AZAZ, Syria – Tiny pieces of a dead woman were picked up one by one and placed in a white piece of cloth. It might have been a scarf or perhaps simply at hand when it was needed for a final task that certainly had not been its intended purpose. The young men filled the cloth with bits of the woman’s remains and moved broken pieces of concrete from around the rest of her body. The men carefully collected as much of her as possible. 

The cloth went into a grave along with the rest of the woman, one of at least 40 victims of the Aug. 15 bombing in Azaz, a city of 75,000 in northern Syria, about three miles from the Turkish border. By bombing Azaz, the Syrian regime seemed to be making clear its belief that Turkey, despite its sometimes aggressive rhetoric, was not going to intervene to stop the bloodshed in Syria. The attack also came just one day after US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told The Associated Press that a no fly-zone imposed by Western countries was not a priority.

Despite this prevailing attitude from the West, Syrian rebels have continued to make gains against a military and security apparatus that had held the country in check for 40 years.

Azaz was freed from government forces on July 19 — something that seemed unthinkable only a few weeks before. Opposition forces suddenly held the roads to Turkey. In an interview, a rebel commander in the Liwa al-Tawhid, or the Unity Brigade, a newly formed group of various rebel battalions around Aleppo, claimed that regime forces had been cleared from a 200-by-40 kilometer area.