“When my wife described the wall to me I immediately thought of the wall built by the Israelis to isolate Palestinian villages and towns in the West Bank,” said Abu Annas, formerly a resident of Homs’ devastated Baba Amr district.

“I can understand that Israel built a wall to protect Israeli settlers from Palestinians. But I cannot understand how a national government builds a wall to separate its citizens from each other.”

Since forcing the retreat of rebel fighters from Baba Amr after a brutal month-long bombardment in February, government forces have constructed a massive concrete wall to seal off the former opposition stronghold.

A reporter for GlobalPost recently visited Baba Amr and the wall, describing it as up to 10-feet high and made of cement. It's still so new there is no graffiti. Since most residents have long fled, the neighborhood behind the wall has become “a dead land for cats and dogs,” as one former resident described it.

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Today, a year after GlobalPost first visited the city where Syria’s uprising began, the mosque has been transformed into a military base. Cement rooms have been built around its walls, home to dozens of soldiers.

The snipers who picked off civilians during the siege here last year are still posted atop the highest buildings and the headquarters of the ruling Baath Party and the regime’s many security agencies.

Tanks and armored vehicles remain deployed not only inside the main city itself — in violation of the UN-Arab League cease-fire plan — but around most towns and villages where anti-regime protests have taken place.

On road signs, bridges, schools and clinics the graffiti slogan that children first scrawled back in March 2011 still stands: “The people want to topple the regime.”

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In Washington, however, Ziadeh has become a crucial figure for those hoping to establish a new Syrian order. In October 2011 he formed the Syrian National Council (SNC), “to unite the opposition and establish an inclusive organization that would include different groups.” It is now the main umbrella group for exiles and opposition groups. Ziadeh has met with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, influential senators like John McCain and Joe Lieberman, and members of President Obama’s National Security Council. A senior fellow at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, a Washington-based Muslim think tank, he writes for publications like Foreign Policy and The New Republic, passionately urging the international community to save his people from their own government. And yet, the gap between Ziadeh’s pleas and America’s interests reveal the limitations of those hoping the United States can act as a savior on the international stage.

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There is a very good chance that this slow-motion blood bath could go on for years. And at the end, Assad could still be in power.

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Under a ceasefire agreement brokered by the former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, fighting was to stop at 6 A.M. Thursday and, according to the Associated Press, the first hours passed without any reports of major fighting.

The truce is to be followed by negotiations between President Bashar Assad’s regime and the Syrian opposition aimed at finding a political solution to the bloodshed that has claimed more than 9,000 lives over the last 13 months.

But as the sands of the diplomatic hourglass sifted down in the hours before the ceasefire agreement was set to take effect, it was hard to find diplomats or observers here at the UN or across the Middle East who believed it would hold.

U.S. President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed agreement Wednesday that “more resolute” action was needed by the UN Security Council if the ceasefire agreement was truly going to hold.

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The daily email from the acronyms told the whole story.

Earlier on Tuesday, the LCC (Local Coordination Committees of Syria), the SRGC (Syrian Revolution General Commission), the RLC (Revolution Leadership Council of Damascus) and others had noted that today was the day peace was due to return.

But as the body count rose to between 30 and 62 people killed by Syrian troops, and a further six soldiers killed by the armed rebels, the afternoon emails from activists saw little need to remind readers that Kofi Annan’s UN and Arab League peace plan had failed.

Since nominally agreeing on March 26 to pull their military and security forces out of urban areas by Tuesday, the government of President Bashar al-Assad has only escalated its assaults, according to witnesses, foreign diplomats and activists inside the country.

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Although the rebels had controlled Saraqeb for months, government troops had just finished their conquest of surrounding cities, including the provincial capital, Idlib.

Saraqeb would no doubt be next, attacked by forces far better equipped than the rebels. The night before, rebel commanders had heard the tanks were coming on the military radio channel they monitored.

On the crisp, sunny morning of March 24, they saw the ominous sign of a full-blown government assault. A column of T-72 tanks rolled into the city center, emerging and disappearing between the city’s street blocks.

It was typical of the strategy Syrian forces had deployed to reclaim rebel strongholds throughout the country. From Hama to Homs and beyond, the tanks rolled in, shelling rebel positions before launching a broader attack. Once they controlled the city, activists said, regime militias would go door-to-door, arresting or executing anyone suspected of aiding the rebels.

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“He was shouting at me, ‘You want freedom? You want to topple the regime?’ And he beat me. They asked me, ‘What is your name? What is your father’s name? Where are you from? Why did you join the protest?’ He showed me a video and said ‘Isn’t that you?’ I said no and he beat me. ‘Isn’t that you?’ No. He beat me. ‘Isn’t that you?’ Yes. He beat me more.”

In a regime whose systematic and widespread torture has shocked even hardened human rights researchers, Syrian children have been singled out for abuse, with hundreds reportedly tortured over the past year by the men fighting to keep President Bashar al-Assad and his family in power.

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The Senate's three most predictable and least credible warmongering "moderates" frequently join forces to publish joint Op-Eds or hold press conferences and the one thing they always, invariably want is for the United States to have just a little bit more war than it currently has, somewhere far away. Sure, we could draw down in Iraq ... or we could listen to McCain, Lieberman and Graham and draw back up. We could draw down in Afghanistan ... or we could stay the course and keep sending troops there until we win! Americans may be tired of endless war with no coherent goal, but on the other hand, "only decisive force can prevail in [whatever country John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman are talking about now]."

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Then the tanks rolled in.

The Syrian regime's assault began March 24. It started in the same way it has so many times before — in the cities of Idlib, Homs, Hama and elsewhere — in this country gripped by more than a year of conflict.

A column of tanks first rolled into the city center, making precision strikes on roving bands of Free Syrian Army fighters.

The mishmash of Syrian army defectors, doctors and former shop owners had tangled with the tanks before and attempted to stop them. They would sneak up to the tanks at night to take pot shots and plant roadside bombs, neither of which had any effect.

At one point a strong-jawed youth proceeded down a parallel avenue, holding an antiquated rocket-propelled grenade launcher, the kind that still uses a chain link strap.

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But briefly, during the president's visit — his first since Homs was devastated by fighting last month — a surreal bonhomie prevailed. Assad was greeted by a group of well-wishers, rounded up and organized by security forces, activists claimed. There were faithful pledges of “With you until death” and “Reconstruction is 90 percent complete.”

But away from the spectacle, Homs residents saw matters from an entirely different vantage point. One such perspective comes from Abu Hamza Sabouh (not his real name) a 23-year-old former math student, now a rebel fighter.

It was on a Syrian TV station with close ties to Assad that Abu Hamza first learned that 17 members of his extended family had been killed, and that his brigade was being blamed for the murder.

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Both the regime and the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA) claimed as a victory the battle that eyewitnesses said began around 11 p.m. and lasted into the early hours Monday morning. The battle involved heavy machine gunfire, rocket-propelled grenades and helicopters, the witnesses said.

State-run Syria TV and Al Dunya reported that security forces attacked a “terrorist cell” living in a flat in the western Mezze district of the capital, where foreign embassies and official residences are located. It is also home to many senior figures from the ruling Baath Party, the military and security apparatus.

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Activists say more than 8,500 people have died while the Syrian regime continues to blame foreign-backed terrorists and gangs for the unrest. In the major population centers of the country, including Damascus and Aleppo, however, life remains largely calm.

GlobalPost spoke to Syrians from various parts of the country and from differing religious backgrounds to ask their views of where their country is today, and where they think Syria is headed.

Most agree life is worse now than before March 2011.

Malda, a former journalist-in-training from Dummar, a suburb of western Damascus, said life for her had deteriorated.

"There is no gas, no electricity, it's not safe to go out, and I am talking about Damascus, we can't forget the killing that is happening everyday elsewhere. But the only thing that gives us some comfort is that every loss of life is for our cause for freedom," she said.

Osama, a 25-year-old law student from Aleppo, said the uprising has upended the social interactions in the country.

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Written in the same perky self-adoring voice that makes her show so excruciating, it offers some correct observations about certain lamentable trends in the American military— its reliance on contractors, its exploitation of reservists, its surfeit of nuclear weapons; but its righteous aim is to make the use of force itself seem absurd.

You have to appreciate a literary critic who objects to the notion that war is absurd. (As for Leon Wieseltier calling out another author's "self-adoring" tone, well ... no one would ever accuse Wieseltier of being "perky," I suppose.)

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Then began the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.

Now, state oil revenues have been slashed under crippling international sanctions. Tourism is nonexistent, and confidence in the economy is at an all-time low. As a result, the Syrian pound (SYP) has lost a full 50 percent of its value, falling to the psychologically hard-to-stomach yardstick of SYP100 to $1, compared with SYP48 when the crisis began.

“So now my salary is actually $250: In a year, I lost half my monthly salary while prices of commodities doubled,” said the 50-year-old, a father with four children in school and a three-room home in the struggling Damascus suburb of Hajar al-Aswad.

On his way into work, he said, the usually tight-lipped passengers on the minibus now all chat away about money and prices. And when he returns home ready to enjoy the traditional, leisurely mid-afternoon lunch, Abu Bassam now often finds his wife driven to distraction by pressures on the family purse.

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The BBC says that Hussameddin is the highest-ranking civilian to abandon al-Assad since the uprising began a year ago.

In the video, a man who identifies himself as Hussameddin announces his withdrawal from the Baath Party, and says: "I am joining the revolution of the people who reject injustice and the brutal campaign of the regime."

He added: "I tell the regime, which claims to own the country, you have nothing but the footprint of the tank driven by your barbarism to kill innocent people."

He said he had served in the Syrian government for 33 years and did not wish to end his life "serving a criminal regime".

The authenticity of the video, which was shot at an undisclosed location, could not be immediately confirmed, the Guardian newspaper reported.

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Syria looks like Libya all over again. A brutal dictator uses his military to repress his country’s protests. A civil war erupts. And, oh yes, a split opens among American liberals over what to do about it.

With a few notable exceptions, the conservative movement has been of one mind on foreign policy issues since 9/11. All right-wingers supported the Afghanistan war, and virtually all supported Iraq, as well. Every conservative believes President Obama has been a craven appeaser of America’s enemies, and now all believe that pressure should increase against Iran, even if that means another war in the Middle East.

Liberals have shown no such unanimity. They were divided not only on Iraq but also on President Bush’s 2006 surge, Obama’s Afghanistan escalation, and the intervention in Libya. Views fall roughly along two lines. Dominating the party since Bill Clinton’s ascension are liberal hawks who believe it is in America’s interest to use military power abroad to promote human rights and expand democracy. More popular among the rank-and-file of the Democratic Party are attitudes skeptical of the use of force in major wars. (The only exception to this split is over the use of drones, which nearly all Democrats support).

Though Barack Obama opposed the Iraq War when he was a state legislator, as president he is closer to the liberal hawks camp. The best account we have of the decision-making on Libya, from Michael Hastings in Rolling Stone, has the president explicitly declaring that America needs to have an expanded conception of its role in the world. Just looking after its own affairs, attending to its national interests, is “not how America leads,” Obama said. The rationale Obama employed in a speech delivered at the National Defense University in March of 2011 was the closest he has come to defining an Obama doctrine.

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On Sunday, the Arab League announced that it had formally decided to “open channels of communication with the Syrian opposition and offer full political and financial support, urging (the opposition) to unify its ranks” and to “ask the UN Security Council to issue a decision on the formation of a joint UN-Arab peacekeeping force to oversee the implementation of a ceasefire.”

This is the strongest call for foreign military intervention that has yet come from the international community regarding Syria, as more and more Syrians are getting caught up in government crackdowns and increased fighting between the Syrian army and a growing armed opposition movement. Yet questions about the nature and timing of such an intervention are far more complex than in Libya.

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