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.”

Dozens of checkpoints still ring Daraa and divide its streets and neighborhoods. Soldiers and secret police mete out arbitrary humiliation, residents said, often abusing women or making locals wait an hour in the blazing sun while they leisurely finish their cigarettes and tea.

Locals said government services are running at a minimum and state employees now regularly work only one or two days a week. The shops are open again, but night markets are a thing of the past as shutters come down promptly at 7 p.m., just before the regular nightly clashes between regime troops and armed rebels of the Free Syrian Army.

Exactly one year after first visiting this city, which gave birth to the Syrian uprising, a GlobalPost reporter described Daraa as “dying,” a “demolished battlefield” where residents complain bitterly about the destruction of their livelihoods and discuss international military intervention, finding arms to fight and other means to bring down the regime.

As the first major city to suffer a full military assault, the situation in Daraa could foreshadow the fate that likely awaits Homs, Hama and other major protest centers if the regime re-exerts long-term security control over urban opposition strongholds.

“We know that if we give up now the regime will finish us later,” said Abu Rami, a member of the Zuabi tribe, one of the four big tribal families that dominate Syria’s south, a land of black basalt rock, known to locals as the Houran.

“To keep our revolution going now costs less than if we stay at home until the army or security men come and slaughter us like sheep.”

One of Abu Rami’s cousins was among the 15 schoolboys whom security forces arrested last March for spray-painting anti-regime graffiti. The boys were tortured, sparking the mass protest movement. A year later, the 40-year-old said that security forces have killed at least 70 members of the Zuabi tribe. Each one — under the local system of tribal law — represents a blood feud between the tribe and the regime.

To travel from his home in Old Daraa’s Arbaeen quarter into the city center means Abu Rami must pass through three checkpoints, his every movement monitored by snipers.

Protests still go on across the Houran most Fridays, but they are now usually small and unable to join together as they did this time last year.

And every weekend, Syrian activist groups report the endless morbid toll: Reem Abdul Rahman, 17, killed in Giza yesterday, a day after her brother; Adel Ghaleb al-Zuabi, died of wounds untreated in Taiba; Ali al-Turk, tortured to death after being arrested in Al Karak al-Sharwi eight days ago; an unknown male from Heet, detained and tortured to death; Mahmoud al-Badawi, also from Heet, whose body was discovered in the village of Sahm, bearing the scars of torture.

All of these fatalities were from Daraa, just one area of Syria. The respected Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR) confirmed their deaths on Sunday. All told, the SNHR found 25 people killed on Sunday in Syria, a modest toll by the standards of the past month.

Against this backdrop of everyday long-term violence, even overtly non-political residents of Daraa appear to be becoming increasingly radicalized against the regime.

Ali is a 45-year-old engineer who works for the state and lives comfortably in a big house with his wife, four children and elderly parents in Daraa’s Qusour district. For the past year, however, Ali’s middle-class status has taken a serious hit: With regular electricity blackouts lasting between 12 and 14 hours, Ali can’t keep fresh food in his fridge, and his children have to study by candle or flashlight.

If his parents need medical treatment they can no longer seek it for free at the state-run Daraa National Hospital because Ali said the facility has been taken over by the military for the treatment of injured soldiers, secret police and armed pro-regime thugs.

Instead, they must travel to Damascus and endure the one aspect of the regime’s vice-like grip on Daraa that irks Ali the most: checkpoints.

“I am an engineer and earn a good income and have no problems with the government. But when I cross any checkpoint, the security men deal with me as if I am an armed fighter,” Ali said. “They don’t respect anyone: The elderly, women, the educated, they see all people as nothing.”

Last week, as he was trying to cross a checkpoint, Ali said a young member of the secret police took his ID and slapped him in the face with it.

“He said, ‘I’ve seen you before.’ He was joking and making fun of me. I felt so angry, but what can I do? It is very easy for him to shoot me and say that I am an armed fighter. No one will investigate or hold him accountable.”

As well as IDs, residents of Daraa wishing to travel north to the capital must now show security men at checkpoints their recently paid electricity, water and phone bills, a move by the regime to counter the spread of civil disobedience in protest centers like Daraa and Hama where residents began burning their municipality bills.

With so many checkpoints choking it off, Ali said many large food companies no longer send their trucks to Daraa, creating spiraling inflation on basic commodities.

Many of Ali’s neighbors have moved to the slum-like illegal housing areas that have sprung up around Damascus over the past decade. Ali chose to stay in Daraa to continue working his government job but makes regular trips to Damascus to buy dry foodstuffs rather than pay exorbitant local prices.

And every time he travels he faces the same checkpoint humiliation.

“The military and security crackdown pushed the people to be more angry and radical but without solving any problems,” Ali said. “Personally, I used to be very supportive of Bashar al-Assad, but today I am not.”

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.

“The level of torture is not comparable to any other conflict I’ve worked on,” said Anna Neistat, associate director for Program and Emergencies at Human Rights Watch, who has worked for more than a decade in crises from Chechnya to Zimbabwe to Sri Lanka.

“There are a disproportionate number of children trapped in this system. Children are tortured alongside adults and are even subject to more brutal torture as interrogators believe children could crack faster and give them names.”

For the 13-year-old from Tal Kalakh, a town west of the flashpoint city of Homs, the nightmare began when security arrested him on his way home from school on the last day of exams.

Blindfolded and beaten by soldiers at a checkpoint, Hossam — not his real name — and his cousin of the same age were bundled into a car and taken to a military security office about 45 minutes away. This was in May last year, less than two months into the uprising.

“In the cell there was me and my cousin and about 50 other people. We were the only children,” said Hossam, interviewed by GlobalPost in north Lebanon after he crossed the border with his family. “The cell was really small and smelled like sewage. There were bugs and rats in it. I was sleeping in the corner as everyone was packed in, like a zig zag.”

Documenting a dozen cases of children detained and tortured, Human Rights Watch reported that prison cells of 5-by-6 meters (16-by-20 feet) often contain up to 70 people. After conducting hundreds of interviews with survivors of torture, Human Rights Watch said that up to one in five detainees were minors, under the age of 18.

Neistat said that tens of thousands of Syrians have been processed through the prison system since the uprising against the Assad dictatorship began last March. She said the vast majority of them have been subjected to degrees of torture.

Reacting to the screams of the men under interrogation, Hossam said he thought he would die under torture, just like Hamza al-Khateeb, the 13-year-old from Daraa whose death last May became a rallying cry for the opposition.

“I told them: ‘I’m a kid, why are you beating me?’ He said, ‘You’re young? So why are you in a protest?’ I told him: ‘To express my opinion.’ … They electrocuted me in my leg and in my chest. I passed out for about 15 minutes. Then I felt my soul come back to me and I thanked God I did not die.”

Mohammed, a 16-year-old from Duma, one of the restive satellite towns outside Damascus, was also tortured with electricity after being arrested, he said, by members of Airforce Intelligence. He said he was picked up on Jan. 20 and held until early March.

“I was young, so the security men were not very hard with me. But I got my share of torture,” he told a GlobalPost reporter in Syria last week. “I was beaten and whipped with cable two or three times a day. One time I told the interrogator I wanted a country for all Syrians, not for one family. He reacted very badly and told some soldiers to electrocute me on my chest, hands, legs, neck and on my stomach, close to my penis.”

Last month Navi Pillay, the UN human rights chief, told the BBC that Syrian forces had systematically targeted and tortured children and that Assad “could simply issue an order to stop the killings and the killings would stop.”

Both Pillay and Neistat said the UN Security Council now has enough reliable information to refer Syrian leaders to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity.

But because Syria is not a party to the ICC, unless Damascus referred itself to the court, the only way to give the tribunal jurisdiction to act is through referral by the UN Security Council. But Russia and China have twice vetoed watered-down Security Council resolutions condemning the Assad’s crackdown that made no mention of the ICC.

This month Amnesty International identified 31 methods of torture used by Syrian authorities. Some methods have been in use for decades, include the “tire,” where the victim is forced into a large tire and beaten on the feet. There is also the “flying carpet,” where the prisoner is strapped face-up on a wooden board that is bent to stretch the spine.

Less well known are apparently new and even more disturbing techniques, including pincers used to rip out flesh, anal rape with sharp objects and a form of crucifixion where the prisoner is hung from a wall by their wrists.

“The biggest lie of the regime is that there are no orders to torture,” a defected former member of Airforce Intelligence told GlobalPost. “It’s a program, a routine. I saw an old man with a 6-year-old girl brought to the interrogation department. Just five minutes of what she saw there, the screams she heard will surely traumatize her for the rest of her life.”

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.

“I wish I hadn’t seen that footage on TV. I saw my family killed: My father shot in the eye; my cousins, uncle, aunt and grandfather; my cousin lying on the bed, also shot in the head. Now I can’t get the images out of my mind,” he told GlobalPost from a hospital in north Lebanon, where he is receiving treatment for an elbow shattered by shrapnel.

He said that in February, he was injured fighting in Homs’ Baba Amr district with the Free Syrian Army’s Farouk Brigade, which held that and other neighborhoods until being forced to withdraw on March 1 after a month-long assault by Syrian forces that killed at least 700 people, and wounded thousands more.

The death toll from the year-long crackdown now exceeds 10,000, according to activists documenting fatalities. The vast majority of those killed are civilians, according to human rights groups.

Many have been killed by bullets, bombs or torture. But in the wake of the rebel withdrawal from Homs, activists documented what they said was the cold-blooded murder or scores of Sunni civilians by Syria’s security forces, which are composed mainly of minority Allawites, an off-shoot of Shiite Islam that dominates the country’s leadership.

Activists said the killing spree included the execution of 12 young men during raids on houses in Baba Amr by security forces hunting Free Syrian Army fighters, Abu Fares, a spokesman for the Homs Revolutionary Council, told GlobalPost.

In a another incident at least 10 men were executed outside a state-run cooperative supermarket that was transformed into a prison and military base where dozens of young men, some as young as 14, were held and tortured, said Abu Bakr, a local activist.

Many of those killed were wounded with large knives. Some corpses were found missing body parts or even decapitated, he said. Activists found children whose fingers had been cut off.

The last time Abu Hamza spoke to his family, who lived in the countryside on the edge of Baba Amr, he said he felt safe enough. The bombs and missiles flying over their heads had stopped and although Assad’s security forces had entered the village, they had only stolen cars, not killed anyone.

“I think the security forces came to the village and took the cars so the families could not escape,” he alleged. “Two days later security forces came back and forced the two families into one house. They killed 17 of them in cold blood. There were children from one and half years old to six. I don’t know what kind of religion these people follow who can do this.”

The bodies were first discovered on Feb. 29, just as the rebels were withdrawing from Homs and the regime’s forces were moving in. But it was not until March 5 that Abu Hamza heard his family name reported on Al Dunya, the only private satellite channel in Syria, which is majority-owned by Assad’s first cousin and Syria’s wealthiest tycoon, Rami Makhlouf.

Al Dunya blamed the murders on “armed terrorist gangs,” the label the regime has consistently used for its opponents. But this time, the propaganda was more specific: The Farouk Brigade, the very force Abu Hamza had been fighting with, were responsible for killing the Sabouhs.

The report showed bodies slumped on floor cushions in a front room where they had apparently been sharing lunch. The pictures included women and children who all appear to have been shot at close range. Pale graffiti scrawled on the walls shown in the broadcast, purportedly signed by the Free Syrian Army, said: “Death to the agents.”

Abu Hamza tells a different story.

“Al Dunya claims the Farouk Brigade were killing the people but I am 100 percent sure that they were not. I don’t know the name of the people who did this to my family but I know they must be from the army or Assad’s militias,” he said.

A statement by the surviving members of the Sabouth family, which was released by activists in Baba Amr on March 5, said they “hold the Assad regime fully accountable for this massacre in retaliation for the support we gave to the revolution.”

Abu Hamza said he thought the murders were more about spreading terror than revenge on his family in particular.

“My father was a government employee. He never went to a protest. Why would you kill a one and half-year old child? It’s to terrify people and tell them: ‘This could happen to you.’”

Trained as an anesthetist but lacking any serious painkillers, Abdel Rizk has morphed from a practitioner of the exact sciences into a battlefield surgeon of the most basic kind, completing multiple amputations in a day, using underwear to bandage wounds in the absence of gauze, and appealing desperately for help.

“We’ve got almost no medical supplies left,” said the doctor, whose 15 patients, dying slowly in a single room of an old Syrian home, included two with serious chest wounds, five injured by mortars and three with amputated limbs.

“I was able to get a few stitches into the amputees, but they are going to die because we have no antibiotics or muscle relaxants,” he said, speaking to GlobalPost using a satellite modem because all mobile and landlines have been cut, as has electricity to the neighborhood for the past two months.

“We are calling on the Red Cross or Red Crescent to come right away as the situation is intolerable. Today there was no bread. Children are dying.”

Many in Homs fear a repeat of the massacre that took place exactly 30 years ago this month, when Assad’s father, Hafez, sent his artillery to pound neighboring Hama, another Sunni-majority city that dared to rise up against the oppressive rule of one family and a regime drawn largely from the minority Allawite sect, an off-shoot of Shiite Islam.

The 1982 assault on Hama, which was triggered by an armed insurgency by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, ended with Assad’s troops going house to house, killing, raping and looting, with an eventual death toll estimated between 20,000 and 30,000 people, the huge majority civilians.

Since the bombardment of Homs began on Feb. 3, activists estimate the death toll has exceeded 500 with more than 1,000 people injured. A researcher with the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), who has been traveling between neighborhoods in Homs, told GlobalPost that his group had counted 754 people killed, though accurate figures were impossible to verify.

Amid all the chaos, long dormant sectarian fault lines are beginning to open up, dividing neighbor from neighbor, Sunni from Allawite and opening a space for militants to operate freely.

In the Allawite neighborhood of Homs’ Nuzha district, a GlobalPost reporter met with Haidar, a successful 40-year-old lawyer, who is married to an Allawite school teacher and has two young boys.

Haidar and his family used to live in the Hamadieh area, a mix of Sunnis, Allawites and Christians. But after young Allawites volunteered or were paid to shoot and beat Sunni protesters alongside regular security forces, Haidar said he was “advised” by some of his Sunni neighbors to leave Hamadieh.

“President Assad and his father stacked the security forces with Allawites so now Sunnis see all Allawites as part of the killing machine,” Haidar said. “I understand their feelings, but what can I do?”

Haidar said he moved to Nuzha for “social protection from my community” and was now considering leaving Syria altogether for Qatar or another Gulf state.

“What is going on in Homs is a real civil war between the government and Allawites on one side and the Sunnis on the other,” Haidar said. “I don’t think we as Allawites have any future in Homs if the Assads go. We are shaking with fear for the future.”

Sectarian disintegration has also occurred the other way, with Sunnis, such as 25-year-old Firas, leaving Allawite neighborhoods. “I will be frank and say Homs is divided. There is no more national unity,” said the Sunni former resident of Haddarah who moved to the Sunni-majority neighborhood of Deir Baalbah. “The Assad regime created this sectarian war when it gave arms and money to young Allawites to attack us.”

In Homs’ Qusour neighborhood, home to about 35,000 people, an activist there said the majority of the one fifth Allawite population had moved away over the past six months.

“The pattern of sectarian consolidation that is taking place in central Syria and along the coastline has now spread to Damascus itself,” warned Peter Harling, the Damascus-based Syria Project Director at the International Crisis Group. “People are moving into homogenous neighborhoods, social ties are being cut, polarization is increasing.”

As communities divide along religious lines and the Allawite security forces continue to torture and kill Sunni civilians, forces long held in check by Syria’s secular system are emerging to stake a claim in an uprising many now fear is morphing into the nightmare of sectarian conflict suffered across the border in Iraq.

“I am not afraid to say that I support the opposition with money and weapons,” said Abu Annas al-Homsi, a Syrian Salafist fundamentalist who fought with Sunni militants against American-led troops in Iraq and who now leads Islamist militants fighting in Homs.

“The international community was too weak to protect civilians, so now we fight an open war to liberate our land and defend our religion.”

On Sunday, Al Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri called for the first time on Muslims in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey — Syria’s neighboring countries — to join the uprising against Assad’s “pernicious, cancerous regime.”

His call came just days after twin suicide car bombs killed 28 and injured 235 soldiers and security members in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, so far noted for its relative stability. The Free Syrian Army denied involvement in the attack and no group claimed responsibility.

State-run Syria TV — broadcasting images of destruction from Aleppo within minutes of the explosions while ignoring Homs completely — blamed “foreign terrorists.” In Syria’s tightly-controlled police state, however, such high-profile attacks by organized terrorist groups are extremely rare. Opposition members say the regime staged the explosions in an attempt to divert attention from its massacres in Homs.

A reporter working with GlobalPost who spent two days in Homs this week said the city reeked of corpses. Since the crackdown on the popular uprising against the Assad family’s 42-year dictatorship began last March, rights group Avaaz has confirmed more than 5,600 Syrians killed. Several other rights groups say that number could be higher. Tens of thousands have also been injured. The regime, meanwhile, says more than 2,000 members of its security forces have been killed battling “armed gangs and terrorists.”

In interviews on satellite phones and with a reporter in Homs, residents said they were in shock. Many said they felt abandoned by the outside world after Russia and China vetoed a UN Security Council resolution that would have condemned the Assad regime and opened the door for possible sanctions and military intervention.

On Sunday, the Arab League said it would end its observer mission to Syria — widely criticized by the Syrian opposition for failing to protect civilians — and would ask the UN Security Council to send an international peace keeping force to end the bloodshed.

For now Homs continues to suffer bombardment from afar by artillery and rocket launchers. A GlobalPost reporter in the city witnessed scores of tanks and armored vehicles being deployed in Sunni-majority neighborhoods, with sandbags, checkpoints and soldiers around all buildings of the secret police and ruling Baath Party.

Activists in Baba Amr, the neighborhood that has been the hardest hit so far, said residents were now terrified that a ground assault was imminent with troops amassing on the area’s outskirts, while a reporter for Sky News who spent time in Homs last week said rebel fighters of the Free Syrian Army estimated a build up of about 10,000 troops outside the city.

Fighting with only Kalashnikovs and the occasional Rocket Propelled Grenade launcher, the defected soldiers and armed civilian volunteers of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in Homs are severely outgunned.

Several members of just one small FSA unit interviewed by GlobalPost last November have been killed fighting Assad’s forces recently, while several others wounded.

But an FSA commander in Baba Amr told GlobalPost this weekend that his fighters had successfully repelled a ground assault against the city.

“They will enter only over our dead bodies,” said the rebel commander, known as Captain Ammar al-Wawi. “We destroyed four tanks when they tried to enter and we prepared a lot of surprises for the regime if they try to storm Homs. But we do not have a lot of weapons because no one is supporting us. We appeal to the international community to support the revolt in Homs because there is a massacre ongoing.”

Western powers have so far ruled out arming the FSA, as they did with Libya’s rebel fighters, fearing such a move would hasten Syria’s descent into civil war and concerned that neither the FSA nor the political opposition Syrian National Council are sufficiently united.

A GlobalPost journalist in Homs contributed reporting for this story.

With rights group Avaaz reporting at least 258 people killed — including 72 children and 42 women — in a single night of shelling just hours before Russia and China vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning the government of President Bashar al-Assad, analysts warn the onslaught in Syria marks a new chapter in which further bloodshed appears inevitable.

In shelling by tanks, artillery and what several sources inside Homs said were multiple rocket launchers, Syrian security forces have killed at least 350 people since late Friday, prompting the U.S. to close its embassy in Damascus and withdraw its ambassador and remaining staff.

“Its own supporters believe the regime has shown too much restraint and they have been increasingly vocal in calling for a crackdown,” Peter Harling, the Damascus-based Syria Project Director at the International Crisis Group, told GlobalPost.

“The situation in Syria is now entering a phase of extreme violence. The regime has not until now made use of all the fire power at its disposal. Now that Russia torpedoed the one political mechanism on the table, the armed struggle will take greater importance.”

An activist from Khaldiyye, the first opposition-held neighborhood of Homs to be targeted in the onslaught that began Friday around 10 p.m., gave a graphic account of an almost apocalyptic night of terror in the city that is already the hardest hit by the government crackdown.

“We are used to shelling so when it started we thought it would only last a few minutes, so everyone stayed indoors,” said Waleed Fares. “But then we heard a terrible, loud sound.”

The sound was from a local apartment block, home to 36 flats, Fares said, collapsing after being hit repeatedly by rockets and shells.

Rushing outside to help recover the injured and dead, Fares said the sound of mosques calling out “God is great” mixed with the explosion of shells and the cries of those in pain.

“There were children crying, women screaming, standing in their nightclothes because they had not had time to dress,” Fares said.

“We took the bodies and the injured to a nearby park. I counted around 40 bodies from the building collapse. The injuries were appalling: People missing limbs; people crushed so badly you couldn’t recognize them; people pierced by metal.”

Even in the park, terrified residents said they were not safe. “Three bombs fell on the park and killed around 30 people,” Fares said, one of them his friend, Omar Zarour, who was also trying to rescue trapped neighbors.

Omar Shakir, an activist in Bab Amr, another Sunni-majority neighborhood in Homs, said the shelling was like, “random machine gun fire, only much, much heavier.”

“The bombs fell like rain,” said Shakir, whose best friend, 23-year-old Madher Tayyara, a student turned volunteer medic died on Friday at home from shrapnel in his chest and head. “You didn’t know where they would fall. You can only pray.”

Several hospitals treating the dead and dying were raided by security forces, according to reporting from activists in Homs gathered by Avaaz, which described the humanitarian situation inside the city as appalling.

Small field hospitals set up to treat protesters were suddenly overwhelmed with hundreds of injured, according to activists. With security forces laying siege to neighborhoods and preventing medical supplies from reaching the area, activists feared many of the up to 1,000 people injured would die because there was no way to treat them.

One of the hospitals targeted was the Hikmat in Homs’ Inshaat neighborhood, where a video uploaded to YouTube yesterday appeared to show a doctor walking through a hospital whose roof was leaking and and bloodstains on the floor.

“Fifth of February, the Hikmat hospital,” says the voice on the video. “The surgery room was hit by shells. Here is one injured person,” he says, lifting covers to reveal a man unconscious from anesthetic, apparently left mid operation.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), medical staff and patients were gunned down when two field hospitals were targeted by Syrian forces Monday in Bab Amr, leaving three patients killed and a doctor needing an amputation.

“The hospitals were specifically targeted,” SOHR spokesman, Sami Ibrahim, told GlobalPost from close by Bab Amr.

“It’s a disastrous situation. People are losing their minds. When the bombing ceases we can hear them crying out for help.”

Interviewed by a GlobalPost reporter in Damascus on the day he fled with his family from Homs, Abu Yaman said his neighborhood of Inshaat had come under heavy fire, with no phone or mobile coverage for 11 days and no electricity and water for a week.

“We cannot walk in the streets so we made holes in the walls between each flat to reach a small shop at the end of the block open every day for just two hours,” he said.

“We are 10 families in the building and we all moved to the basement flat to use it like a shelter: 10 families living in a 150 square meter space underground.”

Abu Yaman said residents had begun to burn tables, chairs and other household wood to try and stay warm through winter nights without heating oil or electricity and that corpses were being buried in private gardens because graveyards were either full or impossible to access.

“My two children haven’t slept well for months,” he said. “My wife was pregnant but she lost the baby after she was shocked by a bomb hitting our building. No one in the world can imagine what Assad’s forces are doing in Homs since Friday.”

The Assad regime denied the assault on Homs, with state-run Syria TV claiming corpses shown in video footage — said by activists to be victims of the bombardment — had been people kidnapped and killed by “terrorist armed groups.”

The assault with heavy weapons initially appeared to have been triggered by the capture of more than a dozen soldiers by members of the rebel Free Syrian Army (FSA), which attacked a checkpoint and an airbase on Friday.

In a video released on YouTube and broadcast by Arab satellite channels, a man identifying himself as from the Farouq Battalion of the FSA is heard taunting the captured soldiers.

“How did we capture you and you have everything, arms and ammunition, at this checkpoint?” he asks. “If we had captured women it would have been more difficult. It did not even take us 10 minutes to capture you.”

The taunting takes a sectarian turn when each man is forced to admit he is from the minority Allawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam from which the Assad family and much of the regime and loyalist security forces are drawn. Around three quarters of Syria’s population, and the overwhelming majority of the opposition, including the FSA, are Sunni Muslims.

A spokesman for the Free Syrian Army told GlobalPost the armed rebels had lost 27 soldiers in four days of fighting with Assad’s troops up to Friday, saying the regime had planned an assault on Homs before the capture and video of its soldiers.

“The regime is a killing machine. Four days ago the regime said it would finish the revolution but the revolution will not end,” said the FSA commander, known as Abu Ali. “We capture soldiers to show how weak the regime is. Their soldiers fight for one person, Bashar al-Assad. We fight for a cause: the nation.”

In interviews with half a dozen different residents and activists in Homs since Friday, it appeared the majority of Assad’s forces remain, for now, deployed around restive neighbourhoods, while heavy artillery and rockets pound the city from afar.

The fear of many though, is that a full scale ground assault is imminent, with dark memories of the massacre of up to 30,000 civilians in Hama after that nearby Sunni-majority city rose up three decades ago to challenge Assad’s father, Hafez.

“The Assad regime wants to finish us,” Abu Yaman said. “We fear the president wants to make Homs another Hama. We are living in a very hard situation and we need help from the world.”