"The regime wants the city to kneel..."

Six days…
For six days, Syrian army tanks pounded Bab Amr, a residential neighborhood of Homs, Syria’s third largest city, home to 1.5 million people.
Then, in the early hours of Monday morning, soldiers and shabbiha (a pro-Assad militia) entered the city.
I didn’t want to turn on the lights of the stairs because there are snipers everywhere, and they will shoot whenever they see lights. I felt that the air was being sucked out of the room by the intensity and frequency of the explosions, a woman living in an adjacent neighborhood, told Anthony Shadid of the NYT.
The city is an open wound, Mohammed Saleh, who fled to Damascus on Sunday, added.
Bab Amr had become a haven for many of those who deserted Assad’s army, refusing to use their weapons against their own people.
The defectors could not withstand the Syrian army onslaught, however.
Many fled or were arrested.
Over thirty died in what was a brutal confrontation.
Some Syrian soldiers, apparently exhausted, went door-to-door, requesting water, food and blankets, one Homs resident told Shadid.
On Monday morning, once the fighting had subsided, Syrian security forces arrested scores of young men, including some who had been wounded and hospitalized.
They are now storming houses and arresting people. The shabbiha have brought pick-up trucks and are looting buildings, Raed Ahmad, an activist from Homs, told Reuters.
I sneaked in to see my father today, who was hit by shrapnel. The number of troops and shabbiha in Bab Amr is now in the thousands and the looting is rampant, Sami, a Homs resident told Reuters.
Some of those arrested were detained in schools transformed into jails
For the residents of Bab Amr, living conditions were particularly harsh.
According to information the UN human rights office has received, the neighborhood has remained under siege for seven days, with residents deprived of food, water and medical supplies, Ravina Shamdasani, UN Human Rights Office spokeswoman told Reuters.
This is an extreme humanitarian crisis, Ausama Monajed, of the Syrian National Council, told the LAT.
More than 110 people were killed during the siege and assault, six of them on Monday, including two women, and an eight-year-old child.
What was the significance of the siege of Homs and the crushing of the military resistance led by the defectors?
The latter are too weak to pose a serious challenge to the Assad regime’s security apparatus.
The defectors and the people don’t have enough weapons or strength to wage a war against a professional and disciplined army. We cannot talk about a war between them because they’re not equal powers. It’s impossible for defectors to keep the city, Fayez Sara, an opponent of the regime based in Damascus, told the NYT.
What is clear is the following: months of bloody yet ineffectual peaceful protests have led some to resort to violence in order to topple a brutal and nihilistic regime that will stop at nothing to remain in power.
Not only defectors have drawn this conclusion, however.
In Homs, which some refer to as the capital of the Syrian revolution, the city population is a heterogeneous one, composed of not only Sunnis, but also Christians, Shiites and Alawites.
The upper echelons of the Assad regime are dominated by the Alawites.
As a result, the violence has become sectarian in nature, with Sunnis killing Alawites, and regime supporters gunning down Sunnis.
Christians have largely refrained form joining the uprising, no doubt preferring the devil they know…
The killing is sectarian, and it is being perpetuated by revenge without moral limits or rules. The situation is out of hand, and there is nothing that can hold it in check, Mohammed Saleh, the Homs activist, told Liz Sly of the WP.
The violence has also become particularly gruesome, as the conflict endures with no resolution in sight…
Some of the bodies have been stabbed from their heads to their feet, some have had their eyes taken out and the burned bodies cannot be recognized. Gunmen who are extremists are touring the city in cars kidnapping people and killing them, a doctor working at the Homs National Hospital told the WP.
Last week, more than 70 bodies bearing gunshot wounds were brought to the hospital in a twenty-four hour period, numbers reminiscent of the darkest days of the Iraqi civil war…
Sectarian violence, a budding insurgency, is the conflict in Syria changing in nature?
Eight months of demonstrations having failed to dislodge a regime willing to kill its own citizens to retain its privileges, is an armed struggle in the offing?
Homs is a turning  point for now. It’s a successful model for self-defense, if you will, at a time when you really can’t expect people to take any more. They’ve seen too many corpses come back, too many people arrested, disappeared or returned after abominable treatment. It’s too much. And everybody seems to be losing control of the street, an analyst told Shadid.
If the analyst is correct, is civil war, at least in certain parts of the country, and particularly in Homs, around the corner?
That, surely, cannot be in anyone’s interest…
Yet, is not the looming threat of civil war the regime’s best and last hope of retaining the support of those minorities fearful of a post-Assad Syria, while justifying its brutal repression?
In any case, the Arab League’s plan to restore peace in Syria, and which the Assad regime had ratified on November 2, is now in tatters.
According to this plan, the Syrian troops were to return to their barracks; the regime was to cease all violence against its citizens, liberate all political prisoners; allow journalists access to the country and launch talks with the opposition.
The regime did release 553 detainees last Saturday and proposed an amnesty to those holding weapons if they turned themselves in…There are thousands and thousands of political prisoners currently detained in Assad's jails.
This was clearly insufficient to convince even the Arab League that Assad was serious about complying with the terms of the agreement.
Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem al-Thani, overseeing the issue for the Arab League, called for a further meeting on Saturday, due to the continuation of violence and because the Syrian government did not implement its commitments in the Arab plan to resolve the crisis, he said.
The Syrian Revolution General Commission, an umbrella organization within Syria representing several opposition groups, urged the League to meet sooner, so as not to give the regime another opportunity to bombard, strike and burn.
The Arab peace plan died on arrival. There has been no let-up in the violence. The Assad regime is in complete defiance mode, Murhaf Jouejati, a Syrian scholar in Washington, told Reuters.
I don’t think anyone in his right mind was expecting Assad to pull his troops out of the streets and allow peaceful protests. Lack of even a threat of international intervention is viewed by the authorities as a license to kill, Walid al-Bunni, a lawyer and dissident exiled in Paris, told Reuters.
That seems to be the crux of the matter.
Without international pressure, Assad will pursue unabashed his vicious repression of the Syrian People.
Many, too many are apparently satisfied with the status quo, no matter how many Syrians die defending those values we in the West profess to embody.
The Syrians however, have paid too onerous a price to abandon the struggle now…
The people who are protesting in Syria seem to have crossed the barrier of fear, but the international community hasn’t, Nadim Shehadi, of Chatham House, a London think-tank, told Reuters.
Why should we fear to support without reservation those demanding justice, freedom and democracy?
They are our natural allies in the region (and everywhere else, for that matter), and certainly not those thugs and despots who still rule (and misrule) in too many Middle Eastern nations, in the name of stability and the purported defense of western strategic interests in the region.
French foreign minister Alain Juppé denounced on Sunday the Assad regime’s behavior as absolutely unacceptable.
Furthermore, he declared that the regime could no longer be trusted.
Its acceptance of the Arab League Plan was followed in the immediate hours by a new round of repression and new massacres, he added.
Why then not simply officially repudiate this odious regime (responsible for the deaths of over 3,500 Syrians since last March, according to the UN), and recognize instead the Syrian National Council as the legitimate government of the Syrian people?
(the photograph above was found here)