It is a mistake to believe that dead people don't talk. They talk nonstop in Syria, at least on the telephone. "It's the last greeting from our martyrs," says one of the young organizers of the resistance movement in a suburb of Damascus, as people around him discuss battles and changing fronts without fear that intelligence agents will monitor on their conversations. That's because the insurgents are using phones that contain the SIM cards of dead people. They can no longer be killed, the man says calmly.

What began about 11 months ago as a peaceful protest for democracy and reforms has since turned into a war waged by the regime against large segments of the Syrian population. Month after month, protesters were beaten and shot, thousands were killed and tens of thousands disappeared without a trace -- until autumn, when the rebels began returning fire.

International appeals and embargoes have failed to deter President Bashar Assad's regime from responding with increasing violence. Until Friday of last week China and, most notably, Russia, had blocked every United Nations resolution against Syria . Not even the presence of an observation mission from the Arab League kept the regime in check. Instead the brutality has increased dramatically since the observers left on Jan. 28. Elite troops, particularly members of the 4th Division of the Syrian Army, under the command of the president's brother, Maher Assad, are no longer shooting at individuals with guns. They are now using tanks and grenade launchers to bombard entire rebel neighborhoods from a distance.

It is an uneven match between the heavily armed troops of the regime and the poorly equipped rebels of the Free Syrian Army, or FSA. Nevertheless, the rebels are gaining ground.

In recent weeks SPIEGEL, both from Hamburg and with the help of a local colleague, has once again contacted the people who had provided access to the rebels for past research efforts . This enabled the editors to obtain eyewitness reports from the centers of the rebellion -- the Damascus suburbs, and the embattled city of Homs and Zabadani, which the anti-regime forces have controlled for the last two weeks.

Smoke Over Damascus

In recent days, grenades could be heard exploding in downtown Damascus for the first time, and columns of smoke rose from the northeastern part of the city. Within days, FSA units had gained control over Harasta, Irbin and Duma -- the suburbs where there had been a number of demonstrations since last spring. Now the protests have turned into open fighting. It took the elite units of the government's 4th division several days to regain control over the neighborhoods. "Maher's soldiers were within 800 meters (2,624 feet) of us last Tuesday, on Wednesday it was 500 meters, and by Thursday they were in the center of the district," says one of the members of the local committee in Irbin, who calls himself Abu Said. The former suburb, which has now become part of Damascus, is six kilometers from the city's downtown area. "If I got up on the roof I could see the presidential palace," says Said. "But then I would probably get shot."

No one even considered fighting with weapons until a month ago, says Said. "But by that time 26 people had already been shot to death during the protests, and 150 were abducted and disappeared. Assad's troops didn't just shoot at demonstrators. They even opened fire on funeral processions." Said can no longer understand this. "Even if someone is my enemy, at least you have to respect the dead," he says.

To recapture the suburb, home to some 50,000 people, Assad's troops brought in tanks, then shut off the water, power and telephone network until the FSA withdrew after three days of fighting. A grenade tore a hole in the roof of the local mosque, and five civilians died in the gunfire, including an old woman standing in her kitchen and a three-year-old girl.

"Then the soldiers came to search the houses for fighters," says Abu Said. "But the men from the 4th Division and the security services stayed out in the streets, sending in the recruits from regular units instead. Everyone was afraid, we of them and they of us."

But by Thursday at noon, the elite units had pulled out again, leaving a few regular troops behind in Irbin. "They're all being transferred to Zabadani," the observation posts reported.

Mountain Stronghold

Zabadani, normally an idyllic vacation spot in the mountains 50 kilometers to the northwest, where many wealthy Damascus residents have summer homes, is the first city controlled by the insurgents. The rugged, wooded area is not good terrain for tanks. Besides, the regime did not realize how important the area was until it had already been occupied by insurgents. Much of the drinking water for Damascus comes from sources in the mountains.

There is a fragile cease-fire with the army, but there is little food left in Zabadani, and there are only a few hundred rebels defending the city. "We received €900 from Germany today," says a local activist. The donation came from "Adopt a Revolution," a Berlin initiative spearheaded by Germans and Syrians. It isn't much, says the activist, "but otherwise we get nothing at all from the outside world. We need food, satellite telephones and medicine!"

Last Friday, insurgent military council leaders in Zabadani were still negotiating with officers from the government's troops over extending the cease-fire. "Apparently they really are afraid that we will cut off Damascus from its water supply," the council's spokesman says incredulously. But, he adds, they wouldn't think of doing such a thing.

The troop movements on the other side have the besieged residents and insurgents feeling somewhat hopeful, though. They say that Assad is constantly moving his most important elite units from one location to another. The FSA cannot hope to prevail against them militarily, but the insurgency continues the minute they are gone. The remaining divisions of the Syrian army, which nominally consists of up to 300,000 men, are not just being worn down by the growing refusal of soldiers to shoot at their fellow Syrians, but are also becoming a threat to the regime. Entire groups of soldiers are now switching sides, taking their weapons with them, as they did a week ago on the outskirts of the Khalidiya neighborhood of Homs.

The neighborhood had been under fire for days by about a dozen soldiers barricaded behind sandbags. Meanwhile, men from Syrian Air Force intelligence stood behind them, threatening to shoot anyone who refused to take aim at the insurgents. But then the men took advantage of a moment when they were not being watched, running to the other side as a group. The residents they had been shooting at moments earlier received them with open arms.

Defiant and Apocalyptic

The fact that the fighting around Damascus is so readily apparent is dangerous for the Assad regime, because it exposes the ridiculousness of the propaganda construct that there is a foreign conspiracy. In September, the propaganda station Dunya TV reported that the Al-Jazeera news channel had "built giant film sets of Syrian cities with the help of French and American directors," so as to stage a fictitious rebellion in Syria. But now the reality of the uprising is both audible and visible in the capital.

But the decisive battles, which have already become part of a civil war, are taking place in central Syria: in Hama, where the regime even ordered the bakeries closed and is trying to starve the sealed-off city; in towns like Rastan and Hula, which are being bombarded by regime tanks because no one dares send troops into the city centers any longer; and in Homs, the center of the rebellion, where more than 2,000 people have died.

Since November, a few hundred FSA fighters have retained control of the Bab Amr neighborhood in southwestern Homs. The houses on the front lines, long abandoned and half-destroyed, are connected for several hundred meters by openings in the walls. This enables the men to reach their positions without venturing into the streets. They have laid mines in some places to prevent the government troops from advancing -- mines that they purchased from the soldiers.

The prevailing mood there is both defiant and apocalyptic. "Come to us. You'll find the safest hospital in all of Homs here," one of the doctors in the underground hospital and Suleiman al-Hamad, an emergency rescue worker and body-washer, joked in December. "Here is where you will be treated!" they said, pointing sarcastically at the improvised interior of the converted shed. "At the government hospital you'll enter with a leg injury and leave with a bullet in your head." There have been reports of the wounded being dragged away and killed before they were even admitted to the government hospitals. Doctors, pharmacists and nurses have been murdered, and the only reason Suleiman's real name can be used here is that he was shot to death days after the visit to his makeshift hospital while attempting to recover one of the wounded.

In late January, there were already three such underground clinics in Bab Amr alone. One is exclusively for the severely wounded. A policeman is paid $4 a day to stand outside the gate and prevent anyone from parking at the entrance. "We can now operate effectively on gunshot wounds to the legs and arms," says a doctor, describing the situation. "For shots to the lungs, we have taken plastic tubes from toilets and sterilized them, and we have set fractures with wood. But they have been shooting at people's heads for the last two months, and we can't do anything about that. We just have to watch these people die."

Homs at the Forefront

Doctors are putting their lives at risk by filching materials from government hospitals. Other supplies, including devices for sterilizing bandages and blood-testing equipment, are smuggled across the snow-covered borders on mules and motorcycles or in backpacks.

In the midst of the bustling volunteers, who are removing blood-soaked sheets and trying to get the sterilizer working again, an eerie debate has erupted over what might have happened to the eyes of corpses being found in the streets at daylight. Some say that the corneas are being sold for transplants, while others insist that the torturers are simply poking out the eyes of their victims.

In Homs, many things happen sooner than elsewhere in the country. Early on, the shifting power structure reflected the regime's cluelessness over how to quell the continuing mass protests. First the "Political Security Service" was responsible for Homs, followed by "Military Security," until autumn when the Air Force intelligence service, known for its brutality, assumed responsibility for the city. The actual army leadership plays a secondary role, while the heads of the intelligence services are truly in command.

Bab Amr, and increasingly other Sunni neighborhoods in Homs, has become a model for other cities. In Bab Amr, the revolutionary city council has had green food cards printed. Each card consists of a number of small boxes, which are stamped weekly. In return, residents receive sacks of rice, baby food, sugar and oil, enough food for a family to survive for a week. The district has its own police force and even a tiny prison, where people caught looting abandoned houses are kept. Evacuation plans have been made in case of large-scale aerial bombardment, and basements have been stocked with supplies. "Our informants in the military have reported that the 4th Division is having Scud missiles brought from Damascus to the outskirts of Homs," explains Omar Shakir, the spokesman for the town council. Of course, this isn't his real name.