Anonymous

The atmosphere of the student-organised, leaderless, pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong last week was hopeful, even jubilant, although the police had attacked the crowds with tear gas and rubber bullets on Sunday 28 September. Under torrential rain, tens of thousands of peaceful Hong Kongers made their way to Admiralty, Central, Causeway Bay and Mongkok. I was volunteering at a station to distribute supplies. On Tuesday we had to refuse any more water donations, we had so much already. Food and first aid workers were abundant. Strangers quickly became friends. ‘Hong Kong people are so practical,’ one fellow outlying islander said. ‘They go to work and then come to protest.’

Raqqa, a predominantly Sunni city in northern Syria, has been under the control of rebels, mostly Salafists, since March. Black jihadist flags fly from the main city buildings, but there's also fresh graffiti in the red, green and white of the Syrian revolutionary pennant. Most of the small Alawite population, who worked mainly in government or the security forces, left when the city exchanged hands. Roula Dayoub, a young nurse at one of the hospitals, did not. ‘I am the only Alawite here now,’ she says.

The regime in Syria, eight months into the uprising, is making a show of playing nice. It has said it will accept an Arab League plan to end the bloodshed – but no one’s holding their breath. Last week it invited a number of foreign journalists into the country. President Bashar Assad gave his first interview to the international media, with Andrew Gilligan in the Sunday Telegraph. For an outsider arriving in Damascus, having seen the TV footage of the violence in Homs, the city must seem surprisingly calm – one of the reasons, presumably, that the regime asked the press in. But calm isn’t quite the word.

More than five months into Syria's uprising, at least 2200 people have been killed and thousands more detained. The activists involved in the protest movement have insisted on non-violence and non-sectarianism but it’s not clear how much longer that can last. I recently accompanied a doctor and an activist as they made their rounds of Harasta, a small town on the northern outskirts of Damascus.