The Curious Case of Amina Abdullah (Figures of Revolution Part 1)

Amina Abdullah is a Syrian-American blogger who became a symbol of Syrian resistance on April 26th of this year, when she posted an entry reporting that security officers came to her home to arrest her for political content on her blog (A Gay Girl in Damascus). Her father, she said, was effectively able to shame the police into leaving without her. International news outlets quickly picked up the story, and it was celebrated as a defeat of the widespread political arrests taking place in Syria.

Then, a few days ago, a woman claiming to be Amina's cousin reported that Amina had been kidnapped while out and about in Damascus. This news also spread like wildfire. But this time there were questions brewing.

Some journalists have begun to question if Amina Abdullah even exists as she's presented on her blog. The main issues being raised are that journalists have been unable to find anyone who has actually met her in person, pictures supposedly of her were actually pulled from a London woman's Facebook, a report that her IP address was from the UK, and Amina's own words indicating her blog would be a mix of fact and fiction. Guardian article

There have been possible explanations offered for these inconsistencies. Some suggest that the writer of A Gay Girl in Damascus employed "Amina Abdullah" as a pseudonym, hid her real IP address and put up pictures of Jelena Lacic to maintain anonymity.  

It's hard to come to a conclusion at this point. But since Amina Abdullah is purported to have American citizenship, the US State Department is investigating. Of course, even if the author of Amina's blog is an American detained in Syria, the Syrian government may or may not choose to cooperate. (Look no further than the high-profile detention of al-Jazeera correspondent Dorothy Parvaz, a naturalized Canadian citizen with an Iranian father and an American mother. The Syrian government simultaneously confirmed they were holding her for interrogation and claimed that she had been denied entry and returned to Qatar, when in reality she'd been deported to Iran within three days of her arrest) Parvaz's account of her ordeal

My feeling is if we don't hear anything more about Amina in the next 48 or 72 hours, she's disappeared into the cold embrace of the Syrian intelligence apparatus forever...if she ever existed in the first place. We may never know how true the accounts on the blog are. But if she's found out to be fake, what will that change?

I don't think it will make that much of a difference one way or the other. Why? Simply put, she's been upstaged by a 13 year-old boy named Hamza al-Khateeb. More on him (and why he is, in my opinion, a stronger rallying point for Syrians) next.

**Hat tip to my dear friend Jesko for reading my mind and inspiring this post**