Thousands of Syrians poured into neighboring Turkey this week, fleeing a scorched-earth military campaign that brought new levels of violence to the regime’s drive to silence dissent. President Bashar al-Assad’s forces used helicopter gunships and indiscriminate shelling by tanks to seize the northern town of Jisr al-Shughour, a center of the pro-democracy movement. Witnesses said hundreds of local men were rounded up as troops burned nearby farms and villages. Among the 8,500 people settling into refugee camps in Turkey were dozens of soldiers who deserted rather than fire on unarmed civilians. “Terrible things are being done,” said deserter Ismail Sher Saleh. “I have seen people getting shot for no reason.”
This could be Syria’s tipping point, said The Christian Science Monitor in an editorial. “Pro-democracy revolutions often start rolling only when individual soldiers refuse orders to shoot unarmed civilians.” Just such a mutiny, in fact, prompted Assad’s crackdown in Jisr al-Shughour. “But by killing even more civilians—in such a wholesale way—the regime may only drive more soldiers to defy their superiors.”
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