Leave 'Em Laughing: U.S. Embassy in Syria Posts Cartoon to Facebook

The U.S. Embassy in Damascus' only statement to Syrian citizens since pulling up stakes in what appears to be a nascent civil war is...a cartoon.

The State Department evacuated the Damascus embassy Monday amid rising violence between Arab Spring protesters and President Basher Assad's regime. It wasn't clear at the time of the evacuation whether the embassy would maintain a virtual presence in Syria through its website or its Facebook and Twitter profiles.

The embassy's first post-evacuation post to both Facebook and Twitter came at about 7:30 p.m. Monday. It was the link to an animated Washington Post political cartoon referencing Russia and China's veto Saturday of a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning the Syrian government's violence against protesters.

The cartoon shows caricatures of Chinese President Hu Jintao and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin covering their ears and eyes respectively just before an Assad caricature shoots a protester in the face.

It's not clear whether the posts were made by embassy staff or by State officials in Washington. There was no text on either site explaining the link or the reason for posting it.

Seventeen people had liked the Facebook post as of 5:30 p.m. Tuesday and 47 people had commented on it. Only a few of those comments were in Arabic. The remainder were in English, though some of the English comments appeared to be from Syrian citizens or expatriates.

The comments were almost uniformly negative, with the Syrian American, Russian and Chinese regimes all taking heavy criticism.

The embassy Tweet had only been retweeted once.