On July 4, 2011, Assad’s forces surrounded the town, then they invaded, looting stores and burning homes. During the yearlong occupation that followed, Fares and his friends continued to protest using YouTube and social media. Because it was impossible to gather for more than 30 seconds, they deployed a kind of flash mob, and Fares, the director, tried to make the short films funny.

He once wrapped his friends in shrouds and had them stumble out of graves to show that even the dead wanted Assad to step down. Another time, he procured human hair from the town’s beautician to make wigs and beards to transform his actors-protesters into cave men, whom Assad gassed as the international community looked on impassively. (The grunting solved the problem of translation.) While Fares was filming, a family of four on a motorcycle rode past. Dumbstruck by the hirsute and half-naked actors, they nearly crashed. The video, titled “Kafranbel: The Syrian Revolution in Three Minutes,” has more than 100,000 views on YouTube.

“From the beginning, I’ve used humor,” Fares said. “We wanted to be special. There were thousands of people demonstrating, and we were, like, 50 people in a field, and we wanted to be on Al Jazeera.” Fares decided to write in English “to try to get the whole world to pay attention.” With his own Syrian-American “spies” in the United States, he wrote messages that he hoped Americans would listen to. On Dec. 16, 2011, he first voiced his frustration with U.S. inaction: “Obama’s procrastination kills us. We miss Bush’s audacity. The world is better with America’s Republicans.” (A former ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, sent a picture of this banner to the White House.) The banner that elicited the greatest international response, with 17,000 Facebook shares over two nights, was the message of compassion he offered the families of the Boston Marathon victims: “Boston bombings represent a sorrowful scene of what happens every day in Syria. Do accept our condolences.” The families in Boston responded: “Friends in Syria — we too hope for the safety of your families and for peace.”

During the fall of 2012, after Kafranbel was liberated, Fares sneaked over the Turkish border to attend a media workshop in Turkey, where he met the United States government official who was identifying activists who might receive American support. Fares’s station became one of nine Syrian radio and two TV stations financed by the U.S. State Department. (So far, $25 million has been disbursed.) On the surface, this funding is reminiscent of Cold War strategies: using Potemkin media to broadcast America’s messaging inside a hostile regime. But the programming is 100 percent Syrian. “It’s not traditional psy-ops where the U.S. controls the radio,” Barton, the State Department official, said. “It’s about finding local people who are truly capable.”

The 11 activists whom the United States finances, including Fares, aren’t strictly journalists. They fill an unusual role in the conflict: Via social media, they informally monitor more than $2 billion of aid in a country to which the United States government has little direct access. They report which projects are working and which aren’t. As dangerous as Syria is for journalists — 72 have been killed since 1992, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists — it can be even more so for activists. To mitigate those risks, the United States provides training in austere media environments. “We try to make the best, latest little gizmos for their laptops available to them, but we do worry about them,” a senior U.S. official said. (Those supplies include software for secure communications.) Recently the official met all of the Syrian activists in person to thank them and to urge caution. “You guys are tremendously important in monitoring this aid,” he said. “Don’t think you have to tell us what we want to hear. . . . None of you is Superman. Please be careful.”

Not long after Fares began receiving recording, editing and broadcast equipment from the United States, the Free Syrian Army helped the residents of Kafranbel retake their town in a four-day battle that began on Aug. 6, 2012. When it was clear that Assad’s forces were fleeing, Fares ran to the mosque and shouted over the speakers, “People of Kafranbel, you are free!”

Since then, amid airstrikes, the citizens of Kafranbel have tried to rebuild civil society on their own; Fares is one of their leaders. It has been more difficult than he imagined. “We’ve had seven different local councils, but we did nothing, just made promises,” he said. So Fares started an organization, the Union of Revolutionary Bureaus, which employs 365 people and is paid for by a number of NGOs. In addition to Radio Fresh and a media center, the bureau runs a women’s center, three day care centers and human rights training for lawyers and has nearly completed a project to once again provide running water for the town and three villages.