Syrian opposition seeks to wipe the Assad name off the map — via Google

Among the first acts of victorious revolutionaries is to tear down signs bearing the names of the regimes they toppled.

In Syria, the opposition is not waiting for President Bashar al-Assad to fall.

(GOOGLE EARTH IMAGE from JANUARY PROVIDED BY ogleearth.com/Last month, this major Damascus highway was identified on Google Earth as being named after Hafez al-Assad, the father of Syria’s current president, and Ibrahim al-Kashosh, an icon of the current uprising. On Tuesday, Assad’s name was nowhere to be seen.)

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Major events in the country’s tumultuous uprising.

Anti-government activists in recent weeks have used a Google crowdsourcing program, Map Maker, to rename key streets, bridges and boulevards after their revolutionary heroes, according to opposition figures and the Syrian government. The idea, activists say, has been to expunge the vestiges of the Assad family’s 40-year rule and to commemorate protesters who have fallen over the course of an 11-month-old uprising.

“They have the right to be remembered by the Syrians,” said Rwadan Ziadeh, a representative of the Syrian National Council, an exile group. “They are making new history.”

On Google, names have changed over time as the maps are updated with user proposals, which are approved by other users as well as Google editors. The names on Google Maps are sometimes different from those on Google Earth. The overall result, however, has been a patchwork of Assad-era and revolutionary names, sometimes side by side.

The campaign started a couple of months ago on Facebook, said Rami Nakhle, another exile opposition figure, and it has quickly gained the Syrian government’s attention. On Monday, the country’s envoy to the United Nations, Bashar al-Jafaari, digressed from a speech before the General Assembly to accuse Google of participating in a foreign plot to meddle in Syria’s internal affairs and undermine its leader.

“What does Google have to do with the names of streets in small Syrian cities and villages?” Jafaari said, referring to changed street names in the restive towns of Homs and Idlib. “This is a flagrant violation of United Nations General Assembly, the resolution of the Arab League pertaining to the standardization of the geographic nomenclature.”

The renaming campaign hasn’t happened only online. On Syrian streets, members of the opposition have changed signs with their own hands.

Ziadeh said activists in his home town, Daraya, tore down the sign on a street named after President Assad’s older brother, Basel al-Assad, who died in a car accident in 1994. In its place, they erected a sign honoring Ghiyath Matar, a 24-year-old tailor whose signature gesture — handing out flowers to Syrian soldiers — has come to symbolize the opposition movement’s nonviolent beginnings.

Anti-government activists throughout the Middle East have effectively harnessed the power of the Internet, particularly social media, to fuel public support for their causes. Google, which employed Wael Ghonim, an early leader of the popular uprising that brought down Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, has emerged as a particularly high-profile symbol of the forces of tumult.

The Internet giant declined to make someone available to discuss its mapping practices in detail. But spokeswoman Deanna Yick said Google has built its maps from “a wide range of authoritative sources, ranging from the public and commercial data providers, user contributions and imagery references.