The location of Assad’s speech on Sunday—the center of the city—was a message in its own right: a public sign that he felt confident the fight for Damascus is going his way, securing his presence in the heart of the capital.  Analysts and activists say semicircle of terrain north and east of Damascus has fallen into rebel hands, threatening the government’s control over its own capital.

“The most important aspect is perhaps not the speech’s content, but rather the ability of Assad’s forces to secure the capital for such an event,” wrote Ayham Kamel, an analyst with the Eurasia Group, in a note released on Tuesday. He said that following successive rebel advances, particularly around the capital, there had been a perception that Assad’s military strength had been compromised.

“In delivering his speech from central Damascus, Assad was demonstrating that the strategy has been effective and that the military, the regime’s core pillar of support, remains intact.”

Douma-Damascus, Shaam News Network

But still, the fight goes on. Even during the speech, there were reports of continued shelling in the city’s periphery. Over the weeks past, the regime has escalated intense shelling of the surrounding suburbs, flattening areas like Douma and Daraya. And for many months, Damascus has borne the marks of a security lockdown, with a heavy military presence across the city.

“The battle for Damascus is not unlike the battle for Aleppo,” said Joshua Landis, an analyst and author of the Syria Comment blog.

“The core neighborhoods outside of Damascus have a lot of refugees from Homs and other places, and they are boiling with opposition.”

Inside Damascus, Landis says, the regime has effectively barricaded itself into the city center. Residents tell Syria Deeply that checkpoints now pepper the city streets, holding up traffic and making it harder to get around. They also say few people go out late at night, as looting and robberies have spiked.

“The morale of people is gone in Damascus. Some people have no hope. And others have very little,” said one resident.

“Some people have shifted from one neighborhood to another neighborhood, looking for safety. It’s a survival issue.”

One barometer of the flight in Damascus is the city’s international airport. In November, flights were interrupted as battles intensified along the main airport road. If that happens again, it’s a sign the government is losing control in a war that has disrupted the most basic functions of the state.

According to Kamel’s note, Assad seems to have reasserted control over the capital. But insofar as this is battle of attrition, Landis argues that he is losing his grip as the battle goes on. Regime troops can’t easily be replaced, as compared to rebels, who are drawing on a larger pool of willing fighters, from Syria and abroad.

“It will be very difficult for the regime to hold on to Damascus,” said Landis.

“In the long run, this will be devastating to the regime.”

The nurse, who asked us not print her full name or photo, speaks on the stairwell outside the hospital’s new surgery room, built with donations from two American medical NGOs. She met us alongside Dr. Mohammed, the Sunni orthopedic surgeon who serves as her boss and the chief of this hopsital.

The hospital has only been open for 20 days; the surgical unit is located underground for safety, as the area is heavily bombed and rocketed by regime forces.

A hospital in Homs, courtesy of Shaam News Network

“Before I came here, I worked for 14 years in the Assad Hospital in Latakia City,” she says. Now her husband and five children have moved to the mountains with her, to hide from regime forces who might be angry with her defection to a Sunni hospital in FSA territory. “I never feel any tension working here – we’re all people with the same degrees, no difference between Sunnis and Alawites in the hospital. We are one medical team.”

But the fact still stands that should Assad be removed from office, Alawite civilians like Umyara could face reprisals from angry Sunnis. “I am surely afraid for my safety after Assad falls,” the nurse says, despite assurances from local FSA leaders.

For now, within the hospital walls, Dr. Mohammed doesn’t see a distinction.

“Most of our patients are Sunni, but it’s no problem with us if someone who comes in is an Alawite…this is why she came to work with us.”

Every day, he says, his staff sees 20-35 patients, most of them injured in the war. A few days ago he treated a patient with cancer and has seen others with diabetes and hypertension. But the hospital doesn’t have have the medicine or resources to properly treat those patients – part of what he describes as a crisis in specialized care, one that now affects nearly every Syrian city.

When we met the doctor had just performed surgery on a young rebel fighter whose palms had practically been blown to pieces in an explosives accident.

The nurse says that as a Sunni fighter, his treatment would have been varied, at best, at her old regime-supported hospital. “I am working here now to help people, all people. Before, the treatment was specialized just for the Alawites.”

At the Assad Hospital, they might treat Sunnis, “but afterwards, the Assad forces come and get them and take them away. This has happened since the beginning of the revolution, since March of last year. I feel better now,” working here.

President Bashar Al Assad gave a rare speech on Sunday, his first since June, igniting Facebook and Twitter discussions that provided a jolt to both his supporters and opponents. Assad reiterated his argument that there is no revolution in Syria and that those seeking his ouster are criminals and terrorists working for foreign enemies. He laid out a peace plan that echoed his stance for the past 21 months, refusing to engage the armed rebels and functionally insisting on staying in power.

The online discussion followed a predictable flow. Assad opponents dismissed the speech, pointing out that nothing new was said, while Assad supporters were invigorated, gleeful at the defiance of their embattled president. 

Although the fate of Assad and his family’s decades-long rule remains the core demand at the heart of the Syrian conflict, the debate in Syria has touched on broader issues — none more sensitive and potentially deadly than the sectarian enmity brewing in the country. Subhi Hadidi, a prominent Syrian writer for the London-based daily Alquds Alarabi, sparked some testy exchanges this week.

It began when Hadidi said that Alawites should examine the roots of the violent behavior of some in their sects, a comment that was a reaction to the apparently endless stream of videos showing Syrian soldiers taunting and killing unarmed prisoners.

Many took offense to his statement, including Samar Yazbek, an Alawite writer who supports the revolution, and labeled him as sectarian. Yazbek asked why people fell silent after it became known that one of the alleged soldiers was Sunni. His response tries to clear up the point but its aggressiveness doesn’t seem to have been effective.

Asaad Abu Khalil, author of the Angry Arab blog and a fierce opponent of the Syrian revolution, linked to Hadidi’s tweets and alerted readers to their “sectarian quality.”

The unmistakable signs of Islamism continue in Aleppo. The image below shows rebels emptying liquor bottles into a drain, a picture that has many liberal supporters of the revolution concerned that they may not be able to drink alcohol in a post-Assad Syria.

We met at a house used by the FSA deep in the mountains of Jebel Turkman, in Latakia Province. While bombs rattle the windows he shed light on the complicated mindset shared by many of Bashar al-Assad’s soldiers: young men, forced into mandatory military stints, desperately wanting to join the opposition.

“It’s my first time seeing a journalist or an American,” he says shyly. “I’ve been in the Syrian Army for one year. From the first time I joined, I wanted to defect—when I saw the FSA growing. Before I joined, I thought the revolution would end and Assad would win.”

He says one shabiha minder was assigned to each new soldier, to ensure that they don’t defect. It comes after a recent stream of defections that apparently rattled the army’s confidence. “The soldiers, they’re scared of the FSA. A lot of them would like to defect, but the shabiha, they stay with us, they watch us like security so we don’t go.”

Courtesy of Shaam News Network

The young soldiers hardly spoke of it among themselves. “I would only talk about this with my family. I couldn’t speak of it with the others, though we all wanted to leave. My family is in Damascus, and they are all with the revolution. They are happy I left the army.”

He never wanted to shoot to kill the rebels he secretly supported, and says some of the army’s soldiers came up with tactics to avoid causing serious harm. “I would never do it [shoot to kill]…I’d shoot into the air, shoot everything but the fighters. A lot of people do that—the guys watching don’t notice.

“The officers have power and they keep saying, ‘we’ll be successful, we’ll go back to our houses [once we win]’. But the fighters, they know it’s coming close.”

He served most of his army time in Idlib, and was stationed in the mountains of Latakia for the final two months. In that time, he says, “I never had a vacation. I never went to town.”

Before he was brought in for our interview, I’d been concerned about my safety in speaking with him. How could the FSA battalion leader who introduced us guarantee that his new fighter wasn’t actually a double-agent, informing on us to the regime? “I have spoken with his father in Damascus,” the leader told me. Trying to assure me, he said that given the security at the regime bases, and based on the physical terrain, only the most faithful of men manage to escape. He said “it is very, very difficult to defect.”

They had been on both sides of the revolution, joining in peaceful protests against the Assad regime, but they had refused to join in the armed conflict against the government.

“It was impossible for me to shoot at the army,” said Ahmad, the more loquacious of the two. Syria Deeply is withholding their surnames and photographs at the request of their parents, who still live in the regime-controlled Idlib city.

In May 2012, they were nabbed at a military checkpoint and were forced to fulfill their mandatory military service, which both had been deferring. Syria’s army was in dire need of boosting its officer ranks, Ahmad said, and placed the two educated young men in the infantry school on the outskirts of Aleppo.

Roughly 500 cadets were in Adel and Ahmad’s class, 90% of them from the Alawite sect, according to Ahmad. Adel and Ahmed, on the other hand, are Sunni. Training for the first two months involved fitness exercises and classroom instruction, but that was interrupted when rebels swept into Aleppo late in July and Syria’s largest city was plunged into brutal urban warfare.

Most of the cadets were dispatched to man checkpoints in the city. Adel and Ahmad, the lucky ones, were ordered to guard the three square km campus. “The Alawites, even those who were our friends, seemed to be afraid of us,” Ahmad said. “When we went on patrol, especially when it was one Alawite and one Sunni, they used to watch us more than the fence ahead of us. You could sense that they didn’t trust us.”

Most of the supervising officers were Alawites, Adel said, and the commanders told cadets that the fight was against armed terrorists, many of them foreign, who were bent on destroying the country. Unable to call their parents or watch foreign news channels, the cadets had no way to verify this assessment. “They would insult Sheikh Arour,” Adel said, referring to the firebrand and sectarian Sunni cleric who has a TV show on a Saudi satellite station.

(A Syrian officer defects from the infantry school).

As war raged in Aleppo and news trickled into the infantry school of comrades who died or fled the battle, cadets from all sects quietly talked about plans to defect and speculated on when Assad would fall, Ahmad said. By November 1^st, the battle reached the infantry school.

Rebels implemented a siege of the campus and methodically forced Syrian soldiers and officers to contract into defensive positions, in what was known as the “Battle of the Trenches.” Colonel Ali Saeed, the school’s commander, cancelled all training and classes to focus on breaking the siege. According to Ahmad, he explained the retreats as tactical and promised cadets that the military’s best tanks and Republican Guard units were just hours away from destroying the “terrorists.”

“They lied to us,” Ahmad said. “By November 18, the siege was tighter and we knew that we were done. Soldiers and officers began to defect every day.”

Food sources were depleted and cadets began to eat powdered mixes used to make Tang-like drinks. Water was short. Bread was flown in, but the commanding officers kept the bulk of the food for themselves, Ahmad said. “Even the Alawite students were hungry,” he said.

On December 15, rebels surged into the final stronghold left at the school. Ahmad and Adel used the confusion to flee, disobeying orders from the commanding officer, Major Ibrahim Haidar, to fight to the death. The rebels provided food and water to the survivors, Adel said, and took them to Aleppo for a week before sending them back to their families in Idlib.

(Rebels use a tank to shell the infantry school).

One rebel commander, Abu Furat, who died that day after gaining control of the school, had previously broadcast a public plea to the parents of the cadets, urging them to defect. But Ahmad’s mother said she never heard the message, which is unsurprising given the lack of power and unreliable Internet services in much of the country.

Ahmad and Adel’s friends in rural Idlib are now hardened fighters. One of the rebels said he was glad that his friends are alive and is certain that they weren’t criminals, but he doesn’t accept them as revolutionaries. He called them selfish, complaining that they stayed in the Syrian Army because Ahmad was scared of losing his job, while Adel wanted to be near his new fiancé.

Both men are thinking about leaving the country, but their families no longer have the resources to help them start a new life, and competition for jobs in neighboring countries is fierce. They are relatively safe for now, filling their nights by serving food and tea to rebels who were trying to kill them only a few weeks before.

From the start of the uprising, Loubna’s parents took opposite sides: her father and uncles stood with Assad, while Loubna and her mother supported the growing protests.

Loubna

It was a position Loubna’s father made it clear he wouldn’t tolerate: he demanded her loyalty to the Assad camp. In August, Loubna left her hometown of Latakia, in western Syria, fleeing across the border to Turkey. Her father kidnapped her mother and threatened to kill her as punishment. When Loubna refused to return her father followed through on the threat. Her father killed her mother, and cut her off from the life she had known before the uprising.

Loubna is now a filmmaker with Basma, a media activist group. She travels around Syria with a camera, chronicling the revolution on film. We met up with her in Gaziantep, Turkey, to talk about life and war in Syria. Below is a portion of that chat.

SD: What was it like in Latakia at the beginning of the revolution?

Mrie: It started like every other city in Syria. The demonstrations just had the normal, peaceful slogans like, “we want better schools”, “we want better jobs”, “we want democracy”. We didn’t even say the line “al shaab yureed isqat al nizam”—“the people want the regime to fall”.

SD: Were there many Alawites protesting?

Mrie: No. There were hardly any. Latakia is full of Alawites, and most of them were supporting the regime. We had just a small slice of society that was against the regime, but they didn’t go to demonstrations because they were so afraid. From day one the regime was trying to convince people that this is not a revolution–it’s just terrorists or an Islamic movement against you.

SD: When did it all happen? When did your family fall apart?

Mrie: It happened last November. It was so traumatic, I couldn’t even think about anything. I felt guilt, huge guilt. I kept crying for three days, but then I realized that my mom didn’t die just to see me crying in my bed the whole day. So I chose the other option: to grab my camera and go back to Syria.

SD: Did she speak to you in the final month?

Loubna

Mrie: No, they kidnapped her in the middle of August. I didn’t hear from her again since then. Even my aunts and my grandma didn’t call me because they were so afraid that if the government found out they were in touch with me, they would harm them. Even my neighborhood and my old friends didn’t talk with me at all. They didn’t say we are sorry, we feel sad, we feel anything. They were saying that you deserve that. So it’s not only the loss of my mom that broke my heart, it’s also the attitude of the people that I was growing up with.

SD: What was your father’s argument?

Mrie:  I have no idea. But maybe they were just convinced by these stories that the regime has been telling them: that this is an Islamic movement and they will kill you, and that you will lose everything. I think that for the big families– my family is one of them—they are so afraid. They know that when the regime will fall they will lose almost everything, because when the regime was in control they knew they could do anything and no one would punish them. They could do all the stealing, the cheating, the robberies.

For me, I understand the rich families or the families that are in power, but I don’t understand the poor families who support Assad. I remember my neighbors…they were so poor. I’d wonder, why are you supporting this regime? What did the regime do for you?

After a while we discovered it’s like a religious thing for them. In the last years, it was Hafez al Assad, and now its Bashar al Assad. The people worship these guys. Since the revolution began, I kept telling people that the protesters who are in the streets, the opposition, they are not monsters. I fled to Turkey with the help of the Free Syrian Army. They were so nice to me and they helped me. They knew that I’m an Alawite, but they didn’t kill me as the government is always trying to say.

SD: Do you think they are changing their opinion at all? Do you think the community is changing its opinion at all?

Mrie: Now they are stuck in the middle. They are losing their children in battle. They are losing their generation in the army. So they know that the government is not making any good for them, but at the same time they are so afraid of the opposition. We have Islamist elements in the revolution, and it makes them afraid. They are in the middle.  They know that the government is not helping them, but at the same time they are afraid of the opposition.

I have been hearing stories about how, when the dead bodies come to the villages of the Alawites, all the village starts to curse Bashar al Assad and curse his government because he’s not protecting them and they are sacrificing themselves for someone who is not making any efforts.

SD: From what we keep hearing, the regime has scared the Alawite community so much that they think it’s a battle for survival, life or their death. How do you think that you can calm down those fears

Mrie: The problem in this community is that they won’t understand. All they know is that if you were an Alawite and you were against the regime, your punishment will be doubled.

If they just saw the stories and just turned on the TV and heard the slogans, they would know that this is not a revolution against them.

SD: Right now in the Alawite community, if somebody stands up, like you, and supports the revolution, what happens?

Mrie: They would kill his mom.

SD: They say that?

Mrie: No, but it happened to me. I’m not a terrorist. I didn’t do anything wrong. I just stepped out from my small community and said that I am with the revolution, I am with my people. I’m not going to witness all this bloodshed and keep quiet. It’s not a political cause, it’s now a human cause…this is a revolution for us, for our children, for our grandchildren.

SD: The whole regime could change tomorrow. Whenever it happens, how is this community going to react? How is Syria going to change if you have so much fear within the Alawite community?

Mrie: Right now we have liberated areas. There are Alawites in those liberated areas, so you can see samples of a new Syria, how it’s going to be. [The opposition is] not killing the Alawites, they are not kicking them out of their houses. We are all one. We are just a good community. Not because of Bashar al Assad, because we are a peaceful people.

SD: There are some Alawites in the coalition, in the opposition. Are they people that the larger Alawite community respects? Are they people that can be leaders and help the community?

Mrie: The community hates the Alawites who are with Moaz al Khatib. They say these are not even Alawites—they are outcasts.

Loubna

I’m living the same situation myself. They broke into my house. They stole all my things. They stole my papers from my college. All I got from my Alawite community, who are supporters of the regime, was just bad words on Facebook.

SD: What did they say?

Mrie: That you deserved it and we wish that the same thing that happened to your mom will happen to you.

SD: There might always be some anger against the Alawites for standing behind Assad? What does that mean for Syria?

Mrie: In Syria the shelling is still going on and everyday we have more dead people. So we can’t really decide now the shape of the future Syria. We know that revenge doesn’t build a country, doesn’t build democracy. We went in the streets and made sacrifices to make a new country; revenge will not help us to do this. But we will punish the people who did make mistakes, who killed.

Kilo left Syria eight months into the revolution and now lives in Paris with his family. He answered questions from Syria Deeply via Skype. For more on his story we’ve included a link to a video interview about his time in prison, jailed for his prominent political dissent.

SD: Are you officially backing the Syrian National Coalition? What do you see as their strengths and weaknesses?

Kilo: I’m not a member of the Syrian National Coalition, because I think its weakness lies in the exaggerated representation of the Islamic movement. It does not represent the various trends of the opposition forces, especially democracy and secularism.

SD: When you look at the state of the war in Syria, what do you see?

Michel Kilo

Kilo: I see a slow shift in the power relations between the opposition and the regime, with a possibility of many surprise twists. That includes desperate operations [by the Assad regime], such as the use of internationally banned weapons, as it loses control of more Syrian land. Fighting has also arrived in Damascus, encircling the main centers of power.

SD: Do you have any hope for a negotiated solution? What is the best-case scenario?

Kilo: Yes, I have some limited hope of a negotiated solution. Some members of the system have disassociated themselves from the Assad regime and extended their reconciliation to the opposition, accepting a transition to a democratic system.

SD: How do you keep Sunnis and Alawites from fighting each other? Is there any way? Any hope?

Kilo: I do not know how we can prevent sectarian clashes without a national program that brings in all parties. This integrated program does not exist today, since the opposition had missed the opportunity of drafting and implementing it [early on]. Today I think we need a kind of program, that will encourage everyone to collaborate in a joint national project, in order to cut the route to a sectarian conflict or at least reduces the possibility [of it erupting].

SD: Are there members of the current system that you think could and should stay on in a future Syria?

Kilo: Yes, there are people in the system who can play a role in the future of Syria…some of those who are now in power, especially those who are defecting from power and Assad’s family to join the people.

SD: What is holding up the Assad regime today?

Kilo: The resilience of Assad’s military strength comes from Russian, Chinese, and Iranian support and the lack of a critical western position against it. That enables them to play that supporting role without real impediment, with a green light that allows Assad to oppress people and destroy Syria.

SD: Do you think the Assad regime would really use chemical weapons for its political survival?

Kilo: Yes, there is no doubt that he would use all kinds of weapons, including chemical weapons, because he does not respect the lives and rights of human beings. Otherwise he wouldn’t have destroyed his country.

SD: How do you think Assad will exit the picture?

Kilo: My fear is that we will move from a crisis to overthrow the regime to a new crisis, extending civil war and chaos, political and armed. Plus we shouldn’t forget that Syria is destroyed, and much of the people are homeless, hungry, or displaced, and this atmosphere will encourage chaos.

SD: What is your biggest fear in the coming phase in Syria?

Kilo: Assad wants to make a decisive victory over his people, this is the goal of the war waged since nearly two years ago. It excludes all kinds of political solutions that had been offered by the opposition. He fancies that he can still win the war.

SD: What does the international community need to do for Syria?

Kilo: The international community should develop clear, practical and applicable positions to stop the killing in Syria and work on a political solution to the crisis without hesitation. [World powers] have demonstrated their inability to do anything, abandoning their responsibilities under the pretext of a weak opposition and divided Syrian society.

SD: If you could tell US President Obama to make one change on Syria policy, what would it be?

Kilo: I’ll tell him committed to what I said repeatedly, that U.S. policy must be based on respect for human rights for people, everywhere.

SD: Should the international community enforce a no-fly zone over northern Syria? Should the world intervene to take out Assad’s forces from the skies?

Kilo: But I do not think we need it. The Syrian people have proved over the past two years that they can [defend] their homes without external interference and are supported by the minimum of weapons needed for victory. They no longer depend on foreign countries to get their freedom. They believe that Western countries don’t want Assad to leave, and that he’ll stay until he destroys the whole society and what holds it together.

1- تركت سوريا قبل عام وشهرين بالطريقة العادية ، عن طريق المطار ، وأنا اليوم في باريس مع اسرتي.

 2- لست عضوا في الائتلاف الوطني السوري ، الذي اعتقد أن نقطة ضعفه تكمن في تمثيله المبالغ فيه للتيار الإسلامي ، وفي أنه لا يمثل مختلف تيارات وقوى المعارضة ، وخاصة الديموقراطية والعلمانية منها .

 3- ارى تحولا بطيئا في علاقات القوة بين المعارضة والنظام ، مع احتمال وقوع مفاجآت كثيرة ، بما في ذلك قيام النظام بعمليات يائسة كاستخدام اسلحة محرمة دوليا ، بعد ان خسر القسم الأكبر من الأرض السورية ، ووصل القتال إلى دمشق واخذ يدور قرب مراكز السلطة الرئيسة.

 4- نعم ، لدي أمل ضعيف في حل تفاوضي ، إن قام جزء من النظام بالانفكاك عن نظام الأسد ومد يد المصالحة إلاى المعارضة ، وقبل بانتقال سوريا إاى نظام ديموقراطي .

 5- لا اعرف كيف يمكن منع المواجهات الطائفية دون برنامج وطني يشمل جميع الأطراف التي لا بد أن تشارك فيه . هذا االبرنامج ليس موجودا اليوم ، وفوتت المعارضة على نفسها فرصة صياغته وتنفيذه . اليوم ايضا اعتقد أننا بحاجة إلى هذا البرنامج الذي سيشجع الجميع على الانخراط في عمل وطني مشترك يقطع الطريق علىالصدام الطائفي أو يقلل من احتمالاته .

[ 6- نعم ، هناك من اهل النظام يمكن أن يلعب دورا في مستقبل سوريا ، إنهم اؤلئك الذين سينفكون عن السلطة والأسرة الأسدية وسينضمون إلى الشعب .

[ 7- يبقى بفضل قوته العسكرية والتأييد الروسي الصيني والإيراني وعدم وجود موقف غربي حاسم منه ، وتمكينه من لعب دوره بلا ازعاج حقيقي ، بل واعطاؤه بطاقة بيضاء تتيح له البطش بالشعب وتدمير سوريا  الذي هو مطلب إسرائيلي وربما خليجي .

 8- نعم ، لا شك في انه سيستخدم جميع انواع الاسلحة ، بما فيها الكيماوية ، لانه لا يحترم حياة وحقوق البشر ، وإلا لما كان دمر بلاده بكل ما لديه من أسلحة .

[9- خوفي الأمر أن ننتقل من أزمة إسقاط النظام إلى ازمة جديدة تضمر إمكانية الحرب الأهلية والفوضى الشاملة ، المسلحة والسياسية ، ولا ننسى أن سوريا مدمرة وأن جزءا كبيرا من شعبها مشرد أو جائع أو مهجر ، وان هذه اجواء تشجع على الفوضى .

 10- يريد الأسد إحراز انتصار حاسم على شعبه ، هذه هو هدف الحرب التي يشنها ضده منذ قرابة عامين ، والذي اقصى بسببه جميع انواع الحلول والعروض السياسية التي قدمناها له كمعارضة . إنه يتوهم أن باستطاعته كسب الحرب .

 11- على المجتمع الدولي تطوير مواقف واضحة وعملانية وقابلة للتطبيق لوقف القتل في سوريا والعمل علىإيجاد حل سياسي لأزمتها ، دون تردد أو تظاهر بالعجز عن فعل أي شيء ، أو تخل عن مسؤولياته بحجة ضعف المعارضة وانقسام المجتمع السوري .

[ 12- سأقول له التزم بما قلته مرارا حول سياسة اميركا التي يجب أن تقوم على احترام حقوق الإنسان والشعوب في كل مكان .

All the predictions for a new year in Syria have been bleak. Nearly 50,000 people have been killed to date; UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi warned another 100,000 people could lose their lives this year. Analysts say President Bashar al Assad could go on fighting for months. A round of voices, including rebels on the ground, tell us that even if the regime falls, it’s likely the fighting won’t stop.  There’s been too much bloodshed, weapons flooding the country, and religious rivalries – Sunni vs. Alawite – turning into active fault lines.

Courtesy of Shaam News Network and the Syrian Revolution Memory Project

In major cities, food and fuel are scarce, people are going hungry and freezing inside there homes. Syria’s social fabric has been torn to shreds. Brahimi himself warned of a failed state in Syria – hellish conditions, if there’s no solution soon.

There’s a flurry of diplomatic headlines: hope for UN peace deal, Russia and the Assad regime talking about talks. But the rebels are skeptical, to say the least – it’s hard to negotiate, when each side harbors no trust for the other.

The trends we saw in 2012 have carried over: diplomats and world powers keep talking, people in Syria keep dying, and the chaos on the ground keeps mounting – in ways that get harder and harder to eventually control.

The role of media activist has bloomed in Syria. For scores of young revolutionaries, the most effective way to serve in the uprising is to essentially become an itinerant cameraman, capturing scenes in battle and uploading them to a global audience. Many become fixers for foreign news outlets as a source of income. Omar, for one, didn’t ask for money. He was just glad to have a professional journalist, especially one with Syrian roots, join him for the ride.

Citizen journalist Omar Abu Al Huda plays with his cat at his safe house in rural Idlib. Credit: Mohammed Sergie

In Idlib province, where Omar does most of his work, the Assad regime has kept control of the major city, but lost the surrounding terrain. Its army, security forces and irregular militia members, or shabiha, have pulled back to the provincial capital. The city itself has swollen in number from 200,000 to 750,000, as rebels fighting for control of the towns and villages in Idlib have sent their families to relative safety. They can’t openly express themselves there, but they are free from the regime shelling and air strikes that pound the rebel held areas.

Omar, who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Al Huda, has memorized the topography of Idlib province, charting its farm roads and villages during the revolution. A lively tour guide, he points out the landmark battles for military bases in the countryside and highlights the aftermath of MiG strikes and barrel bombs.

“You are riding in a martyr’s car,” he said, explaining that the hole in the driver’s seat was made by the bullet that killed his 27-year-old brother Mouayad Al Ghafeer in June. Omar used to have his own car, but it was stolen a few months ago by other rebels, or perhaps by a rogue armed gang. He’s constantly on the lookout for the vehicle, and his friends alert him when they see the same make and model on the road.

“It was my car from before the revolution that I paid for from the sweat of my brow,” he said.

Mouayad, his dead brother, is buried in his parent’s farm, located in a hamlet right outside of Idlib city. A few hundred meters away was the fresh grave of Abdullah Allawi who was killed on Dec. 27 hours before we arrived, after a firefight with Syrian army forces at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Idlib. The rebels said the army entered their stronghold in search of defectors and opened fire on Abdullah, who was 25 and had two children, and then retreated after the battle. The video of the fight is below.

Omar documented the fight and compiled the footage later that evening, sharing the raw scenes with the rebels who huddled around his laptop – catching a glimpse of themselves in action. Moving from farm to farms along the same road where the deadly battle occurred hours earlier, the rebels had dinner at one of their family homes.  Their fathers were beaming with pride over their sons’ perceived glory in battle.

Rebels said they captured this truck when the Syrian army attacked their stronghold in late December. Credit: Mohammed Sergie

The fathers tried to pipe in their advice on battle formations, like football coaches on the sidelines, but the rebels largely ignored the older men. A power line was downed during the fight, and the fathers talked about fixing it themselves. But there was no urgency because power rarely came through those lines as of late and service was largely cut off.

Shifting to yet another house (this one belonged to an officer in the Syrian army but is now considered the spoils of war) they used a satellite Internet connection to upload the day’s videos. The connection was faster than most cable services in the U.S. Rifles were cleaned and magazines replenished as the fighters and activists relaxed and discussed the future.

Omar was pessimistic about the future, predicting a cycle of violence after the fall of the Assad regime. “I want to leave Syria when its over and finish my studies,” he said. But he was also torn because of his connection to the land and people, a bond that has become deeper through his work which not only depicts violence but also focuses on softer stories such as humanitarian conditions and the state of Syria’s antiquities.

Away form the violence, life is hard for all Syrians. Rebels and media activists, much as the rest of the population, struggle to find food and fuel at reasonable prices. Bread is expensive, but available.

Gas stations have long been shuttered in northern Syria. Credit: Mohammed Sergie

Prices for petrol, used for transportation and to generate electricity, fluctuate between $12 and $15 per gallon over a 24-hour period. Gas stations no longer exist in much of Syria – the lack of electricity renders pumps useless, while supply lines to refill them are highly unreliable. Fuel is now sold by street vendors and shop owners who have no other wares to offer. Diesel, or fuel oil, which was mostly used to heat homes, is now a luxury that most Syrians can’t afford. Nights are cold and dark, and frequently interrupted by the sounds of artillery shells lobbed from Idlib city into the countryside.

Some fighters rose early to join a battle nearby while others who kept watch during the night slept in for bit. After drinking a small glass of tea and playing with the house cat (which all Syrian rebels seem to keep) Omar holstered his pistol and repeated his dangerous daily cycle: travel, battles and Internet videos.

Apart from the relentless rounds of global diplomacy, recent headlines on Syria have focused on the rise of  extremist brigades calling for an Islamic state and fears about the fate of Syria’s minorities. They have overshadowed episodes of civilian suffering, like the estimated fiftieth air strike of a bakery in a Sunni neighborhood. That’s lead to complaints across Syrian social media that some crimes are being amplified while others are ignored.

Some of those online voices are calling attention to one visual element often overlooked in the press: videos leaked from the Syrian military. Just as rebels record some of their worst behavior, Syrian soldiers and pro-Assad militias have documented their brutality. By some act of defiance or deliberate messaging, those images make their way  to the Syrian public. These leaked videos show how soldiers stomped on unarmed protesters  and lit unguided ”barrel” bombs with their cigarettes before tossing them out of a helicopter. One video that went viral was allegedly shot in Al Hiffa, a Sunni town in the Alawite mountains that was shelled by the Syrian military in June after rebels took control of the town. A Syrian soldier confronts civilians in the street.

It’s a short scene (above). A man is kicked and punched. Three women, including a teenage girl, were a few meters away. The soldier turns his attention to them, slaps the girl and rips off her veil, while hurling obscenities at the women. He tells the man that he plans to violate his sister. Another soldier mocks the women and calls them jihadis.

In the realm of high profile defections, conflicting stories have emerged about Jihad Makdissi, the deputy foreign minister and spokesman, in the weeks since he left Damascus. Did he defect, is he on a three-month vacation, did Hizbollah nab him in Beirut or is he providing intelligence to the U.S. in Washington? As we wait for the man to speak for himself, here’s a purported private Twitter conversation Makdissi had with Rami Jarrah, a well-known activist who blogs under the pseudonym Alexander Page.

Makdissi gives Jarrah a glimpse of his mindset, sympathetic to  the “heroic actions of the Syrian people.” Jarrah tells Makdissi how he was  detained by the security apparatus in Syria and slapped with a travel ban years before the revolution. He urges the diplomat to defect or take a real stand with the people. More of the interaction is posted at  @AlexanderPageSY.

Our last snapshot of the week examines the now familiar tensions between Islamist and more secular opposition groups in rebel controlled territories in Aleppo. Protesters gathered on Friday at their usual spot in Bustan Al Qasr, a working class neighborhood in Aleppo that has been shelled repeatedly since July. They start singing songs of revolutionary defiance. But fans of the more extremist Islamist fighting groups refused to join the secular chants and tried to force the crowd to repeat their own calls for an Islamic state. An argument ensued.

Despite the reports of live fire used on the crowds, no serious injuries were reported. But activists condemned the violence and equated the Islamists’ behavior with the Assad regime’s crackdown on peaceful protests.

Continuing on the Islamist theme, pro-Assad outlets and anti-Islamists have been circulating videos of alleged protests in Aleppo that repeat the chant: “The Free Syria Army are thieves, we want the official army.” The first video was broadcast on state TV, though the audio seems to be looped and doesn’t match the video. Then the same audio seemed to be dubbed onto a protest in Aleppo from April 2011 and re-released as anti-rebel demonstration in December 2012. All is fair in the virtual war for Syria.