The deepening stalemate suggests that events may be slipping out of control. In a town about a half-hour’s drive from Damascus, the police station was recently burned down and, in retaliation, electricity and water were cut off, diplomats say. For a time, residents drew water in buckets from a well. Some people are too afraid to drive major highways at night. In Homs - a city that a Lebanese politician called “the Stalingrad of the Syrian revolution’’ - reports have grown of sectarian cleansing of once-mixed neighborhoods, where some roads have become borders too dangerous for taxis to cross.
In a suggestion that seemed to underline the sense of desperation, the emir of Qatar said in an interview with CBS, an excerpt of which was released yesterday, that Arab troops should intervene in Syria to “stop the killing.’’
“There’s absolutely no sign of light,’’ said a Western diplomat in Damascus, a city once so calm it was called Syria’s Green Zone. “If anything, it’s darker than ever. And I don’t know where it’s going to end. I can’t tell you. I don’t think anyone can.’’
The forbidding tableau painted by diplomats, residents, opposition figures, and even some government supporters suggests a far more complicated portrait than that offered by Assad, who delivered a 15,000-word speech on Tuesday, declaring, “We will defeat this conspiracy without any doubt.’’ The next day, he appeared in public for the first time since the uprising began in a Syrian backwater last March.
More telling, perhaps, was the arrival of a Russian ship last week, said to be carrying ammunition and seeming to signal the determination of the government to fight to the end.
