With shelling and sniper fire pursuing them, hundreds of insurgents lugged RPG7 rocket launchers, heavy machine guns, and their all-purpose AK47s out of the district and filtered into neighborhoods adjacent to Salaheddin to set up new defensive positions in buildings mainly to the north and east, and to await the next move of their better-equipped adversaries.

Only days ago, as warplanes and helicopter gunships struck at rebel forces, Free Syrian Army commanders insisted they would retain the district in the southwest of Syria’s second-largest city, arguing that its strategic importance made it essential for them to hold it. Salaheddin lies on a vital supply and logistics route for government forces wanting to move men and materiel north to retake a string of towns running south from the Turkish border at Kilis.

“Government claims to have conquered the enemy stronghold were false, as were the rebels’ later claims to have breached regime lines,” wrote Guardian correspondent Martin Chulov from Aleppo last night, describing a new sense in the city that there is no end to the battle in sight.

Even as rebel commanders admitted today that they had pulled their fighters from Salehedin at dawn, amid heavy bombardment from ranks and fighter jets, there were signs that they felt that momentum in the ever-present information war, at least, may be shifting their way. As it pounds away at Aleppo, the regime is gradually losing its image as a well-oiled and organized military machine. Breaching the Assad façade of quiet, confident control, as it is often described, has been a key element of the Aleppo campaign from the start--the very existence of heavy fighting in the country’s most populous city and economic center suggests that Assad may be more vulnerable than many once thought.

Hijab bolted for Jordan today amid competing claims over what exactly took place—state media reported that he’d been fired, while Hijab’s spokesman countered that he’d defected with his family, with some additional officials and military officers also in tow.

The spokesman, Mohammed Otri, took to Al-Jazeera with a defection statement on behalf of Hijab. “I announce today my defection from the killing and terrorist regime and I announce that I have joined the ranks of the freedom and dignity revolution,” the statement said.

With the situation deteriorating rapidly in recent days, he gathered his family and finally fled—but not before giving the keys to his shop to a rebel fighter he knows in town and asking him to keep an eye on the birds. Sitting in a four-room house in Reyhanli last night, where he lives now with three other Syrian families, Moustafa held out hope that the refugee experience would be more like a prolonged trip abroad than a dissolution of his former life. “We’re hoping the situation will be solved soon,” he said. “But we don’t know how long it will take.”

As fighting in Aleppo has intensified, residents have fled the city en masse. But many have yet to cross the border into Turkey. Instead, they wait things out in the surrounding area, or elsewhere in Syria, hoping the situation will settle down enough for them to resume their lives. A number of his neighbors had even brought their families to the countryside, Moustafa said, then returned to Aleppo to hold down the fort.

Manaf himself is, no doubt about it, a handsome devil. Those of us who were invited to tea with him and his siblings at his father’s house years ago still remember his languorous eyes and the thick black hair that is, today, a rakish mop of premature gray. But no Syrian would have picked Manaf then, or since, as a potential leader of his country—much less someone who could guide the nation out of war to a new democratic future, as he now claims he wants to do.

“He’s not a big brain,” says a prominent member of the Syrian National Council, a largely civilian exile group. Other more senior military officers who’ve taken up arms against the regime are not so kind: “We believe he is the hidden shadow of Bashar al-Assad,” says one. “And maybe he is gay!” chimes in another, intending the remark as a gratuitous insult.

It may still be true that President Bashar al-Assad’s days are numbered, but his last day is some time off. For the moment, diplomatic options have been spent. The civil war is on and it will be a fight to an uncertain finish. The conflict could outlast Assad, however and whenever he falls.

Government forces, despite steady defections, remain loyal to Assad. They retain considerable firepower and are increasingly willing to use all that they have–tanks, helicopters, and fixed-wing aircraft–to put down the popular revolt. Whether or not Assad is prepared to use chemical weapons against the rebels, they have undoubtedly deterred an overt outside intervention. The lesson for other rogues like Iran and North Korea could not be clearer.

As the conflict in Syria drags on, young activists are still playing a crucial role—coordinating and communicating over the grassroots networks they utilized to organize protests, documenting and disseminating news, and connecting journalists to people on the ground. But as the death toll mounts, some are struggling with the idea that their efforts often work in lockstep with an armed revolt. “Many activists are now aligned with people they would rather not be,” says CyberDissidents.org co-founder David Keyes, who has been analyzing the role of activists in the conflict. “But war makes strange bedfellows.”

In his resignation as the U.N. peace envoy Thursday, following a failure to bring about even a basic cease-fire, Kofi Annan offered an impassioned assessment of how far Syria’s struggle has come from its roots. “A mass movement, born in the demand for civil and political rights and the empowerment of voices for change, emerged in Syria after March 2011,” the former U.N. secretary-general wrote in an op-ed for the Financial Times. “But, for all the extraordinary courage that it took for the protesters to march each day in the face of escalating violence by the government, this did not become a movement that bridged Syria’s communal divisions. Opportunities to overcome this were then lost in increasing violence.”

It was announced that a new face would soon be stopping by, and the mood slightly tensed. Someone grumbled about extremists. The woman in the group, dressed in a low-cut shirt, briefly worried if she should cover up.

Mohamed Aisa, 32, wears the conspicuously moustache-less long beard that marks a salafist—a strict and passionate adherent to fundamental Islam. He sat down, smiled, and surprised the group by plopping two packs of Winston Reds on the table and lighting a cigarette. “Salafis say you shouldn’t, but because I’m the leader I can smoke,” he said.

So far the Kremlin’s alliance with Assad has cost Russian companies long-term contracts with other Arab nations. Russian politicians are called a “dictator’s friends,” and diplomats are treated coldly. Moscow is seen as the Syrian opposition’s enemy. And while Russian authorities repeat that theirs is a principled position—the worst scenario for Syria would be civil war or chaos if Assad falls, they say—large scale economic losses await Russia in the Middle East whatever the outcome.

Once official Moscow declares full support for another regime, it sticks to it, say pro-Kremlin experts, so as not to fall into the same trap it did with Libya, where it wound up supporting the losing side. But independent analysts believe that Russian officials have miscalculated and once again backed the wrong horse. Other analysts argue that Russia was thinking less of its image and more about the billions it earned from weapons shipments sent to Syria over the years.

A former government intelligence officer, al-Wawi defected to the rebel Free Syrian Army last July. From there, he quickly became a regular presence on YouTube and Arabic-language TV, where he advocates for rebel forces and fires threats at Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. In the process, al-Wawi has become one of the highest-profile figures in the opposition. But he’s more than a flashy spokesman—when not in the Turkish border area, where the FSA military council is based, he can sometimes be found commanding a battalion in Aleppo. He said he’d returned from Syria the previous day.

Al-Wawi seems to embody two defining features of the uprising: armed resistance, and an increasingly aggressive media campaign. In the hotel lobby, he propped his iPad on the table and used a ruddy finger to flip through a photo gallery that showed him posing with munitions at his desk. In the photos, his attire changed from officer’s garb to power suit—he was fighter and public relations flack all at once.