As chants of “Al-shaab urid iskat al-nizam” (“the people want to bring down the regime”) rise, so, too, does the hailstorm of bullets. As people come out into the streets to express themselves, so, too, do the tanks. Syria’s revolution is entering its ninth month, the Assad regime uses familiar tactics in its attempt to crush dissent. There is nothing creative about deploying tanks and snipers to villages. There is nothing creative about using rape as a tool of war, especially against an unarmed population. In contrast, however, the Free Syria movement has responded to these assaults with amazing creativity. Syrians continue to take to the streets in peaceful protest against the Assad regime—every day, in nearly every city, in nearly every village.

Being creative takes work. Nonviolent creativity, especially when faced with live ammunition, takes steely willpower and a fierce commitment. Syrians have demonstrated both as they slowly but surely rid themselves of a regime that thinks nothing of using rape as a tool of repression, dismemberment as a message, or kidnapping as a reminder. That the protests have remained largely peaceful is awe-inspiring; that Syrians are so creative under these circumstances is astonishing.

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Members of the Free Syrian Army at a safehouse on northern Lebanon's border with Syria.

Mass uprisings against oppressive governments put the regime’s soldiers in a precarious situation. When ordered to repress the rebelling populace, they can obey those orders to apply military action against largely peaceful demonstrators, wounding and killing many, as has been happening in Syria for months. The soldiers are then clearly tools of oppression and betrayers of their freedom-seeking countrymen.

Many soldiers with a deep sense of honor and love of their country or religion will decide they can no longer do that. Disobedience by soldiers requires great bravery. Disobeying Syrian soldiers have been summarily executed. Nevertheless, others continue to refuse to kill peaceful fellow citizens who seek only freedom.

On occasion, some brave soldiers have both disobeyed and survived. What are they to do in order to serve the cause of freedom?

Some defecting soldiers have turned their weapons against their former fellow soldiers, perhaps believing that is the most powerful action they can take against the oppressing regime. But, perhaps it is not.

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Protesters dye a fountain red at a main square in Damascus to symbolize the blood of those who have been killed in the nonviolent uprising against Assad.

As the Syrian Revolution enters its ninth month, the Assad regime is finally (after some 4,000 deaths and 50,000 illegally detained) realizing that it cannot kill the Syrian spirit. This defiant spirit is the one that has cried “Silmiyeh, silmiyeh,” or “Peaceful, peaceful,” even while Assad’s tanks enter cities, towns, and villages with one mission: shoot or arrest anyone who calls for freedom. For nearly nine months, Syrians both at home and abroad have espoused creative nonviolence as a means of bringing down one of the most brutal dictatorships of the modern era.

Citizen journalists in Syria—themselves activists—cover the news on a daily, sometimes even hourly basis. It is not uncommon to see the death toll triple between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. Syrians living abroad, once helpless to combat Assad’s tyranny, have found in social media and the Internet a new voice: that of creative nonviolence. In the United States, home to more Syrians outside Syria than any other country, they have also found their political voice. They have trained, mobilized and organized themselves into multiple opposition groups, all with one mission: to topple the Assad regime.

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Emar Nassar

Maimouna Alammar clutched her baby girl to her chest last Friday in her home in Daraya, a suburb of Syria’s capital, Damascus. Security agents appeared at her door at 8 p.m., with Maimouna’s younger brother Suhaib in shackles. They stormed the home searching for her husband, then demanded she hand little Emar Nassar over.

“My baby!” Maimouna held her firstborn tight. The men dragged away Suhaib.

“We’ll bring your brother back in a coffin if your husband doesn’t turn himself in,” they said.

The man they are after, 26-year-old Osama Nassar, is a nonviolence activist from Daraya, an epicenter of nonviolent thought and activism in Syria.

This regime has the usual authoritarian playbook for dealing with armed insurrection, but is stumped by the largely nonviolent uprising facing off with the regime since March 2011. It has responded to the protests with a frenzy of violence and a media spin campaign that desperately tries to patch together a narrative of a regime bombarded by what it calls “armed gangs.”

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Anti-government protesters shout slogans against Syria's President Bashar al-Assad during the funeral of Sunni Muslim villagers killed on November 2, in Hula, near the city of Homs.

The Syrian uprising is at a critical juncture. With 3,500 civilians killed since the movement began in March, according to the U.N., some of the opposition groups within the country—albeit still a small minority—are now taking up arms and calling for foreign military intervention.

Defections within the military and police have been growing. Col. Riad al-Asaad, who announced the creation of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in July, now claims that they have some 15,000 defectors in their ranks. (The Economist, however, notes that ”the true number is probably a lot smaller.”)

While defections are normally a positive sign that a key pillar of support for any regime is weakening, the situation in Syria is complicated by the fact that these defectors are not only refusing orders to crack down on protesters but have organized into the Free Syrian Army, which is now going on the offensive—attacking checkpoints, military convoys and pro-regime gangs. The more intense this fighting becomes, the greater the probability that the conflict will devolve into an all-out civil war and President Bashar al-Assad will use force even more indiscriminately on the civilian population.

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• In spite of the crackdown that has killed at least 110 people in Homs over the last five days, protesters in Hama, Damascus, Deraa as well as several other towns in Idlib and Deir Ez-Zor have taken to the streets in support of those in the beseiged city.

• On Friday, students at Essex High School in Vermont staged a sit-in and protest to support freshman Cole Peterson after he reported being assaulted in anti-gay attack.

• In Chicago, more than 1,000 senior citizens joined forces with Occupy Chicago on Monday to protest cuts to social security, Medicare and Medicaid. After a large march about 50 people were arrested for blocking traffic on the street.

• About a dozen people occupied a historic building in the Romanian city of Cluj on Monday to protest a plan to mine gold using the controversial cyanide process in a nearby heritage area.

• A four-hour general strike took effect across Israel on Monday to demand the government improve working conditions of contract workers.

• Nine Greenpeace activists were arrested after they chained themselves to a gate and climbed a crane Monday at a South African coal-fired power station to protest dependence on coal, weeks before the country hosts a global conference on climate change.

Written on the hand of this young protester, “Leave” - a message to Syria's President Bashar Assad

Bits and pieces of information about the growing uprising in Syria are coming our way through mainstream media sources like Al Jazeera. But dig down deep, and you’ll find a revolution with women forging the way, and with a news gap that’s being filled by Syrian expatriate females.

Let’s begin with a little known fact: The youngest known convicted prisoner of conscience in the world is a Syrian citizen. Her name is Tal al-Mallouhi, a young blogger who has been in prison since 2009, when she was 17 years old. Tal’s poetry and political interests and activism chaffed with the authorities. After being held in jail for more than two years, in February 2011, Mallouhi was sentenced to five years in jail after being convicted of spying for the U.S. The case of Tal became part of Syrian consciousness, particularly among women. The idea that young people were increasingly disappearing, often later found tortured or killed, sounded an alarm in villages across Syria.

During a recent conversation with Rafif, a female Syrian expatriate activist living in Northern Virginia, I learned some of the deep grievances that were at the core of decades of citizen activism in Syria. “There is a kind of gang mentality in Syria that goes beyond politics. You either support the government-supported mafias, or you are excluded from ‘inner circles’ that allow you some economic leverage. All major industries, like tourism, mobile communications, and petroleum industries are regime-controlled. In any business, you have to strike a deal with the regime in order to operate without too much government interference,” she explains. “It is a culture of bakhsheesh, meaning tip or bribe. Those who cannot afford to pay off every level of government or businesses are excluded, and therefore don’t benefit economically.”

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• A dozen men in suits, including the Yes Men’s Andy Bichlbaum (middle-left) and Mike Bonanno (middle-right), marched with hidden placards last week after announcing at Occupy Wall Street’s General Assembly that they were about to take part in a highly arrestable action. As the police, who overheard the announcement, prepared to make arrests, the suits lifted their hidden placards, revealing the message: “Brokers and Police for the Occupation.”

• While Occupy Wall Street protesters braved snow, sleet and rain in New York this weekend, scores of protesters in Portland, Oregon and Austin, Texas were arrested after refusing police orders to disperse.

• Hundreds of students staged an anti-government rally in eastern Sudan on Sunday, protesting against poverty and rising food prices, witnesses said.

• Workers at the world’s third-largest copper deposit, Chile’s Collahuasi mine, ended a partial strike begun early on Saturday after reaching an agreement with management over bonus payments.

• Air France cancelled one in five flights on Sunday after cabin crew stopped work for a second consecutive day to protest against employment conditions.

• More than 30 farmers who staged a sit-in Thursday in front of the Myanmar government housing department in Yangon to protest the unfair confiscation of their land. Seven people were arrested, despite the government’s stated commitment to democratic reforms.

• Activists say Syrian security forces have killed at least 44 people, as large protests calling for a no-fly zone to protect civilians and soldiers deserting the army were held across the country on Friday.

• More than 30,000 Israelis marched in Tel Aviv Saturday night to express anger over the high cost of living. Thousands more protested in Jerusalem.

Over the weekend, activists with Anonymous and RevoluSec hacked into and defaced the official websites of every major city in Syria, along with the websites of several Syrian government departments and ministries. The hackers posted caricatures of President Bashar al-Assad on these sites and more importantly gave tips to Syrians about how to avoid detection while online from the Syrian government. As Amira Al Hussaini noted on Global Voices, they also posted on the  government websites:

an interactive map of Syria, showing the names, ages and date of deaths of victims of the Syrian regime since the protests started in March.

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Ghiyath Matar, a 26-year-old activist, was arrested in Syria on Sept. 6 and then died in detention after being tortured, according to Human Rights Watch. (Human Rights Watch/AFP/Getty Images)

Not surprisingly, the conservative National Review does not get what nonviolence is all about. In a commentary on the killing by Syrian security forces of Ghiyath Matar—a young activist nicknamed “little Gandhi,” who pioneered the tactic of handing out flowers and water to soldiers—Mark Krikorian writes that his death “highlight[s] the limits of nonviolent resistance.”

I have a couple issues with his analysis, if you can call it that. First, while it’s tragic that Matar was killed, his death doesn’t show the limits of nonviolence. The fact is that people die in nonviolent struggle, just as they die—almost always in far greater numbers—in violent conflict. To really illustrate the hypocrisy here: Would Krikorian argue that every US soldier that’s killed shows the “limits of war or violence?” I highly doubt it.

What Matar’s death shows is that nonviolent struggle requires sacrifice and it may highlight the need for the Syrian opposition to consider shifting to tactics of dispersion, like strikes and boycotts, that would be more difficult for the security forces to repress.