- and 30-somethings (folk i tyverne og trediverne) smoking sheesha pipes are playing the role of international aid agencies from their laptops (computere).
Largely restricted by the Syrian government, traditional humanitarian agencies have been unable to access many of the areas affected by more than a year of unrest in Syria.
A new generation of aid workers – working through personal contacts and online networks – have been filling the gap. They say donors and international agencies are increasingly using them to get aid across, raising a number of questions around international law and ethics.
“We do everything: journalism, medical care, smuggling,” said Ahmed Almasri, a Syrian refugee in Jordan, as he takes a puff from his sheesha pipe.
“We do everything. We have all be-come superman,” he added.
One year ago, Almasri worked as a manager at a Duty Free shop in Syria. Now, he is one of the main players smuggling aid into Syria via Jordan.
It is a project that consumes his life – he calls his mother to wish her a happy Mother’s Day while en route to drop off medicine to other activists who will arrange for them to be smuggled across the border.
He met his current girlfriend, another Syrian activist, in Amman, after she too fled because she was wanted by the Syrian government. They joke about naming their future children Dera’a, after the southern Syrian town where the uprising started.
He gets calls in the middle of the night – “Are you Ahmad Almasri? We have medical supplies for you from Qatar. Come pick them up at the border.”
He lives off of savings and remittances (penge optjent i udlandet) and runs on little sleep and too much caffeine.
Vast network
In a smoke-filled room in the Jordanian border town of Remtha, he and a few other activists – some Syrian, some Jordanian – sit around in tracksuits discussing logistics, the floor cluttered with ashtrays, cups of coffee and cell phones.
“A 13-year-old boy who was wanted (eftersøgt) has just crossed the border illegally,” announces another Syrian refugee, Abdu Abazid, as he gets off the phone. He himself has just arrived from Dera’a, where he was also involved in the movement of supplies. “We have to go pick him up.”
Their networks stretch from Dubai to New Jersey to Barcelona to Australia. Members of the Syrian diaspora (syrere i udlandet) send them everything from satellite phones to blood bags.
They then tap into a network of truck and taxi drivers, or smugglers – often working for free – to take items across the border. From there, another network of activists gets the items into any city or specific family in Syria, or to a network of doctors who then coordinate among themselves to get the medicines to the areas most in need.
Syrians on the other side of the border inform Almasri and his crew if it is safe to try to smuggle things across on any given day, depending on the size of the security presence.
“At first, we each worked independently. But it became so big we needed to coordinate and get organized,” Almasri says.
Now they joke they resemble a mafia. Many links in the chain do not know each other – but the system works.
Activists approach donors
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http://www.irinnews.org/Report/95209/AID-POLICY-A-new-humanitarianism-at-play-in-Syrian-crisis
