AS PROTESTS continue for a seventh week and the government acts ever more harshly in its efforts to suppress them, two new features of the upheaval have emerged. First, the number of Syrians crossing the country's various borders has sharply increased as people flee on foot into Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon, and many of the 1m-odd refugees from Iraq ponder whether to go home. Second, hundreds if not thousands of intellectuals and would-be dissidents have gone into hiding for fear of arrest. Many are banned from leaving the country. The security forces are reckoned to have rounded up some 7,000 people since March 18th. Many of those since released tell of torture. Residents in several places report tanks rumbling down their streets.

Since April 29th at least 116 people have been killed, according to human-rights campaigners, bringing the overall death toll to more than 600, almost all of them unarmed civilians. The southern town of Deraa, where the protests began, remains under siege, with telephone communications and transport cut off. The army has moved in force into several other restive cities, such as Banias. Protests are continuing in and around Homs, among other places. Tight security in the capital, Damascus, and in Syria's second city, Aleppo, has so far kept the lid on protests there. But there are reports of growing anger in those cities too.

President Bashar Assad not only struggles to contain unrest at home, but he may also be losing support in the region. Relations with Turkey, probably his key ally, have cooled. On May 1st Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, made a scathing reference to the massacre of Islamists by Mr Assad's father, Hafez, in Hama in 1982, urging the son not to repeat such a mistake. Rumours of an impending decision by Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist movement long headquartered in Damascus, to move to Qatar have been strenuously denied but are widely believed. Syria will feel even more isolated and embarrassed if its sole solid ally is Iran.