Huntsville-trained engineer creates phone system for anti-Gadhafi rebels in Libya
By Kay Campbell, The Huntsville Times The Huntsville Times
Published: Thursday, April 14, 2011, 5:45 AM Updated: Thursday, April 14, 2011, 8:48 AM
HUNTSVILLE, Alabama -- An alumnus of Grissom High School and UAH has masterminded a new cell phone network for Libyan rebels that bypasses Col. Moammar Gadhafi's state-controlled network, which had jammed dissident communications.
The new network, Free Libyana, which has its international gateway in London and an IDP in the U.S., went live April 2 with a call its engineer, Ousama Abushagur, 31, made from Libya to his wife, Aisha Gataani, at their home in Abu Dhabi.
Abushagur's parents were refugees from Libya, as is Gataani, who still has family living in Benghazi, Libya.
Because of Abushagur's telecommunications expertise and business connections, he was able to set up a satellite system and crack into the phone number data base of the official Libyan system in less than a month, he said.
"They were jamming satellite phones; we knew something had to be done," Abushagur said. "We had to do some tricks to replicate the customer records."
Gadhafi's government had routed all regular phone communications in the country through Tripoli, where government censors could control calls. Abushagur said it took him and his telecommunications friends about four days to engineer a way around it and a couple weeks to put the pieces together.
 Ousama Abushagur, who grew up in Huntsville and now living in Abu Dhabi, helped get these supplies into Libya in February days after the revolution's outbreak. Here, Tarek Shalaby from Egypt, checks his phone as he prepares to take the medical supplies into Eastern Libya. Abushagur spearheaded the engineering of a phone system in Libya that rebels could use outside government control. The slogan on the wall behind Shalaby says "Libya is in our hearts." (Courtesy of Tarek Shalaby)
Flags to phones
Abushagur had realized personally the problems in March when he accompanied the second delivery of medicine and baby food into the country by Tawasil, which means "Delivery."
He started Tawasil through his Facebook connections within days of news of the uprisings Feb. 15. The first shipment went in to Misrata by the end of February. Tawasil has now delivered more than $1 million in aid and helped physicians and journalists to cross into the country.
The phone system, he told The Huntsville Times Tuesday afternoon in a call from Abu Dhabi, was funded entirely by private funds and without any support from any government. Free Libyana uses a privately contracted satellite connection.
"It's not that hard to get capacity on a satellite - you just sign a lease," Abushagur said. "It's my field."
Abushagur is the son of Mustafa Abushagur, a former UAH electrical and computer engineering professor who now heads the optics department at the University of Dubai. Ousama Abushagur graduated from the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2006 with a degree in electrical engineering. He is a business consultant now to companies expanding into the Middle East, including Huntsville's Adtran.
The state-controlled Libyana cell phone network, run by Gadhafi's eldest son, had cut phone and Internet service about a month ago. In some cases, rebel fighters were reduced to sometimes waving flags on the battlefield to communicate.
The Chinese contractors who had installed Libya's system wouldn't sell gear to help the rebels, so Abushagur and his engineer friends, also men with Libyan roots, had to patch together equipment to match the Libyan network, according to a story in The Wall Street Journal.
"We worked with engineers locally (in Libya), and were getting configurations right and left," Abushagur said.
After a delay from Egyptian customs officials for a week, the needed equipment had arrived in Libya by the end of March. Abushagur eventually managed to get it and a team of three Libyan engineers, four Western engineers and bodyguards into Libya, where they teamed with Libyana engineers and executives in Benghazi to put the plan into action.
Nomads no more
Besides helping rebels direct the fight, the new network is helping them raise funds and support from outside the country. It is also giving more than 2 million Libyans their first chance to communicate with family outside the country since Gadhafi cut off the system.
Abushagur's Twitter and Facebook pages gives a step-by-step update of the network, noting when Libyans could call Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and noting that some U.S. companies had refused to connect with the phone system.
"Ousama, U R a great man," says a typical post on his Facebook page. "Thank you for work you are doing in Libya."
The Libyan cell phone mission is perhaps just the latest expression of a desire to help oppressed people that Abushagur has had since childhood. In February of 1993, a 13-year-old Ousama Abushagur stood outside the Madison County Courthouse wearing a T-shirt that read, "Stop the War, Save the Children."
The protest had been organized by dozens of members from the Huntsville Islamic Center, which Abushagur's father helped to build. They were protesting the fighting, murder and mass rape in Bosnia by Serbian soldiers.
"Just watching the horror ... how bombs are thrown on little kids - I mean, you just look at this and you look at other worlds and you think, 'I feel sorry for those other people,'" he told The Times then.
Now, Abushagur dreams of the day when his own son, Ahmed, can live in the country his parents fled.
"We've become nomads," Abushagur said. "That's why we're doing this. I want a country to call home - the country of our origins."
Fight continues
Abushagur said, despite Gadhafi's reputation for ruthlessness and a wide reach, he feels safe for now.
"Oh well," Abushagur said, his shrug almost audible across the miles. "At this point Gadhafi has got a lot more to deal with right there. If he won the war I'd be a lot more worried."
But Abushagur is still hopeful that the rebels will prevail. The United Nations countries' bombing of Gadhafi's troops has saved untold lives, he said.
"I was at Friday prayers at the courthouse in Benghazi, our Tahrir," Abushagur said. "People were flying American, European, French flags to thank Americans and the French for their support. The bombs had stopped the tanks that were within hours of destroying the whole city."
"If Americans had not stopped them, there would have been a massacre that day. They are very, very thankful for the help, and they want it."
For now Abushagur continues to work on technological tools for the rebels from outside the country - just what he wouldn't say. Freedom loving people everywhere can help, he said, by keeping the pressure on governments to communicate to Gadhafi that he has to go.
"We need more bombing in the west," Abushagur said. "And if the U.S. government would recognize Libya's new government, that would help significantly. Gadhafi has to leave."
Huntsville Times staff writer Kenneth Kesner is co-writer of this story. He can be reached at Kenneth.Kesner@htimes.com.
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