The memory still haunts Samar Yazbek. Five times this year, Syrian security police hauled the 41-year-old novelist, one of the country's best-known writers, from her home in Damascus and into detention centers -- not in order to arrest her, she says, but to show her what she would suffer if she continued speaking out against President Bashar Assad's regime. In one detention cell, she saw two young men swaying unconscious, blood pouring from their faces, as they hung suspended from a ceiling; after witnessing another prisoner curled on the floor of a cell, she vomited and fainted. "I am still shocked and deeply sad, even today," she said on Tuesday, sipping an espresso at a cafe in Paris -- about as stark a contrast as possible from the horrors she has witnessed. "The U.N. says 5,000 have been killed, but I am certain it is more," she says. "Many have disappeared, and those are not counted among the dead."
The number of those killed in Syria's 10-month revolt now looks set to rise. In a 100-minute speech at Damascus University on Tuesday, President Bashar Assad told a gathering of supporters that he would crush the rebellion with an "iron fist," no matter how far it spread. "Victory is near, because we are capable of being steadfast," Assad told the audience, in a televised address interrupted several times with applause. (PHOTOS: Syria's Ongoing Protests.)
Well into the second hour of Assad's speech, Yazbek sank into a chair in the Left Bank cafe and let out a sign of despair, having not bothered to listen to it. "I foresee more and more bad coming from this man," she said. "The more the villages rebel the more he will throw everything at people: the military, the secret police, all forms of repression, to kill the revolution."
For months this year, Yazbek joined the demonstrations in Damascus, where she says she watched people "carrying flowers and olive branches, and then getting killed." In The Smell of Cinnamon, a novel published four years before the revolution erupted, Yazbek already wrote that killers "walk the streets in cold blood," referring to government agents. Her next book, describing the current conflict, will appear in Arabic next month and in French and German in April. Having written several screenplays and four novels, Yazbek's writing was becoming increasingly anti-regime, and with it, she says, the threat of arrest seemed ever-more likely.
Rather than that possibility, or even the terrifying scenes of torture she saw in Syrian detention cells, her decision to flee the country came after the police threatened to arrest her daughter, now 18. "I could not work anymore, I could not write. And yet I could not hide and go underground, because of my daughter," she says. "I would have stayed in hiding because I believe in the revolution," she says. "But with my daughter that was impossible." (WATCH: Why They Protest in Syria)
On July 13 she and her daughter -- whose name Yazbek does not want made public -- made their way to Damascus Airport and boarded an Air France flight to Paris, landing just as the city was beginning its exuberant Bastille Day celebrations. Yazbek says she told just a few close friends that she was fleeing, fearing that if word spread, the police would grab her and daughter as they tried to leave the country; she says she had to tell some people, since she also feared that the two might disappear into custody, with no one knowing where they were.
As it was, Yazbek made it out of Syria -- she hints that she received help from the French government -- and requested political asylum on arrival at Charles de Gaulle Airport, joining a growing number of Syrians who have fled to France in recent months. They include Suhair Atassi, a well-known female blogger and political activist who fled to Paris late last year.
GRAPHIC: Rage Across the Region: Where Revolution Struck
Most, says Yazbek, arrive knowing that they will be welcomed by a government which supports them and wants Assad out. Last month French officials said they would beef up security for Syrian refugees, fearing that regime supporters could target them in Paris. One possible target is Burhan Ghalioun, a professor at the Sorbonne University in Paris, who is chairman of the Syrian National Council, one of three opposition groups. "The biggest ones supporting the revolution are the French," Yazbek says, adding that many opposition figures like Ghalioun now live in France.
Yet despite that support, Yazbek says she, like most Syrian refugees, does not believe she will be able to return home soon. Indeed, she met TIME for lunch after her daily French lessons, which she says are essential, because she expects to have to live in France for some time. "I have zero hope that Assad will leave," she says. "The situation in Syria is hopeless." (READ: Claim and Counterclaim: Who Is Bombing Damascus)
Among the biggest hurdles the revolution faces are the divisions within opposition groups, and lack of a strong Arab supporter for its cause -- in contrast to Qatar's key backing for Libya's rebels. The Arab League observer mission to Syria during the past week has been "even worse for the revolution," she says. "It is pure theater, and a charade, just to create a kind of good political image."
The sense that the opposition faces big obstacles ahead -- despite a growing global outcry about the shooting of demonstrators -- is shared by Syrian analysts. On Monday, the Eurasia Group's Middle East analyst in Washington, Ayham Kamel, wrote that the Syrian Army would ditch its support for Assad "only when a credible alternative leadership emerges," and predicted that Assad would endure comfortably in power through most of 2012, although could well be forced out late this year -- most likely when opposition groups secure sufficient weapons to fight the regime. "Militarization of the opposition will become a more dominant feature in the conflict," Kamel wrote to Eurasia's clients, "further increasing the risks of civil conflict becoming a broad civil war."
Yazbek says she dreads the prospect of civil war. She declines to talk about the extended family she has left behind in Syria, saying only that since she is an Alawite -- the minority clan which has held a tight grip on power in Syria for decades -- she has distanced herself from her relatives. That break could become permanent if the country descends further into war. (LIST: Top 10 World Stories of 2011)
Yazbek says she and many others who've fled to France have grown to accept that they are in a vastly different position from the Libyans whose revolt against Muammar Gaddafi exploded 11 months ago; that revolution began a month before Syrians took to the streets, and like Libyans, the opposition faced teargas and gunfire from security forces.
In that revolution, however, French President Nicolas Sarkozy backed the rebels, persuading his E.U. colleagues, and then the U.N. and NATO, to launch a military campaign to force Gaddafi out, the only such intervention of the Arab Spring. This time around, too, Sarkozy has again taken the lead in Europe, helping to usher in stiffer E.U. sanctions against Syria, and pushing for a broader U.N. embargo.
But in stark contrast to Libya, no international military intervention has come -- and, says Yazbek, the Syrian exiles have given up hoping for one. "We think NATO does not want to intervene because we have no oil, and it would never recoup the money that it would cost to intervene," says Yazbek. With no foreign fighter jets to bomb Assad's forces, she says, "The solution in Syria is not clear."
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