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“Michael, I swear we are getting slaughtered.”

I had asked Alaa al-Sheikh, the spokesman for the Khaled Bin Waleed brigade of Syrian rebels, to give me an overview of what’s happened in the last 72 hours in Homs. He said that 42 people had been killed in the city of Rastan alone, although he admits that mention of statistics at this stage is irrelevant: “There are bodies that could not be documented because they were completely mutilated and disfigured.”