ZABADANI, Syria ' Mahmoud, a gangly young man in his twenties, has just been let out of prison. His legs are stained by dark stripes of electric shock burns. It was the third time he had been locked up by President Bashar al-Assad's security services, and each time he gets taken in for protesting, the torture gets worse. It doesn't cow him, however -- the day he was let out, he went to a protest. Now, smiling and laughing, he busies himself by taking pictures of the torture marks.
Over a crackling Skype line, Mahmoud's mother talks to an activist in Lebanon, just a stone's throw away from this mountain town that was once a popular summer resort for Gulf tourists. "We are looking at places he could go to. He should leave Syria," says the activist.
"No," his defiant mother says. "No."
As the school year ends and the uprising grinds on into its fifteenth month, many middle and upper class Syrians are agonizing over whether to leave the country. Now, another atrocity will weigh on their minds: Two explosions ripped through the capital of Damascus on the morning of May 10, killing at least 55 people near a military intelligence building and wounding 170 more. A Syrian filming the smoke plume from the first explosion caught the earth-shaking sound of the second blast on camera. The Syrian government blamed the attacks on "terrorists," while the Syrian National Council, an umbrella opposition group, blamed the regime for orchestrating the attacks. Syria's state news agency published gruesome images of those killed in the attacks.
This bloody escalation in the battle between Assad and his opponents -- and possibly others, such as the self-styled jihadist group Jabhat al-Nusra, which has claimed responsibility for some recent bombings -- seems certain to hasten the departure of both activists and regular Syrians. They will join a growing flood of their fellow countrymen: Since the uprising started in March 2011, over 54,000 Syrians have taken refuge in Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey -- and that's just the official number who have registered with the U.N.'s refugee agency. Roughly 300,000 more Syrians have been displaced from their homes and are still living within the country.
Back in Zabadani, a small city of roughly 40,000 people, about 30 miles north of Damascus, not far from the Lebanese border, Mahmoud's mother worries. She's scared that the next time her son is taken by the security forces, he may not come out alive. But she doesn't want him to leave -- if all the men like him departed, she reasons, the revolution would falter.
"It will be like the 1980s again if everyone leaves," says Mahmoud's mother, referring to a black period in Syria's history when the regime of Hafez al-Assad battled a Muslim Brotherhood-led armed revolt through arrests, disappearances, and ultimately the flattening of Hama, Syria's fourth largest city, in 1982. While there are no exact figures for how many Syrians departed in the 1980s, even the Syrian government estimates today that some 18 million Syrians live abroad. The large Syrian diaspora is not entirely a product of the violence, but it testifies to the the drain of intellectuals, writers, artists, dissidents and even businessmen.
Mahmoud sits in the corner of the room, checking Facebook and ignoring his mother's Skype conversation. Of course, there is a part of him that wants to leave, he says. Before the uprising began, he had dreams: He boasts an encyclopedic knowledge of English music from the 1960s, and had hoped to go to Britain -- not to study English, but to see the cities that gave birth to rock and roll, as well as the medieval castles.
But now that the Assad regime's brutal crackdown has claimed the lives of over 11,000 Syrians, Mahmoud -- and his compatriots in the protest movement -- have made the choice that the uprising is worth dying for. Seeing England now would be a betrayal, not a realization of a dream. For them, the new dream is seeing a free Syria.
But for older Syrians and those less active on the streets, that reconciliation with death has not been made. Businessmen and many of the Damascus elite support the protesters financially, but are unwilling to risk speaking out in public. And as an attempted ceasefire plan brokered by U.N. and Arab League envoy Kofi Annan crumbles, they are no longer shielded from the worsening security situation. In today's Syria, trouble finds you: The central districts of Damascus are now riddled by gunfire at night, while checkpoints ring the capital on Friday, the traditional day of protest.
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