Venomously Polarized

"The front of a UN car took a direct hit.  Everyone ran in panic, but the observers stayed in the car.  People tried to talk to them, but they wouldn't open their windows." Syrian activist Fadi al-Yassin

Peaceful observers in a danger zone, tasked by the United Nations to report back any instances of untoward activity by either the Syrian regime or the protest movement against the regime, falling victim to the very brutalities they were meant to observe and report upon, but escaping unscathed.  In the process, however, observing at first-hand just how volatile the situation is.

They attended a funeral as observers, where Syrian regime forces killed over 20 people, wounding dozens more.  But they have been taken in protective custody by the Syrian Free Army, vowing to ensure that the regime's forces don't have the opportunity to dispatch them to eternity before they are able to report back the observed event.

"The Syrian regime committed a massacre during a visit by UN monitors to Khan Sheikhun", reported the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, claiming that up to a hundred people were wounded.  For gathering as mourners to bury a man killed two days earlier in the stronghold of the rebels, Hama.

"This is a real massacre, and it took place in the presence of UN observers", the head of the Syrian human rights group said. Calling for an international investigation and a public statement from the monitors, revealing precisely what they had witnessed and experienced.

The UN procession of three vehicles carrying seven UN monitors was hit with rocket-propelled grenades - or fire from armoured personnel carriers, according to rebels present at the explosive event.  "The UN mission in Syria reports that, shortly after 2:00 p.m. local time today, a convoy of four vehicles was struck by an explosion from an improvised explosive device."

All the furious sounds of civil war unfolding as surely as the UN observers have noted the provocations from the rebel side and the responses from the government side, neither prepared to relent, each resisting pleas to bargain for a ceasefire and peace; the former intent on removing the latter, the latter anxious to save the country from terrorist infiltration and victory.

Funnily enough, there's truth in the regime's apprehension.  The venomous hatred against the regime's tyranny is matched by the regime's detestation of the underlying threatening Islamist force behind the protest movement's agenda.