Nothing like shelling your own to inspire respect

Anthony Shadid has an article in The New York Times about Syria:

The Syrian military intensified a methodical, ferocious march across the country’s most restive locales, shelling the country’s third-largest city from tanks, forcing hundreds to flee, and detaining hundreds more in what has emerged as one of the most brutal waves of repression since the Arab Spring began.
Homs, in central Syria near the Lebanese border, has become the latest target of the crackdown, which has already besieged and silenced, for now, the cities of Dara’a, in the fertile but drought-stricken southern steppe, and Baniyas, on the Mediterranean coast. Dozens of tanks occupied Homs, as black-clad security forces, soldiers, and militiamen in plain clothes filtered through the industrial city of 1.5 million people. At least nineteen people were killed there Wednesday, human rights groups said.
The crackdown in some neighborhoods alternated with the relative calm in the center of a city that is home to a Sunni Muslim majority and a Christian minority. “We see the smoke rising in the sky after we hear the shells explode,” said Abu Haydar, a resident reached by telephone. “The sky was pretty quickly covered in smoke.”
In public statements and interviews, the government has acknowledged the crackdown, describing the military’s targets as militant Islamists and saboteurs. It said nearly one hundred soldiers and members of the security forces had been killed, and American officials say that some protesters have indeed taken up arms.
In Washington, two Obama administration officials said that the United States still did not see a clear or organized opposition or another leader in Syria who could serve to unite the foes of the government of President Bashar al-Assad. One administration official said that some national security officials were hoping that, even if Mr. Assad stayed in power, he would move away from the alliance with Iran because so many of the Sunni protesters wanted to see an end to that alliance. “There are some who think that because of that, Assad would have to back away,” the official said. But he said the administration remained divided about whether Mr. Assad would actually make a break from Iran.
The Syrian news agency, which has portrayed the crackdown as the response to an armed uprising, said two soldiers were killed and nine were wounded in Homs and Dara’a.
But the sheer scope of the crackdown— along a crescent that runs from the coast to the border with Jordan— suggests a leadership willing to bring to bear the full force of its feared security forces, as it tries to navigate perhaps the greatest challenge to four decades of rule by the Assad family. In the past week, the government has sought to prove it has the upper hand in a conflict that has rivaled the bloodshed in Libya, now mired in what resembles a civil war.
An economy that the government has sought to modernize is reeling from the unrest, residents say, and critics warn that the government is sowing the seeds for more violence with the breadth of the killings, detentions and torture it has administered. “The only exit the regime is offering right now is to restore the wall of fear and turn Syria into a very backward society through methods which would make it impossible for the regime to open the political system in any meaningful way,” a Damascus-based analyst said on the condition of anonymity, given the danger of the situation there.
Though the Syrian government said it had formed a commission to draft a new law to govern general elections, critics called it a largely cosmetic step by a government in survival mode, hewing to its own logic that it must provide an exit from the crisis to sustain its support among minorities, the middle class, and the business elite. “Can the regime bring this to a close?” the analyst asked. “That’s the urgency felt by forces within the regime right now. They can’t afford financially for this crisis to last much longer. That’s why they’re hitting very hard right now to make sure the protests aren’t an issue, to bully them into staying home and to restore the wall of fear.” To do so, he said, would require even more “extreme and, most importantly, arbitrary kinds of violence.”
The shelling in Homs singled out two neighborhoods, Bab Amr and Aldubiyeh, both of which have witnessed persistent protests against the eleven-year rule of Mr. Assad. Checkpoints proliferated across the city, and hundreds of residents were said to be fleeing.
Residents in Homs said that the shelling was most intense between 5 and 7 a.m. and that no one was allowed in or out of the neighborhoods, not even to collect bodies. Pharmacies and grocery stores were the only shops open there. Activists said ambulances were banned from entering, forcing people to treat the wounded in their homes. One resident quoted neighbors as saying that they saw two helicopters join the assault.
Wissam Tarif, executive director of Insan, a Syrian human rights group, said five hundred people were detained there in the past 36 hours, and residents reported that many of them were being held in a soccer stadium and a school in the city. “It is one of the worst days,” Mr. Tarif said. “They’re taking everyone, basically.”
Abu Omar, a resident who fled across the Syria-Lebanon border, painted a portrait of some neighborhoods in a state of terror, administered by the security forces and plainclothes militiamen wearing bracelets to identify themselves. He said that they had lists of people who had taken part in the protests and that they were going house to house to detain them. “It’s misery there,” he said. “Many houses were wrecked, especially those that belonged to people who participated in the demonstrations. They’re taking revenge.”
By nightfall, Syrian television declared the operations in Homs over and, on the news scroll, said that residents had showered soldiers “with roses and rice”.
The military also deployed tanks in Hara, a town near Dara’a where demonstrations galvanized the unrest in mid-March. Mr. Tarif’s group said eight people had been killed there and many had been wounded, though he had no precise number.
At least 360 people were reported to have been detained in Maadamiya and other towns on the outskirts of Damascus, joining an estimated 10,000 still in custody. “When they go back to normalization — and they’re not thinking about it yet — can they leave the army and the security forces in the streets forever?” Mr. Tarif asked. “The minute they pull back, people are going to go back into the streets. This will eventually explode again,” he added.
In Egypt and Tunisia, where the speed of revolutions contrasts with the bloody, protracted struggles in Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, and Syria, the military proved decisive as an institution that could navigate a transition. Despite persistent reports of low-level defections among conscripts, Syria’s elite units appear to have remained loyal. “In Egypt, the military was semi-independent from the regime,” said Nahed Hattar, a Jordanian political analyst in Amman. “In Syria, it is the regime.”