International phone access in Syria is abysmal though. I've been there and to call my parents in neighbouring Lebanon would sometimes take me ~20 attempts to ge

International phone access in Syria is abysmal though. I've been there and to call my parents in neighbouring Lebanon would sometimes take me ~20 attempts to get a successful phone call through. It almost never worked in less than 5 attempts. My hunch is that they artificially limit the number of simultaneous international phone calls so that they can more easily monitor all of them. Further corroborating that theory, when we first got there, we were told by Syrian friends never to discuss anything that might be possibly misconstrued as political over the phone and especially international calls. I was there when the trouble started(I eventually left around June of 2011, some 3 months later) and during that time I'd have friends/family call to check up on me and I could never give any status updates about what was happening just that my surrounding area was calm and that I was fine. TL;DR; I would guess that international dialup, if you even managed to keep it up for any length of time given the difficulty of calling international would quickly flag you as "suspicious" as these things are heavily monitored.