The first Youtube videos to start a war?

CAIRO: They may just be the first YouTube videos to start a war.

The images flooded in only hours after the Aug. 21 chemical attack in Damascus' eastern suburbs. And they soon reached the very highest rungs of the U.S. government: "As a father, I can't get the image out of my head of a man who held up his dead child, wailing while chaos swirled around him," said Secretary of State John Kerry in his impassioned Aug. 26 speech. "[T]he images of entire families dead in their beds without a drop of blood or even a visible wound; bodies contorting in spasms; human suffering that we can never ignore or forget."

Social media also forms a key part of the British intelligence assessment about the attack. As a result of the videos, "there is little serious dispute that chemical attacks causing mass casualties . . . took place" in Damascus, according to an open letter from the chairman of Britain's Joint Intelligence Committee to Prime Minister David Cameron.

The local activists who filmed these videos, then, have accomplished what years of hectoring from the official Syrian opposition have been unable to do — bring the world to the brink of military intervention against Bashar Assad's regime. The conflict's steadily mounting death toll — now at over 100,000, and climbing rapidly — failed to spur international action; the images of dead children lined up in neat rows following the attack, however, appeared to have served as a gut punch to the world's conscience. And the sense of outrage may be so great that it will propel the United States into war.

The amateur Syrian videographers' accomplishment, however, came at a high cost.

Activist Razan Zaitouneh, who runs the Violations Documentation Center in Syria, tells FP that her team sped to the Damascus suburb of Zamalka immediately after a chemical weapons attack was reported there on Aug. 21. The media staff of Zamalka's local coordination committee, which is responsible for filming videos in the area and uploading them to the world, also sped to the scene. According to Zaitouneh, all but one of them paid with their lives.

"The chemical attacks, on the first day of the massacre, claimed the lives of many media activists in Zamalka coordination because they inhaled the chemical toxic gases," Murad Abu Bilal, the sole survivor, told Zaitouneh in an interview uploaded to — what else — YouTube. "[T]hey went out to shoot and collect information about the chemical attack, but none of them came back."

The videos quickly removed any doubt for U.S. intelligence analysts that chemical weapons were used in the Aug. 21 attack. They showed children with constricted pupils who were twitching and having trouble breathing — classic signs of exposure to sarin gas. They also showed the remnants of the rockets reportedly used to deliver the gas, which were largely intact. If they had delivered conventional explosive munitions, more of the rocket would have been destroyed on impact.

There are downsides, to be sure, to this type of reporting. Analysts of the Aug. 21 attack on the eastern Damascus suburbs noted that most of the victims shown in the videos were women and children — a likely attempt by those filming the event to provoke greater public sympathy. White argues that the information from the videos must be put in the context of other reporting of the conflict to gain a fuller understanding of events on the ground.

But for better or worse, this type of reporting appears to be here to stay. And if the U.S. military moves aggressively against Assad, part of the reason will be the brave souls who ran toward a chemical weapons attack when everyone else was running away.

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David Kenner is Middle East editor at Foreign Policy.