This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.
This is the last of a three-part series. Read the first and the second parts.
Fidaa Maksour, a dispatcher with the White Helmets, a volunteer organisation that operates largely in the war-torn northwestern region of Syria, was on duty in the early morning hours of February 6, 2023, when the ground began to shake. It was a 7.8-magnitude earthquake, one of the strongest ever to hit the border region between Syria and Turkey
Calls started pouring into the operation room’s emergency WhatsApp lines soon after. There were “many people under the rubble, many people under collapsed buildings”, Maksour told Rest of World. In Syria alone, the earthquake and its aftershocks destroyed an estimated 10,000 buildings and killed more than 5,500 people.
By that time, Syria had already suffered through more than a decade of civil war. Government bombardments had destroyed much of the opposition-controlled northwestern region. Residents couldn’t call for help through regular emergency numbers. So instead, in times of crisis, they turn to the WhatsApp-based emergency response system set up by the White Helmets, who are often the only first responders available.
Maksour fielded the WhatsApp calls as best he could, relaying information between ambulances ferrying victims to overwhelmed hospitals and rescue crews attempting to reach those still trapped under the rubble.
The White Helmets’ WhatsApp system dates back to 2021, when a Turkish-Syrian project restored power lines to the northwest and a patchwork of satellite and broadband providers helped bring back widespread access to internet services. WhatsApp quickly became the default means of communication. “The whole population – every family, every household in the northwest – is using WhatsApp,” one of Maksour’s colleagues told Rest of World.
In recent months, Maksour has received emergency WhatsApp calls reporting everything from a serious car accident to unexploded ordnance. He dispatched ambulances and disposal teams for these instances, respectively.
Messaging apps have become indispensable tools for civilians in conflict and disaster zones like Syria, and WhatsApp, with its more than 2 billion daily users, is the most popular among them. The app’s compression algorithm, which in part allows it to function in areas with poor connectivity, makes it particularly useful. Humanitarian organisations use it to coordinate emergency responses; refugees turn to it as a lifeline; and journalists use it to relay reporting from conflict zones.
“We’ve talked to a variety of humanitarian NGOs,” WhatsApp’s director of global communications, Christina LoNigro, told Rest of World. “A lot of the things that we are concerned with is how they can use our app to get their information out most effectively … How do they get information out to affected populations in a place where they already are? How do you message where they are? And a lot of times, they are on WhatsApp.”
Historically, the flow of information in conflict and disaster areas has been limited. In the 20th century, government and aid organisations often turned to radio or television broadcasts to get critical messages out. Sometimes, they just used cars with loudspeakers. Meanwhile, victims of conflict often had no way to speak to each other, or the outside world.
As recently as 2006, a report from Denmark-based nonprofit International Media Support described the radio as “the principal means of communication for most of the population in conflict areas”. In Indonesia after 2006 and Sudan in 2009, radio sets were distributed as part of aid packages.
But by the beginning of the 2000s, digital messaging systems started taking on more importance. Skype, launched in 2003, became one of the only ways to reach Syrian activists and volunteers in opposition-controlled areas in the early days of the conflict. Then WhatsApp launched in 2009, Viber in 2010, and Telegram in 2013. These apps had features as simple as sending an SMS or making a phone call, but were not bound by bundled message allowances, character limits, or borders.
Shergo Ali, a humanitarian worker originally from the Syrian city of Qamishli, spent nearly eight years in the northeastern region of his home country as well as the Sinjar and Mosul areas of Iraq. “At that time, in 2015, 2016, 2017, it was more Skype and SMS messages,” he told Rest of World. “But not much WhatsApp or other apps.”
The aid sector is often cautious about adopting new technology to avoid introducing operational risks, but by the mid-2010s, messaging apps had become critical tools to some organisations. John Warnes, senior innovation officer with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, told Rest of World that responding to the influx of Syrian refugees to West Asia and Europe, who were generally highly connected, required a change of approach.
“UNHCR has been engaging with communities through digital channels such as messaging apps for a number of years,” Warnes said. “This accelerated particularly in the early 2010s as adoption rates of mobile devices grew in many parts of the world in which UNHCR was active.” WhatsApp was not the only application the agency used. In Mexico, personnel used Facebook Messenger as a way to speak with refugees and migrants.
The popularity of different messaging apps varied across regions. A 2017 report by the International Committee of the Red Cross noted Viber’s popularity in war-torn Ukraine – the company that operates Viber, Rakuten, claims the service is installed on 98% of Ukrainian mobile phones. In Niger, which has been wracked by years of violence between the military and armed Islamist groups, Viber was also popular, along with Facebook Messenger and Imo, a US-owned messaging platform with over 200 million users.
Before the fall of 2023, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees relied on phone calls, emails, and in-person meetings to communicate with its staff in Gaza, UNRWA director of communications Juliette Touma told Rest of World. Then, on October 7 that year, Hamas attacked Israel, killing around 1,200 people. Israel responded with a massive and ongoing military campaign that has since killed more than 44,000 Gazans, according to health authorities, displaced most of the around 365-square-km strip’s 2.3 million residents, and destroyed at least half of the area’s buildings.
Cell towers, along with power and internet infrastructure, were hit early on in the conflict, causing a near-total blackout in Gaza within weeks. “People couldn’t speak to each other. They couldn’t call each other. They were cut off from one another in the middle of a war zone, and they were cut off from the rest of the world,” Touma told Rest of World. “We were communicating with one staff member through one satellite phone that barely worked but we got cut off from the rest.”
UNRWA turned to WhatsApp.
The agency had previously used the service for sending messages to communities about things like school events or information on vaccination campaigns. Now, the app was suddenly much more important. “I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said that WhatsApp can be life-saving,” Touma said. UNRWA, she said, is now almost completely dependent on WhatsApp to speak with staff in Gaza.
Before the war, writer Amal Helles lived in Gaza’s Khan Yunis city, and mostly used WhatsApp to speak with friends and family. Shortly after the Israeli military campaign began, she started reporting for The Times and WhatsApp became indispensable for her work, she told Rest of World. To cover the aftermath of airstrikes or the desperate daily search for water and food, she and other journalists came to rely on data-only eSIMS that could connect to the outer edges of Egyptian or Israeli networks.
She climbed to exposed and dangerous high points in search of a phone signal. The connection was typically too weak to connect for email, but WhatsApp functioned. Thanks to WhatsApp’s compression algorithms, she was able to send voice notes, videos, and documents to her colleagues in London.
“Whatsapp was the only – the base – application that we used during the war,” Helles said.
Helles and her children eventually escaped Gaza, but she still continues to remotely cover the violence wracking her home and relies on WhatsApp to reach people there. Helles messages her family often, too, including her husband, who is still in Gaza and also works as a journalist.
One day this past August, she read of a strike near the entrance of a hospital where her husband regularly reports. She sent him a WhatsApp message right away but only saw a single gray tick indicating her message had been sent but not received. She tried to call his cell but it wouldn’t connect, and his colleagues couldn’t reach him either. An agonising hour passed before he finally logged on. “I heard his voice in a voice note via WhatsApp,” she said. “And my heart was reassured.”
Ahmad, who requested a pseudonym to speak with Rest of World out of concern for his safety, spent about a year working as an interpreter with British forces in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. That made him a target for the Taliban and other militant groups. He received a death threat in 2019, and was stabbed and shot in an apparent assassination attempt a few months later. So when the Taliban took Kabul in 2021, he fled.
He first went to Iran and then made the arduous trek across the mountains of the Turkish border. Ahmad was already familiar with WhatsApp – he used it to avoid exorbitant Afghan telecom fees. But as he escaped Afghanistan, it also became his only link to home.
“When I was traveling, my family had concerns about my journey,” he told Rest of World. “I was sending some of my pictures home [to say] I’m okay, I’m fine … I had contact with my family and I was always giving them my updates.”
Ahmad reached Istanbul, and applied for a humanitarian visa and to a UK immigration program. In the meantime, he spent months in a cramped and crowded basement apartment hiding from the police sweeps for illegal migrants, venturing out only to work long shifts in a textile factory for around $50 a week. International calls would have been prohibitively expensive, so Ahmad turned to WhatsApp. “It was the only way that I contacted my family,” he said. “I used to share pictures, selfies, voice notes.”
After an unsuccessful attempt to smuggle himself to Europe, Ahmad was deported back to Afghanistan, where he lives today in hiding. WhatsApp is how he keeps in touch with the few people he trusts. He depends on the app’s end-to-end encryption to keep the Taliban from finding him. “It’s more safe than a phone call,” he said. “Mobile phones, SIM cards, voices – these three can be tracked easily.”
He has been trying to reach Europe once again, this time via legal pathways. His lawyer insists that they communicate only through Signal, an open-source, privacy-focused messaging app but Ahmad is confident that WhatsApp is safe enough. “I think the Taliban are not that much developed that they can track WhatsApp very easily,” he said.
WhatsApp has its faults and weaknesses, even for those dependent on the service in conflict and disaster areas. The service has been criticised for a relative lack of privacy and the potential for surveillance by more sophisticated actors. Meta collects a variety of data on users, including IP addresses, device information, and profile images that it shares across its companies.
In May, The Intercept reported on the contents of an internal WhatsApp threat assessment, which discussed potential vulnerabilities that could allow government agencies to work out a user’s contacts, group membership, and potential location. Meta told The Intercept that there was no evidence of security vulnerabilities on WhatsApp.
Signal is often cited by security professionals as harder to surveil for even the most advanced intelligence apparatuses. But that has not yet translated into mass uptake. Signal does not release specific usage data but its active users are estimated to number in the tens of millions – a tiny fraction of that of WhatsApp.
When Ali, the Syrian humanitarian worker, arrived in Ukraine last February to start a new role as area manager for the east of the country with German NGO Welthungerhilfe, colleagues instructed him to download Signal immediately. Aside from general information sharing and travel, the NGO uses Signal for security and safety communications, including instructions on how to react to air raid alarms and airstrikes, Ali said.
“I’d never used Signal before,” he said. “We’ve had staff who arrived new after me, and they didn’t have Signal. We asked them to download it.”
After a 2021 data protection analysis of potential risks, the ICRC instructed its employees to use Signal internally, and, where possible, externally, Rebeca Lucía Galindo, an adviser at the ICRC on communication with communities, told Rest of World. But if that is not possible, then the organisation uses the safest viable alternative.
WhatsApp is aware of how its services are relied upon in dangerous areas and is trying to address concerns, LoNigro said. She described various privacy-boosting additions made to the app after discussions with NGOs, including disappearing messages and the ability to lock specific chats with a PIN or biometric identification.
Nathaniel Raymond, executive director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, underscored the capacity of messaging apps to inflame tensions and incite violence during times of crisis. He described incidents in the ongoing war in Sudan, where the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces sent out large batches of WhatsApp messages announcing an impending attack on a given location, causing panic and displacement.
That is echoed in the findings of a report by the multi-donor initiative Conflict Sensitivity Resource Facility. It concluded that in South Sudan, social media – particularly WhatsApp – had been used to spread propaganda and also as a means to plan and coordinate attacks and ambushes. Research consortium PeaceRep has also noted the connection between WhatsApp groups and revenge killings in Somalia.
But WhatsApp is now so ubiquitous that it will inevitably continue to be a critical tool in conflict areas. Maksour, the White Helmets dispatcher in Syria, said it would be “very, very difficult” to do his job without WhatsApp. “The civilians have only WhatsApp to communicate with us and to communicate an emergency to the operations room.”
John Beck is an award-winning journalist based in Istanbul.
This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.
