Visitors crossing from Turkey to Ras al-Ayn, a sleepy border town in eastern Syria, are now welcomed by the unlikeliest of characters: a Catholic member of what is considered an extremist Islamist rebel group.
Syrians are voicing a range of reactions to a series of Israeli airstrikes launched in the past week on Syrian soil.
For almost two years, Kafranbel, a small town in Idlib, has enthralled Syrians with its witty banners and cartoons, delivering a message of peaceful defiance that made it an icon of the revolution. But today its residents are split: on one side, ardent supporters of a democratic Syria, on the other, those who seek an Islamic state led by extremists such as Jabhat Al Nusra.
Further horrors of the Syrian civil war were uncovered last week in Aleppo with the new of a massacre of at least 80 men whose bodies were dumped en masse in the Qweik River on January 29th.
As opponents of the Assad regime scramble from one foreign capital to another, trying to secure funding for weapons and aid to help Syrians in need, some prominent religious leaders are sitting on the sidelines, quietly organizing themselves to provide spiritual guidance after the bloodshed ends.