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Bloodied but defiant, those who have fled the besieged town of Jisr al-Shughour damn the rule of Bashar al-Assad As the blood from a gunshot wound oozed down his right thigh, Abu Majid shook his fist: “You know what dictatorships are like in the Middle East,” he said. “Syria was the strongest of them all, like an iron ball. Well it isn’t any more.” The 39-year-old elder from the besieged Syrian town of Jisr al-Shughour fled with his wife and children to southern Turkey after he says he was shot last Saturday in a battle – the fiercest yet during the three-month uprising. Since fleeing, he has kept in contact with men who stayed in Syria, and others among the several thousand who have crossed the border as government forces prepare for what many fear will be a full-scale assault on a largely abandoned town that was, until Saturday, home to 41,000 people. After five days away from his homeland, Abu Majid is convinced that the four decades of unshakable autocracy he left behind are now steadily unravelling. He is sure that the government’s claim that armed locals killed 120 government forces through ambushes and assaults in Jisr al-Shughour over the weekend will soon be proved wrong. He is sure, too, that those who oppose the rule of President Bashar al-Assad now outnumber his supporters. But he says Assad’s government is stirring sectarian chaos as it tries to claw back the legitimacy it lost during street demonstrations across the country, which it regularly crushed through violence. “We never thought in sectarian ways before all this happened,” he said. “And now people are talking about Sunnis, Alawites, Shias, Christians. You can say many things about us, but you can’t say that Syria was ever like Iraq or Lebanon. This is leading the country into the unknown.” Officials in southern Turkey said that about 2,500 Syrians, many from Jisr al-Shughour, had crossed the border. Despite being told by their hosts not to speak publicly about the uprising, refugees are still willing to talk about the events of last weekend, which Damascus has tried to cast as an armed rebellion that it had no choice but to put down. “There was a desertion,” said Abu Majid. “I saw it with my own eyes. There were a large number of strangers in town on Saturday. I don’t know who they were, they were big men, many of them bearded and most in civilian clothes. They started shooting at the people and some of the security forces tried to join us. They were killed – there were many of them killed.” In beds alongside him in Antakiya’s government hospital, three other Syrians, also nursing wounds, chimed in. They had all been shot in earlier clashes on 20 May at a village 10 miles south of Jisr al-Shughour. “Assad has never liked our area,” said one of the men. “He tried to get us then and they were the first moments of what eventually happened on the weekend.” A second man, whose three-week-old groin wound seeped a tangerine slime, said that Jisr al-Shughour and the Sunni Arab area that surrounds it has long been considered by the Assad regime, which is made up of a clan all from a minority Alawite Muslim sect, to be potentially disloyal. “When they decided to turn this into a sectarian problem, it was easy to attack our area and them blame us for attacking them. They are liars and they are starting to pay for their lies.” Syrians learned almost 30 years ago what to expect when the army descends en masse on a village. In 1982, between 10,000 and 40,000 people were killed by the military of Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, in the wake of an Islamic uprising. The UN has cautioned against anything like a repeat. Navi Pillay, the UN’s high commissioner for human rights, accused Syrian leaders of trying to “bludgeon its population into submission”. Turkey said on Thursday that it would not close its border to refugees fleeing Syria, and by nightfall the flow of people crossing the border that snakes between the two countries appeared to have increased. In the village of Guvecci in the deep south, minivans were shuttling along a bitumen road between the countries, disgorging dozens of men, women and children who then made their way along dirt roads that wove between olive groves. Along the highway south to Turkey’s southernmost extremities and north to Antakiya, police and military officers were stationed by mid-morning in an attempt to make sure that all refugees were ushered into makeshift camps – and away from waiting press. Hundreds of white tents had been erected in the town of Yayladagi and mattresses were piled in the back of lorries in anticipation of a further influx. Several hundred people remained in a no-man’s land near Guvecci on Thursday, apparently unsure whether to proceed to Turkey or to go back to their villages. Locals told the Guardian that up to 200 refugees had returned to Turkey on Thursday, in fear of ramifications from their exit. “They wouldn’t say whether they had been threatened,” said one man, Ibrahim Kerdje. On the road north, ambulances regularly passed by, taking casualties to hospitals in Antakiya, where the Turkish government has promised to treat wounded refugees free of charge. Allowing Syrians to cross the border, but not to speak, appears to be an extension of a delicate balancing act as Ankara tries to please the west by discharging its humanitarian obligations, while appeasing Damascus by trying to prevent the scrutiny it fears. On Wednesday, the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said: “We hope that Syria softens its stance towards civilians as soon as possible and makes the steps it is taking for reforms more convincing for civilians, for a transformation.” The wounded in the hospital ward were not convinced. “It won’t always be closed like it has been,” said Abu Majid as he leaned against a walking frame. “People now are clearly seeing the lies of the government. Every house in Syria has someone connected to the military of the intelligence service. That is how they have stayed so strong. “So people can see that the government is lying to them when they say that people in a place like Jisr al-Shughour have the ability to attack an army and kill so many people. It is impossible. For this to happen the regime has to be falling apart. Assad has to go, 100%. There is no returning to the time before 15 March.” Syria Turkey Refugees Middle East Arab and Middle East unrest Martin Chulov guardian.co.uk