The Guardian reports: Yasser sits in the dark in his clothes shop in Damascus’s Old City, listening to the whirr of generators outside – a sound that was alien to Syria until recently. Usually his shop is packed with friends and customers, but Yasser, wrapped in a fleece and scarf, sits alone. “Trade is down and the price of everything is going up,” he says dejectedly.

The middle-aged father of five has teabags but no sugar, and last week he could not afford gas to refill the small canister that heats his kettle. “Sugar has become five times more expensive and I’ve had to change to smoking terrible cigarettes,” he says with a wry smile. On the way home from work the day before, he gave in to an ache to treat his family and bought a roast chicken – something that he used to do weekly – so now all his money is gone. “Tell me, how do I survive,” he says.

The mood in central Damascus has moved in peaks and troughs since the start of the uprising against Bashar al-Assad. The suburbs and towns that ring the capital have long been up in arms, and trouble inches ever closer to the seat of power. But life in the city is different to that in places such as Homs or Idleb, which are caught in a cycle of protests, armed rebel activity and regime crackdown.

On a sunny day, people wander the cracked streets, peering at new DVDs. The wealthy are back in the upmarket cafes sipping $4 lattes – at least for now. Against the background of a crisis that has put lives on hold, Damascenes are trying to find new routine.

John Cantlie, an independent photojournalist, reports from the Syrian town of Saraqeb: The sound of the caterpillar tracks could be felt as much as heard, a deep rumble that sent a rattle through windows and a tremble of fear through the guts.

Then we saw them. Huge Soviet-made T72s, accompanied by troop carriers driving slowly into town, extra plates welded onto the sides to deflect rocket-propelled grenades. It was just after 9.30am, and the tanks were coming to Saraqeb.

“Light the tyres!”

The rebels of the Free Syrian Army in Saraqeb, a farming town of 30,000 in northern Syria, are better organised than many in the surrounding Idlib province. Squaring themselves away into formation around the central marketplace, they poured petrol on to truck tyres and lit them sending plumes of thick black smoke into the air, obscuring the sun and – hopefully – the tank gunners’ visibility.

Still the tanks came, driving into town one after another. The troop carriers stopped to take up holding positions, while the T72s turned in pairs to face towards the centre.

I had been smuggled into Saraqeb last weekend by a local guerrilla unit, keen to show the world that despite playing along with international efforts to broker a ceasefire, President Bashar al-Assad was continuing to use all-out force to crush his opponents. While he agreed last week to a six-point peace plan brokered by the veteran diplomat, Kofi Annan, what I saw for myself suggests the Syrian leader intends anything but.

The Wall Street Journal reports: Saudi Arabia has pressed Jordan to open its border with Syria to allow weapons to reach rebels fighting President Bashar al-Assad’s regime, officials from both countries say, a move that could buoy Syria’s opposition and harden the conflict in the country and region.

In a March 12 meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah asked his Jordanian counterpart to permit weapons shipments into Syria in exchange for economic assistance to Jordan, these officials say. Jordan hasn’t agreed, they said.

Such an agreement could escalate prospects for a broader regional conflict. Syria’s fighting has already added to the rancor between Saudi Arabia and its Gulf Arab allies, who support the country’s largely Sunni opposition, and Shiite Iran, whose government backs Mr. Assad.

The Saudi request adds to sentiment that Arab leaders have hit the wall in their efforts to resolve Syria’s impasse diplomatically. Top officials from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab nations were notably absent from Thursday’s Arab League summit in Baghdad, where leaders called on Damascus to adopt a United Nations plan to stop fighting and begin political dialogue. The plan doesn’t call for Mr. Assad to step aside, as the Arab nations had sought. Mr. Assad said Thursday he would support the U.N. plan, but only once foreign countries stopped aiding rebels.

Many Middle East officials view Saudi Arabia’s arming of Afghan jihadis in the 1980s, through official and unofficial channels, as a prime contributor to the Afghan civil war and the rise of violent Islamic jihad. That has led to worries in many countries over the prospect of Saudi Arabia arming Syrian rebels now.

Tony Karon writes: Skepticism by Syrian opposition groups and their foreign supporters over the Kofi Annan peace plan ostensibly accepted by President Bashar al-Assad is hardly surprising: The plan specifies no timetable or sequence for its cease-fire and political solution to the power struggle that has claimed some 9,000 lives over the past year, and — most galling to the opposition — it doesn’t require Assad to stand down. Assad, moreover, last November “accepted” a plan with many similar provisions, but made sure it was never implemented. There’s no reason to believe he’d have agreed, on Tuesday, to accept Annan’s plan if he didn’t believe it offered him a possibility of ending the crisis while remaining in power. Still, for all its flaws, Annan’s plan is the only game in town. And matching the strongman in playing it might be key to the opposition’s prospects in the weeks and months ahead.

The “Friends of Syria” group of Western and Arab supporters of the opposition will meet in Istanbul on Friday, after corralling the fractious opposition to forge a united statement of principles, establish a more inclusive lineup, and empower the Syrian National Council to negotiate on behalf of the opposition. But while it may boost sanctions against Assad and offer more non-lethal aid to opposition groups on the ground, the Friends group remains unlikely to countenance any moves to send arms to the rebels. And the prospect for foreign military intervention remain remote. Over in Baghdad, where the Arab League is meeting, Saudi Arabia continues to press for a more aggressive strategy of backing the armed opposition, but appears unable to win endorsement from the summit’s host, Iraq. With the regime easily prevailing in the head-to-head military battle on the ground, that leaves the plan formulated by Annan, mandated by the U.N. and the Arab League to mediate. And rather than reject it, the Western powers appear set to press for its implementation on terms and a timetable that block the regime’s current military campaign against opposition strongholds. Assad, meanwhile, will seek to approach the plan on terms that reinforce state authority.

Annan’s plan does not claim to be a program to reconcile the regime and its opponents or to resolve their differences. Instead, it’s a plan to demilitarize Syria’s power struggle and restrict it to political means. The regime’s goals, and those of its opponents, remain fundamentally irreconcilable: Assad is determined to remain in power, while the opposition finds a consensus that eludes it on so many other issues when it comes to demanding his immediate ouster. What Annan’s plan offers, is a formula for managing that power struggle within rules that limit its capacity to spill blood — in a U.N. supervised cease-fire that withdraws the military from the cities and stands down armed opposition groups, while allowing freedom to protest peacefully and forcing the regime and opposition to negotiate.

David Ignatius writes: Maybe it’s time for Syrian revolutionaries to take “yes” for an answer from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and back a U.N.-sponsored “managed transition” of power there, rather than rolling on toward a civil war that will bring more death and destruction for the region.

The Assad government announced Tuesday that it was ready to accept a peace plan proposed by U.N. special envoy Kofi Annan. The Syrian announcement in Beijing followed endorsement of the plan by China and Russia. The proposal has many weaknesses, but it could open the way toward a “soft landing” in Syria that would remove Assad without shattering the stability of the country.

Yes, I recognize that moderate diplomatic solutions like these are for wimps. The gung-ho gang has been advocating supplying arms to the Syrian opposition, setting up no-fly zones and other versions of a military solution. Morally, it’s hard to dispute the justice of the opposition’s cause; the problem is that these military solutions will get a lot more innocent civilians killed and destroy the delicate balance of the Syrian state.

We should learn from recent Middle East history and seek a non-military solution in Syria — even with the inevitable fuzziness and need for compromise with unpleasant people. A Syria peace deal will also give a starring role to Russia and China, two countries that don’t deserve the good press. That’s okay with me: Vladimir Putin gets a ticker-tape parade if he can help broker a relatively peaceful departure for Assad.

The case for this cautious, managed transition can be summarized with a four-letter word: Iraq.

“We don’t know these people…” has become a much-used line in recent months, and it’s true. But it needs to be put in perspective.

One of the reasons U.S. governments have such a long history of backing dictatorships is because it provides Washington with the illusion that it’s sufficient to know what’s happening in Egypt, or Saudi Arabia, or wherever, through its ties to an individual or small group of individuals. Americans so often like to reduce foreign relations to personal relations and think that if those relations are with leaders perceived as loyal friends, then the U.S. can remain largely ignorant about the countries and populations they control.

AFP reports: Syrian forces on Wednesday stormed a rebel bastion despite President Bashar al-Assad’s reported acceptance of Kofi Annan’s peace plan and an opposition plea that tanks be withdrawn, monitors said.

The assault came as China urged Syria’s government and opposition to honour commitments to halt armed conflict and Arab foreign ministers were thrashing out a resolution on Syria to be debated at a landmark Arab League summit in Baghdad.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Syrian forces backed by tanks swept into the central town of Qalaat al-Madiq and nearby villages early on Wednesday after a siege lasting more than two weeks.

The Britain-based monitoring group said the troops entered the town, in Hama province, just after dawn following a 17-day barrage of shelling and heavy gunfire to root out rebels.

It added however that the army was not in full control of the town.

“Heavy clashes between regime forces and armed rebels are preventing the army from advancing,” the Observatory said. “Intense gunfire and explosions can be heard in nearby villages.”

Abu Ghazi, a local activist reached by Skype, told AFP in Beirut that members of the rebel Free Syrian Army had withdrawn from the area because of the regular army’s superior firepower.

McClatchy reports: Rima Flihan, a 36-year-old screenwriter and mother of two, is finally adjusting to life outside Syria.

“We used to have a normal life,” she said. “I never dreamed we’d be refugees.”

A Syrian television channel is presently airing a series she wrote last year, and another was filmed last month, she said, making the fact she is no longer in the country even more surreal.

“We are learning what depression is,” she said. “At first, when I would go to sleep, I would wake up and wonder where I was. For four months I refused to remember my (Jordanian) cellphone number.”

Flihan left Syria in September, after the government issued a second arrest warrant for her because she had participated in anti-government protests. She already had been arrested and beaten once.

Flihan is just one of the tens of thousands who have fled Syria to Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq since demonstrations against Syrian President Bashar Assad began a little more than a year ago. The peaceful demonstrations now have been supplanted by an armed insurgency; some groups put the number that have fled the country at more than 100,000. The United Nations has said that more than 200,000 Syrians have been displaced inside the country by the fighting.

The New York Times reports: Turkey and the United States plan to provide “nonlethal” assistance, like communications equipment and medical supplies, directly to opposition groups inside Syria, and will urge other allies to do so as well, the White House deputy national security adviser said on Sunday, after President Obama met with the prime minister of Turkey at a nuclear security conference in Seoul, South Korea.

The United States had already announced that it had been providing humanitarian aid to opposition groups. And on Sunday an administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed that the United States had already begun to supply some aid, including communications gear, to the rebel Free Syrian Army. The agreement with Turkey would formalize and increase that aid, though officials insist that no weaponry would be sent.

The two countries also agreed to set up a framework for further humanitarian and technical aid at the “Friends of Syria” meeting to be held Sunday in Istanbul, according to the deputy security adviser, Benjamin J. Rhodes.

The news that the United States was already assisting the Syrian opposition and would expand that aid was expected to annoy Russia, the most important of Syria’s few remaining friends. Russia has wielded its veto in the United Nations Security Council to head off a resolution condemning the government of President Bashar al-Assad for its violent crackdown on the opposition. On Sunday, the Russian government denounced what it called one-sided political support for the opposition from the United States and others.

The diplomatic developments came on the same day that the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood outlined a vision of a post-Assad Syria, calling for “a democratic, civil state” with religious freedoms.

The New York Times reports: Syrian troops continued their drive on Saturday to retake rebel strongholds, even as there were indications that diplomatic efforts to end the violence could still prove elusive just days after Western officials had claimed a breakthrough.

Those officials had been encouraged by a United Nations vote last week in which Russia and China, after previously blocking Security Council action on Syria, joined a statement supporting an attempt to broker a cease-fire.

But on Saturday — a day before scheduled talks in Moscow with a United Nations envoy — a senior Kremlin adviser indicated that Russia continues to have a sharply different view than the United States and other Western countries, placing the main burden to stop the fighting on opposition forces, rather than the Syrian government.

Rami Khouri writes: In the past three months, a variety of countries – Arab and foreign, big and small, friends and foes of Syria – have all performed an ever-evolving diplomatic dance that last week generated a United Nations Security Council statement on Syria that is important for three reasons: It is unanimously supported by all council members, including Russia and China, who had vetoed earlier resolutions critical of Syria’s leadership; it waters down the earlier Arab League that explicitly called for President Bashar Assad to step aside; it seeks instead to halt the violence and open the way for an unspecified process of dialogue and reform leading to a democratic transition that may one day result in a new regime in Syria.

The two previous possible templates for addressing the Syrian situation – the Libyan intervention and war by NATO, and the unilateral Arab and Western demands that Assad step aside and make way for a democratic transition in the country – have both proved undesirable or unfeasible for certain key actors, primarily Russia. The past month has shown that if Russia and China decide to oppose the American-led camp, the situation will remain diplomatically frozen.

The Security Council statement fully supported the peacemaking efforts of U.N.-Arab League special envoy Kofi Annan, and called on the Syrian government and the opposition “to work in good faith with the envoy towards a peaceful settlement of the Syrian crisis,” and to fully implement his six-point proposal. This proposal calls for a “daily 2-hour humanitarian pause” in fighting, allowing humanitarian aid agencies access to all areas in need, and committing to working with “an inclusive Syrian-led political process to address the legitimate aspirations and concerns of the Syrian people.”

The Security Council also calls on the Syrian government to “immediately cease troop movements towards, and end the use of heavy weapons in, population centers, and begin pullback of military concentrations in and around population centers.” It also calls for the release of all detainees, and for allowing foreign journalists to report freely inside the country.

The chance of this package being accepted or implemented by the Syrian government is virtually zero, because it knows very well that if it pulls back its military and stops attacking its own civilians in urban centers, hundreds of thousands of people will take to the streets in peaceful demonstrations against the regime. The important point is that the key global actors have agreed on this approach, to open the door to a peaceful process of political transformation by which Syrians nonviolently and democratically change their regime and install a more democratic system of governance.

A key element in this approach is that President Bashar Assad and his family who run the country will remain in power for now, and are the key party with whom the opposition negotiates. This is understandably distasteful to the opposition, given the extreme cruelty and near barbarism that the regime’s military forces have used against unarmed Syrian civilians for the most part.

Yet if the continued economic and other pressures on Syria make the situation unbearable for the regime (including cutting off travel links and indicting officials in international courts), the Annan plan approach, supported by Russia, may be the only option the regime has. Assad and his family may soon discover that their only two options are the fate of the murdered Moammar Gadhafi of Libya or the retired and perhaps exiled Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen.

The Washington Post reports: Syrian rebels battling the regime led by President Bashar al-Assad are running out of ammunition as black market supplies dry up, neighboring countries tighten their borders and international promises of help fail to materialize, according to rebel commanders and defected soldiers who have crossed into this Turkish border town in recent days in a quest for money to buy arms.

They describe what appear to be desperate conditions for the already lightly armed and loosely organized rebel force, made up of defected soldiers and civilians who in recent months have banded together in the name of the Free Syrian Army, transforming what had been an overwhelmingly peaceful uprising into an armed revolt.

The rebels have long been appealing to the outside world for military intervention and weapons to help their struggle. But they are acknowledging for the first time that the rebellion, at least the armed portion of it, might be faltering in the face of a concerted government offensive aimed at definitively crushing the year-old revolt.

“Day after day, the Free Syrian Army keeps fighting and fighting, but day after day, we are running out of ammunition, and, eventually, we just have to leave our area,” said Abu Yazen, 26, a defected soldier who joined the rebels in the summer but fled to Turkey this month with five comrades after they ran out of bullets in the northern province of Idlib.

He is living at one of the civilian refugee camps set up by the Turkish government, among scores of dejected fighters who have been showing up on a daily basis in and around the frontier town of Antakya as their ammunition runs out and hope fades that the international community will come to their rescue.

Joshua Landis: The opposition is in a state of chaos right now. The SNC, which has been the dominant external leadership and umbrella group for the opposition, and is led by Burhan Ghalyun, a French professor at the Sorbonne, is facing a crisis. It has been extremely successful in getting the international community organized to isolate the Assad regime and to turn against it. Ausama Monajed, as a right-hand man of Ghalyun’s, was largely responsible for getting both Europe and the United States to sanction Syria within an inch of its life. But what we’ve discovered in the last few weeks is that they failed to get a Western invasion of Syria, which would have capped their success and brought down the regime.

Did this diplomatic failure cause a major problem for the opposition?

This created a big shift in the balance of power within the opposition community because it has become increasingly obvious to opposition members, particularly the opposition members on the ground in Syria who are fighting the regime, that they have to get a military option. The opposition on the ground has suffered a major defeat with the crushing of Homs and the reoccupation of Homs, and more recently, the shelling of Idlib.

The Syrian military, since the Russian-Chinese veto, has pursued a classic campaign of capture and hold. It is taking a page right out of the U.S. playbook, and it is taking back territory from the insurgency and it’s holding it. The opposition had made the mistake, out of a sort of naïve enthusiasm, of believing that Syria’s campaign against the regime would be much like those in Tunisia and Egypt: that they didn’t have to be organized; they didn’t have to have a military option; and that the regime would collapse within months. They showed their faces, they videotaped themselves, they didn’t have secrecy, and now the regime is killing them and hunting them down.

Tony Karon writes: The Kofi Annan peace plan unanimously endorsed Wednesday by the U.N. Security Council may pose an even greater dilemma for the Syrian opposition than it does for the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. That’s because while it demands a halt to the regime’s military operations against opposition strongholds, it also retreats from the previous insistence by Western and Arab countries — and the Syrian opposition — that Assad immediately step down and hand power to a unity government as the starting point of a political solution to the year-long uprising. Instead, the Security Council statement calls for

• both the regime’s forces and armed opposition groups to accept a U.N.-supervised cease-fire;
• daily pauses for humanitarian assistance;
• the regime to release prisoners;
• freedom of access for journalists;
• freedom of assembly for peaceful protest; and for
• “the Syrian government and opposition to work in good faith with the Envoy [Annan] towards a peaceful settlement of the Syrian crisis” by engaging “in an inclusive Syrian-led political process to address the legitimate aspirations and concerns of the Syrian people”.

It remains to be seen whether the regime will honor its stated willingness to engage in a political dialogue if the opposition puts down its weapons. It would certainly face massive peaceful protests if it honored Annan’s terms, and it has no intention of ceding power even if it talks of constitutional reform while shelling opposition strongholds. But the Council statement carries considerable weigh by the fact that it was endorsed by Russia and China, which had vetoed previous resolutions precisely because they demanded that Assad step down. The new resolution, and Assad’s mission, appears to reflect an acceptance that he’ll be at the table in any political dialogue to resolve the conflict.

But the demand that the opposition negotiate with the regime on the terms laid down by Annan poses a dilemma for the fractured Syrian rebellion, some of whose leaders are set to convene in Turkey on Thursday and Friday: What is won at the negotiating table typically reflects the balance of power on the ground. And the reality, there, is that the Assad regime has proven far more resilient than its domestic and foreign opponents had assumed it would be.