Montaser Abu Nabot - Ghazi Anteb
The Syrian youth Tamer Al-Turkmani sits for hours in front of the computer screen, engaging in a voluntary work that he describes as an important national duty for all Syrians, which is preserving the video clips of the Syrian revolution after a large part of it has been deleted and lost.
He tells Al-Jazeera Net that his work was mainly focused on documenting the names of the dead who were killed by the Syrian regime since 2011, but he noticed that most of the video clips documenting this were deleted from the YouTube platform on the pretext that it violates the site's policy to include "violent content", according to the site.
Hence, Tamer realizes the importance of doing another job besides documenting the names of the dead, which is preserving the videos that document the Syrian revolution from being lost, especially as its photographers have either been killed, arrested, or abandoned, and among them there are no copies except on the World Wide Web and specifically YouTube most used by Syrian activists. .
The Syrian regime prevented the media from covering the protests launched against it starting in Daraa Governorate in 2011, but this came in light of the communications revolution that enabled the emergence of the journalist citizen who transmitted with a mobile phone camera what the media was unable to transmit.
The web was filled with video clips documenting the demonstrations, massacres committed by the regime, bombing operations, clashes and other developments and events that accompanied the revolution over the past years, but it was published with the aim of conveying news that is not reached by the international media in Syria. Because some of them are old, it is necessary to document, archive and preserve them from loss.
Positive results: Al-
Turkmani divided his work into two phases. One of them records the videos and the names of their YouTube channels, in addition to the link and its status, if it is active or not.
And the second stage, according to his speech on Al-Jazeera Net, saves the clips on his personal computer and arranges them according to their dates, in addition to the place and time of the event, in a way that helps in the appropriate recovery process for him.
Al-Turkmani confirmed that he worked on preparing three copies of the external storage devices "imports", placing the first in Canada and the second in Europe while keeping the third in Turkey.
The aim of this distribution is to ensure that the documentation of the videos of the Syrian revolution is not lost, and Turkmani told Al Jazeera Net that the total number of videos that he archived reached 1554940 pieces, equivalent to 22164 GB, obtained from 2026 channels, and the quality of the videos ranges between 240 and 1080 "pixels. ".
Documentation and
evidence, Tamer Al-Turkmani aspires to create a website that displays all the videos and archives of the Syrian revolution, including the names of the dead and details of the massacres, to be available to everyone who wants to work on research or documentation on the Syrian revolution.
He said in his interview with Al-Jazeera Net that he did not want to repeat what happened during the Hama massacre in 1982 where there was no documentation, and the Syrian regime was able to obliterate images of violations even if they remained present in the Syrians' minds.
Al-Turkmani added that what happened during the past years in Syria cannot pass without proof and documentation "to be clear evidence on the day of reckoning that all Syrians hope for the assassins of the Syrian regime and Bashar al-Assad's head, and to remain a stain on the forehead of the international community that did not move to save the Syrian people."