The Los Angeles Times reports:

They were once ordinary Syrians: farmers with fields to tend, doctors with patients to treat, students with exams to take and homemakers with children to nurture.

But after longtime Syrian President Bashar Assad’s security forces stormed their towns and villages in an attempt to crush a largely peaceful pro-democracy movement, they represent the emerging human toll, a small segment of the many thousands of Syrian civilians who have fled into the hills or across the border into Turkey to escape the violence.

Hundreds have set up a temporary camp in a muddy field on their country’s border with Turkey.

Now, they draw fetid water from a well and relieve themselves in the woods. They rely on handouts of food from relatives smuggled from across the border. They seek medical care at a makeshift “clinic,” a tarp where a 30-year-old pharmacist attempts to give medical advice.

The Washington Post reports:

The Syrian military widened its crackdown on anti-government protesters Tuesday, dispatching tanks to at least two more locations, including a town near the border with Iraq, as the government sought to extinguish an expanding rebellion that has appeared to threaten the army’s cohesion.

Tanks moved into position on the outskirts of the eastern border town of Deir al-Zour, site of some of the biggest protests of the three-month-old uprising against President Bashar al-Assad’s government. Activists said tanks were also converging on the town of Maarat al-Nouman on the highway between Hama and Aleppo, where protesters reportedly burned government buildings over the weekend.