The minders tried to herd us back onto the bus, but the bearded man, who I later discovered was a prominent lawyer, had everyone’s attention. He shouted that terrible things were happening in his city. When asked who was responsible, he suggested that the regime was using thugs to intimidate people. “Army or security or military, I don’t know!” he yelled. “They are wearing sports shoes! You know a military wearing sports shoes?” He added, “I trust the men in uniforms with helmets and boots. I don’t trust these men with sports shoes.”

Men in long black leather jackets appeared at the edges of the crowd: Mukhabarat or Shabiha. They stood close together and whispered, and some moved in toward the bearded man. A few old men emerged from the café and tried to coax him inside, but he shook them off.

A reporter asked, “How is life here?”

“Life?” the man shouted, waving his arms. “There is no life! There isn’t life here in Syria.”

Men crowded around, yelling angrily in order to drown him out. One of them called to us, “You can go anywhere you like in Homs! Everything is fine.” Another man challenged him: “You want NATO to come to Syria? Is that what you want?” There was shouting and pushing; the secret police swarmed. The bearded man called to the reporters, “Take my name! Tomorrow my name will be on the board,” referring to a list of Homs’s daily dead. Then the crowd descended into chaos, and he was pulled away.

When I met Bassam Abu Abdullah, a member of the Baath Party, he was wearing a wristwatch decorated with Bashar al-Assad’s face. A balding, mustachioed man in his forties, Abdullah is a professor of international affairs at Damascus University, and a good-natured lobbyist for the government. Over coffee, he argued that, in spite of past mistakes, the regime’s intentions were good, and the announced reforms were more than mere tactical concessions. The violence in Homs was distressing, he acknowledged; there had been abuses by the security forces, and such things had to be fixed. Bashar simply needed time to implement the reforms. “Syria will change,” he assured me. “But it’s the management of the change that’s important. We have already seen various scenarios—Iraq, Libya, and Yemen—and none of them are good.”

Abdullah went to college in Tashkent during the fall of the Soviet Union, and he recalled that Gorbachev, too, had tried to bring change and then lost control. “I know what the collapse of a state means,” he said. He agreed that Assad’s reforms should have come sooner, but maintained that there were good reasons for the delays: the Iraq war, the 2005 car-bomb assassination of the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri—which Syria was accused of masterminding—and the current uprising. All of them had taken “a lot of Syria’s attention.” There were also “corrupt people within the country” who had worked to “prevent change.” At my surprised look, Abdullah said, “Yes, we have corrupt people, and I am not afraid to say so. I want a better future for my country.”

The government had in fact made some reforms, but they were concentrated on the economy, and favored the rich. “It forgot about the people,” Abdullah said. “The market was supposed to take care of everyone, but this policy also failed in the West. In Syria, the people are not as well off; they still look to the state as they do to a mother.” With the lack of economic opportunities, religious sentiments had intensified, especially among the poor. The government needed to open things up politically, Abdullah said, and allow greater freedom of expression. But all these things would be addressed in the current efforts to rewrite the constitution.

According to a recent U.N. report, hundreds of children have died in the government’s attacks in Homs and elsewhere, but, when asked why the regime was killing children, Abdullah said, “Why not ask those who are sending their children into the streets? They are dirty people.” In his view, the violence was being orchestrated by outsiders: Jordanian intelligence agents, narcotics chiefs, Islamists. Eleven fatwas had been issued against him by Muslim extremists, he said; he had sent his wife, who is Russian, and their two daughters out of the country. The bulk of the protesters, he argued, were “uneducated people,” and were being misled. “Some people think they want freedom, but they don’t know what freedom is. They think it is disorder.” He smiled, and said, “I think the security forces will deal with this very soon. If the Army wants, it can finish this in a week.”

Skepticism about the rebels was common among Assad’s supporters. One influential businessman, Nabil Toumeh, informed me that what was taking place in Syria was the result of a plan—dreamed up years before by Zbigniew Brzezinski, and supported by Israel—to help the Muslim Brotherhood take over the Middle East. “After fifty years of persecution, they are being given power, and this will bring the Arab world to a state of backwardness,” he said. Assad’s friend told me, “This is not the Arab Spring. It’s the awakening of the extremes of Islam.” The Brotherhood was trying to seize power in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, but it would not happen in Syria. “There is no reasoning with these people; with them, it is only God.”

But in Zabadani one of the protesters, a Sunni, told me, “There’s no Muslim Brotherhood here. The people are Muslims, yes. But the Brotherhood doesn’t have any real plan for them. What we want is freedom, to be able to protest in peace without being fired upon.”

Little is clear about the rebels. A veteran dissident named Salim Kheirbek told me, “No more than thirty per cent of the people are involved in the resistance. The other seventy per cent, if not actually with the regime, are silent, because it’s not convincing to them, and especially after what has happened in Iraq and Libya. These people want reforms, but not at any price.” Assad’s friend told me that the F.S.A. had only a thousand defectors, and the rest were a fanatical rabble; a businessman from Homs estimated that two-thirds of its members were former soldiers. Those I met told stories of being forced by their senior officers to shoot at civilians, and then, after crises of conscience, fleeing with like-minded comrades. There is a convincing consistency to this narrative. Most also say that their mandate is to protect civilians, and insist that they will stop fighting when Assad and his inner circle step down. They claim that their aims are not sectarian—that they are anti-Alawite only in their opposition to those who run the country—but they acknowledge that their breach with the government falls along sectarian lines. Most of the Army rank and file is Sunni, while most of the senior officers, like the country’s other leaders, are Alawites.

“Well, well, looks like we got ourselves a coupla city types here, and a couple more city types right behind ’em, and a whole mess o’ city types transferrin’ to the Queens-bound F train.” Facebook

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Whatever the rebels say now, Islamists will undoubtedly seek a voice in the opposition. The Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri recently issued a call to jihad in Syria, and there have been suicide bombings in Damascus and Aleppo that are strikingly similar to Al Qaeda attacks. As a regime supporter in Damascus put it, “The Americans used the jihadis against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and then the Syrians used them against the Americans in Iraq; Sarkozy used them against Qaddafi in Libya, and now the Americans are using them against us. In the end, maybe they will work for themselves.” But, for the most part, the Syrian opposition seems to reflect a cross-section of citizens who feel victimized by forty-two years in a security state. Some have been abused by the secret police and are seeking revenge; others are inspired by sectarian hatred; and some are genuine patriots, who simply couldn’t continue to serve a repressive regime. There is no telling which faction will emerge ascendant, but it is likely to be the one that is most willing to use extreme violence. Syria is at war with itself, and, inevitably, all sides will misrepresent their foes and conceal aspects of their own agendas. Even the F.S.A. does not yet know what it is.