Revolution going wrong way

Fadwa Suleiman, an actress who became an icon of Syria's revolution, is furious that her country's peaceful protest movement has been drawn into armed conflict with the regime.
She said she is saddened to see that "the revolution is not going in the right direction, that it is becoming armed, that the opposition which wanted to resist peacefully is playing the game of the regime and that the country is heading for sectarian war".
Her bitter assessment comes as she sits in a cafe in Paris, where she fled to last week after escaping from Syria.
"I didn't want to leave Syria but I didn't have the choice. I was being threatened and I was becoming a threat for the activists who were helping me," she said wearily.
Suleiman became a high-profile member of the opposition movement last November when she appeared in footage from the rebel city of Homs that was broadcast on the Al-Jazeera television news network.
The 39-year-old actress, well known in her homeland for her work in theatre, films and television, belongs to the same Alawite religious minority as President Bashar al-Assad.
She says that a major reason for her participation in the protests was to do her bit to stop any slide into a sectarian war between factions of the Sunni Muslim majority, Alawites or Christians.
"Everyone was saying that salafist Sunnis were going to attack the Alawites," she said. So, in Homs last November, "I, an Alawite woman, got up on the stage and declared that we were all united against the regime."
She organised humanitarian aid networks, used Youtube and Facebook to make appeals and denounce the regime's brutal crackdown, and organised Alawite demonstrations.
Suleiman said it was during her time in Homs that she saw that Sunnis who had initially carried weapons only to defend themselves, were starting to use these arms to attack regime forces.
"It was then that I understood," she said.