MAY 14, 2012
DAMASCUS, Syria — For 48 hours, the two Damascus residents struggled to reach the besieged city of Homs by car, trying to deliver boxes of blood bags so surgeons there could operate on the wounded. But gunfire made the roads impassable.
Finally, they strapped their contraband to their backs and, led by a shepherd through back roads and dirt paths, hiked 65 miles to the city.
As the violence across Syria reaches a treacherous new phase and the numbers of displaced and injured swell, such individual and ad hoc efforts have grown into an increasingly organized underground network of volunteers willing to brave injury and arrest to deliver relief supplies to those trapped, wounded or displaced by the fighting. [full story]