Al-Ahram Weekly | Region | 'The regime is definitely finished'

Al-Ahram Weekly | Region | 'The regime is definitely finished'

clipped from article:
How would you characterise the situation in Syria today, seven months after the beginning of the uprising against the regime?

In terms of the movement itself and the response from the regime, we need to distinguish two aspects. The first is the nature of the uprising. This has gone through phases, but today there is a spirit of irreversibility, of there being no return, so there's a very strong feeling in the movement that we have crossed a frontier and we will not go back.

This means that as the repression from the regime continues to be very high, people are looking for new strategies to ensure the movement continues. These have to do with finding new strategies of peaceful protest -- and we've just entered a movement of strikes, of shops closing, and of people not willing to go to work in cities across Syria a few days ago. It looks as if this movement is picking up now, and it might expand to other cities, including to the merchant class.

There is also the temptation, even the physical need, for people to take up arms to defend themselves, and we know that there are arms circulating in Syria. Our movement does not call for armed struggle against the regime, but there have been increasing numbers of defections from the army. It is very difficult to know the figures, but they are somewhere between 15,000 and 30,000. We don't always know the ranks of the defectors, but we do know that not only low-ranking soldiers have defected and that there have been defectors in the higher echelons of the army. [ read more at link}