Robert Mackey reviewd on March 15, 2013 for the New York Times’  The Lede blog some of the most important moments in Syria’s two years of war. He opened his report with the following message of Gen. Salim Idriss, the leader of the Syrian rebels’ military wing, distributed through YouTube:

Gen. Idriss says that the revolution startted peacefully, but the violent repressión by the regimen forced the insurgent to fight. He recognized the difficulties, the unequal forces and the lack of international sufficient support, but promised to keep fighting until the final victory.

Mackey mentioned in his piece an interview with The Lede in Cairo last year by the British-Syrian video activist Rami Jarrah, who confessed the inspiration of the Syrian protest movement in the Tunisian and Egyptian expamles, and replayed the video of one of the first Syrian demostrations, uploaded to YouTube on Feb 17, 2011.