It's hard to explain how it feels to watch your country implode," says a woman from Sweida, a town in southern Syria. She was speaking of two recent massacres of Sunnis in the coastal homeland of the Alawites, the Shia offshoot to which President Bashar Assad and his loyalist forces belong. At the same time Israeli air raids on Damascus further dampened hopes that Syria's conflict, however horrific, would at least be confined within the country's borders. Meanwhile on May 7th, after a meeting in Moscow between Russia's leaders and the American secretary of state, John Kerry, it was announced that a conference on Syria would take place, "as soon as is practical, possibly and hopefully by the end of the month." But no date was actually set. And few people were betting that it could bring peace.
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