Chaos feared as Syria crisis nears bloody impasse

WADI KHALED, Lebanon -- When the Arab Spring came to Talkalakh, the little Syrian hill town a few minutes walk from this border village, it seemed to last barely a moment. Squads of secret police descended on the town within hours of the first protests. Then the army came with its tanks, and the shadowy pro-government militia called the shabiha.

The May siege killed at least 36 civilians, activists say. Hundreds of people were arrested. Thousands fled. By mid-June, the Sunni Muslim town of 70,000 people had only a few dozen families remaining, according to residents who recently escaped into Lebanon, and those still there are constantly watched by security forces.

But when night falls, the Arab Spring comes back to Talkalakh. Because that is when the young people slip quietly to the rooftops of their concrete homes. And in the darkness they shout out for freedom and for the help of God. Silence returns only when soldiers begin blindly spraying gunfire.

As the early success of the Arab Spring has bogged down in turmoil -- civil war in Libya, repression in Bahrain and anarchy in Yemen -- Syria has become mired in its own bloody grind of protests and repression. Its stalemate is a reflection of the new and more complicated chapter in the string of Arab uprisings.

If much of the Syrian uprising has been cloaked by an authoritarian Damascus regime that expelled foreign journalists, the stakes could turn out to be far higher there than almost anywhere else in the Arab world.

In the balance are political reform for one of the region's most brutally repressive countries, and fear that the nation of 22 million people could descend into sectarian conflict that would draw in players from across the Middle East.

Residents of protesting towns describe relentless shelling of their neighborhoods.

They pass around cellphone videos of young men so badly tortured that their corpses look like butchered meat. More than 1,400 Syrians have been killed in the crackdown, activists say, and 10,000 have been detained.

Dangerous protests

"Soldiers kick the faces of demonstrators under arrest, when they are handcuffed on the ground. They say: "You want freedom? This is your freedom!" said a bookish 21-year-old from Talkalakh who asked to be identified only by his first name, Zakariya, fearing retribution against relatives. "They think they can stop our protests by abusing us, but that is not going to work."

Like many demonstrators, he was surprised to find himself in the streets at all.

"We couldn't even imagine that we could talk like this, that we could ask for freedom," he said, standing in the shade of a tree on Wadi Khaled's quiet main street. But then satellite TV brought news of demonstrators overthrowing dictators in Tunisia and Egypt, and of political convulsions across the Middle East.

"It gave us the courage to raise our voices," he said.

However, three months after the protests spread to Syria, the country is in a political no-man's-land, with President Bashar Assad's regime unable to crush the tenacious grassroots opposition but unwilling to begin talks with them. Assad's most recent peace offering, a vague promise to consider political reforms, was quickly dismissed by the opposition as a ploy to buy time and hold onto power.

The regime "still believes it can crush the protests," said Rami Nakhla, a Syrian activist now living underground in Beirut who has spent months disseminating news and video clips sent from inside the country.

"But it's clear the regime has played all its cards and the protests are not burning out. They're spreading."

The Assad regime has long used sheer brutality to hold together a fragile jigsaw puzzle of Middle Eastern cultures. Sectarian violence is widely feared, and in the worst-case scenario the country could descend into a Lebanese-style civil war.

At the same time, Syria is an important geopolitical linchpin.

"People are afraid of what could happen if Assad falls from power," said Elias Muhanna, a political analyst at Harvard University.

At worst, it could become what he calls "an Iraq scenario," with armed militias carving out ethnic fiefdoms.