Paul Wood, reporting for BBC News from Baba Amr in Homs writes: “Is this a civil war?” I was asked from London.

In Baba Amr, it certainly felt like one. But we were seeing a battle over one city. And Homs is not Syria. Not yet, perhaps.

In Homs, the Sunni areas, such as Baba Amr, largely support the uprising. They were being shelled by the Syrian army, from the Alawite and Christian areas, which largely support the regime.

There are Sunnis in the security forces; Christians and Alawites have joined the revolution. It is not yet a purely sectarian conflict. But the pressures for it to become one are enormous.

Yousseff Hannah was a prisoner of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) – the rebel fighters who have defected from government forces.

He was on a mattress, his thigh bandaged, in the basement of a house near the town of Qusayr, about 25 miles (40km) from Homs.

“Law and order,” he told me, groaning from his wound, in reply to my question about his job.

One of his captors angrily interrupted: “No. You are mukhabarat (secret police). Tell them you are mukhabarat.”

The FSA had snatched him a few days before from his home. He had been recovering there from the leg wound, received in Homs.

Aged 45, he was only a corporal, hardly a big fish. The rebels said they had taken him because his family had their own checkpoint in Qusayr that was harassing people.

They wanted it to stop. For too long, they said, people like him – protected by the regime – had felt they were untouchable, able to act with impunity.

Cpl Yousseff was a Christian. After he was taken, his relatives kidnapped six Sunnis, killing one in the process. In return, around 20 Christians were abducted.

“Some hotheads have been kidnapping Christians,” one of the senior FSA commanders in the area told me. “We have got to calm this down.”

After several days of stalemate, everyone was released, unharmed, including Corporal Yousseff. This was done as part of a deal for him and his family to leave Qusayr permanently.

Discussing the past tense few days, one of the Christian residents told me that Qusayr still had Christians who supported the uprising.

About a dozen attended the big Friday protest. In solidarity with them, the entire demonstration walked off when some at the front grabbed the microphone and started shouting Salafi (Islamist) slogans.

Everyone felt the town had come close to tipping over into serious sectarian bloodletting that week.

Is that the future for Syria? Much depends on the character of the FSA.

All of the fighters we met were Sunni. Perhaps that does not matter.

The commander near Qusayr told me they were fighting for all of Syria’s religions and sects: Christian, Muslim, Alawite, Sunni, Druze, Shia.

“We are experiencing freedom for the first time,” said Maj Ahmad Yaya.

But his next words left no doubt, either, that for many, this is a religious – and Islamic – struggle against the secular Baath regime.

“For the first time,” he went on, “we are able to proclaim the word of God throughout this land.”

The New York Times reports: Syrian government forces on Tuesday brushed aside a stern castigation from the top United Nations human rights official about its deadly attacks on civilians, resuming what one activist described as the “brutal shelling” of the city of Homs.

A day after the official, Navi Pillay, the United Nations’s high commissioner for human rights, offered a grim appraisal of the Syrian conflict, activists said the shelling resumed in earnest at 6 a.m. on Tuesday, with rockets and tank shells whistling into parts of the city as often as every two minutes.

It was the heaviest shelling in at least five days, activists said, particularly targeted at the neighborhood of Baba Amr. Videos uploaded on YouTube showed gray and black smoke billowing high overhead as shells crashed into the buildings, while the staccato rattle of machine gun fire sounded constantly.

“The idea of safety doesn’t exist anymore in Baba Amr,” said Omar Shakir, an activist in the neighborhood reached via Skype. “Scary is all that exists.”

The neighborhood was hit by occasional mortar shells overnight, he said, with the heavier shells starting at first light. Although some people managed to flee the heart of the area, it was hard to leave entirely because it was hemmed in by government forces as it has been since the shelling started on Feb. 4.

Food was running low, despite efforts by residents to open a shuttered mini-market to get what they could. “We are under full siege, it is horrible here,” Mr. Shakir said. “I have not tasted bread for the past five days.” He estimated that some 60 percent of the buildings in the neighborhood had been damaged by the shelling.

Al Ayyam reports: Pro-Assad rallies. The epitome of a civilized rally. The balloons, the flags, the dancing everyone happy and singing their praises to a supreme leader, denouncing violence and sectarianism. It’s a utopia of free speech and unwavering support. It is the example the Assad regime points to for proof of their success at ruling the country. It is a far cry from the tear gas, bullets and indeed heavy artillery that rain down on protests in other parts of the country. Proof, the government says, that these other protests are not peaceful at all, that they are, in fact, armed gangs paid for and financed from a number of external forces.

Activists have long claimed pro-Assad rallies are fabricated, that if one were to look closer the crowds are made up of the secret police or moukhabarat and a few die-hard loyalists. That these are planned in advance, funded by the regime no less and are not, as the government claims, spontaneous showcases of love and adoration.

It seems the devil truly is in the detail. The hacktivist syndicate Anyonymous recently dumped emails from MOPA, the Ministry of Presidential Affairs, President Assad’s personal office. Emails uncovered sent to Presidential aid Akram Issa, detail billings and accounts and efforts made in advance to create these spontaneous rallies in support of the President.

The email in question marked SPAM in the subject header, states Governors involved offered their verbal commitment to pay the supplier of these protests yet have not paid up their dues as per the Minister’s request. Attachments in the email detail itemized descriptions of the outstanding balance, which reach a total of 1.1 Million SYP in October 2011 (before the inflation of the SYP) at the time equaling $20,000.

The rally in Lattakia province alone cost the administration 315,000 SYP the bare minimum, the supplier writes, to make the rally seem like an acceptable turnout.

An attachment titled “Details of the Flag Raising Rally in Lattakia” [PDF] includes 45,000 SYP ($800) spent on 60 kg of confetti to be thrown in the air the moment the Syrian flag is raised. One hundred sweaters for the flag raising crew in the colors of the flag totaling 2,500 SYP ($580) and sound system rental for the rally at 500,000 SYP ($9000).

In another attachment titled “Detailed billings to the personal account of Monhal Zeitoun” [PDF] costs for rallies held in Damascus, Sweida and Hasakeh province are itemized. The supplier writes under the header for Damascus “Campaign: Our martyrs, your blood runs in our veins” and details expenditures of 150,000 SYP ($2,600) to cover sound and broadcast of the event including another 49,000 SYP ($875) for printed t-shirts. A miscellaneous amount of 57,000 SYP includes costs for ironing clothes, supply of water, taxi cabs and a refrigerator and its transport.

At a time when cities and towns were surrounded by regime tanks and protesters died on the streets by army bullets, when heating oil in Homs was scarce and when international opinion towards the regime came into question the President’s office was gearing up for a fanfare of pomp and circumstance in an effort almost too bureaucratic to believe to prove their support is indeed a spontaneous act of love sheltered in the heart of every Syrian.

Sharmine Narwani shares an email she received from a former US diplomat with service experience in Syria who has asked to remain unnamed. The email appears to have been written a week ago.

I have serious problems with all the talk about military intervention in Syria. Everyone, especially the media, seems to be relying solely on anti-regime activists for their information. How do we know 260 people were killed by the regime in Homs yesterday? That number seems based solely on claims by anti-regime figures and I seriously doubt its accuracy.

I served over three years in Damascus at the US Embassy and I know how difficult it is to sort fact from rumor in that closed political society. We were constantly trying to verify rumors that we had heard about assassinations, regime arrests, etc., and that included the Agency, which was just as much in the dark as everyone else. Today, we have a skeleton embassy which I am sure is under constant surveillance and with very few personnel to go out and report on what is happening. When I was in Damascus over two years ago, I was less than impressed with the Embassy’s sources and with its understanding of the dynamics of what was going on Syria. And the same is true when I talk to officials at the State Department.

The media, and to an extent the Administration, have personalized the conflict in Syria as being about Bashar Assad and his family. They have consistently underestimated the sectarian nature of the conflict there. It is not just Bashar Assad and his family that are hanging onto power at all costs, it is the entire Alawi system of control of the country, including the military, the security services and the Baath Party. I believe that Alawites firmly think that if they lose power, the Sunnis will slaughter them, That was one reason Hafez and his brother Rifaat were so ruthless in Hama thirty years ago. And everyone in the West conveniently forgets the campaign of assassinations and suicide bombings carried out in the three or four years before Hama by the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the country. I personally witnessed the aftermath of such bombings in which several hundred people were killed. While the State Department, the CIA and other organs of government may have short historical memories, the people in Syria do not.

There have been few good analyses of the conflict in Syria. With the exception of the journalist Nir Rosen and the International Crisis Group, most reporting has been superficial and biased in favor of opponents of the regime. This is no basis on which to base policy, especially if officials in Washington are contemplating some form of military intervention. We would be opening a Pandora’s box of sectarian conflict that could easily spread to Lebanon, Israel, Kurdish areas of Iraq and elsewhere.

One irony of the current situation compared to thirty years ago is Iraq’s role. Then, we had reasonably good information that Saddam Hussein was supporting the Brotherhood with arms, explosives and facilitating the smuggling of both across the Syrian-Iraqi border. Today, the Maliki government in Baghdad appears to be supporting the Assad regime. And thirty years ago, we also had information that the Brotherhood leadership was given sanctuary in Jordan by King Hussein and in Saudi Arabia.

I don’t think we know how to play in this arena, just as we don’t understand how to play in the Afghanistan-Pakistan arena. US military intervention, whether under the guise of NATO or some other umbrella, could have serious unforeseen consequences for the US, Europe and the region. Officials in Washington should have the law of unforeseen consequences hammered into their heads every morning.

In a revised version of an op-ed that appeared earlier in the New York Times, Nicholas Noe writes: With Syria rapidly descending into civil war and UN action blocked by recent Russian and Chinese vetoes, opponents of the murderous Bashar al-Assad regime face a critical turning point in their almost one-year long struggle to unseat him.

Unfortunately, though, in western capitals, among supportive regional states and within the Syrian opposition itself, practically the only approach to the crisis being seriously discussed revolves around one question: how best to ratchet up the pressure in order to bring about a “controlled collapse” of the whole structure.

In this often simplistic approach, the underlying logic invariably rests on two core ideas. First, Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah will not come to the aid of their staunch ally in the event of an impending fall. Second, any violence committed by a dying, isolated Assad regime could be reasonably contained.

Both projections are, however, unlikely. The fall of Assad would deliver a huge, strategic blow to both Iran and its “junior partner”, Hezbollah. It simply does not follow, then, that these actors will simply bite their tongues and absorb the disaster for their mutual position in the Middle East.

As key leaders in Tehran and Beirut have made publicly and privately clear, Assad anchors their tripartite “Resistance Axis”. As a result, both countries have only increased their support of Assad personally – even as his regime acts with more violence and irrationality.

But what if this dominant view were correct and Iran and Hezbollah do not see it in their interests to act? Even in that case, things would be unlikely to turn out as the west would like. A collapse will probably not replicate the eastern Europe experience of the late 1980s or Hosni Mubarak’s fall in Egypt. This is largely because Assad and his supporters control formidable military capabilities, which include, unlike in Iraq or Libya, chemical weapons and ballistic missile systems. Together with the sectarian support that the Alawite Assad regime will likely retain over time against an increasingly mobilised and violent Sunni majority, as well as any continuing military and elite support, the regime is fairly well positioned to prolong what many in the west have confidently projected as an “inevitable” demise wreaked by history.

This slow denouement will mean an extremely violent civil war that will burn for quite some time, with vast humanitarian consequences and multiple unintended effects. [Continue reading…]