Syrian activists launched a new campaign inspired by the video of Colonel Mustafa Shaddoud, where he bravely approaches his opponents unarmed and tells them “I am from Syria, from our country”. The campaign started individually on a Facebook page, but due to the enormous amount of likes–the page exceeded 7000 fans in only 6 days–the founders decided to widen the campaign. The activists asked supporters to send a picture of them baring a small sign with the famous quote of Colonel Shaddoud.
The campaign would last for two weeks, ending with a “documentary about the martyr’s story, attached to the messages the fans sent, and a message from our gathering to the people of Syria, with no exceptions,” according to the activists.
In their Facebook page, the activists presented themselves as the following: “First of all, if you’re asking yourself if this page is a pro-regime or against it, I’d like to inform you that the people who created this page, momentarily forgot about their political affiliations, they saw in the words of both Colonel Shaddoud of the Syrian Army, and colonel Abo Furat of the Free Syrian Army, a role model of patriotic, loyal citizens and army personnel. We need more people like them, we need to build a patriotic army, or else we will lose our homeland.”
Many people interacted with the campaign in a lot of ways, some of them held a sign with the colonel’s quote on it at home and abroad, others wrote poems about the act. In addition to a contribution by the NO campaign, which designed leaflets that read: “Don’t forget your home/I’m from Syria, from our country/sects have no streets or neighborhoods.”
The campaign’s activists concluded their talk with our website Syria Untold by saying: “we’re all civilians, who believe in peaceful resistance, and civil movement, that aren’t biased, financed or politicized. Our work has no price, because we’re working for Syria. We started this campaign because we know that a patriotic army is the starting point for Syria. And we need such an army to distance itself from extremism and political or sectarian conflicts.”
