By RANIA ABOUZEID
Wed Apr 13, 12:20 pm ET

A man in a white shirt lies motionless, apparently dead, on an otherwise empty road, his arms and legs splayed at awkward angles. Intense gunfire crackles as four black-clad anti-riot policemen in helmets and shields run up to the body, several beat it with their batons before dragging it along the asphalt by its feet. The mobile phone footage zooms out to show hundreds of policemen deployed along the street, allegedly in the southern Syrian city of Dara'a, where anti-government protests first erupted less than a month ago. A voice off camera screams "Let the people see!" but the body has disappeared from view.

It's a gruesome episode to be sure, but one that may have far-reaching consequences, given that the motionless man in the white shirt is reportedly Mohammad Abdurazak al-Sharaa, the cousin of Vice-President Farouk al-Sharaa. The claim was conveyed by Radwan Ziadeh, a Washington-based Syrian dissident and visiting scholar at The Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University. Ziadeh says al-Sharaa's family personally confirmed the identity of the dead man to him. He was killed on Friday April 8. "He was very close [to the vice president], and I think it will have huge implications," Ziadeh says.

The snippets of information leaking out of Syria - through smuggled mobile phone footage, Twitter, Facebook, furtive calls to citizens inside and outside the country, as well as the official media - paint a fragmentary picture of a chaotic state desperately trying to contain swelling anti-regime anger with increasing brutality.

It's still extremely difficult for foreign media to gain accreditation in Syria, and even those who have permission to work are severely curtailed in what they can cover and where they can go. There are reports from Syrian human rights groups of soldiers allegedly killed by their colleagues for refusing to fire on protesters, of armed gangs known as the shabiha (believed to be members of the ruling Alawite clans and their lackeys) roaming the streets and shooting people indiscriminately, and of security forces preventing the injured from receiving treatment, either by shooting at medical personnel trying to help, or arresting people in hospitals, a finding corroborated by the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Then there is the state's version of events, which holds that nine soldiers were killed on Sunday in an ambush "at the criminal hands of a group of terrorists and thugs," according to the official SANA news agency, and that rather than preventing the wounded from receiving medical treatment, it was injured security officers who were blocked from reaching hospitals by "gunmen," resulting in the deaths of several.

The National Progressive Front, a body dominated by the Ba'ath Party of President Bashar al-Assad, has ominously warned that "there is no room for complacency in dealing with these gangs," suggesting a possible uptick in violence. The regime "distinguishes between the reform aspirations of citizens and their legitimate demands" and conspirators trying to exploit "the changes taking place in the region to serve their hostile plots and undermine Syria's stances ... against hegemonic interests and Israeli expansion policies."
The death toll is also a matter of debate, even among human rights organizations. It stands at 200, according to a key Syrian rights group known as the Damascus Declaration, while HRW has a much lower figure of 130.

The confusion may be deliberate, according to a typed, three-page document stamped "top secret" and allegedly issued by the Syrian intelligence agency, dated March 23, 2011 and viewed by TIME. It is now posted on the Syrian Revolution 2011 Facebook page. The authenticity of the paper and its contents is impossible to verify.

It summarizes a meeting of a 10-person security committee (initials, but not names of participants are provided) on March 23, a week after protests kicked off in earnest in Dara'a. It says the media must be prevented access to flashpoint towns, and that false witnesses (undercover security agents) should be paraded before the press to recount testimony that "should contain contradictions and lies that we can expose in the state media and discount to destroy the credibility of the protesters."

"We can benefit from our previous experience with the Ikhwan and from the mistakes of the Tunisian and Egyptian regimes," it reads, referring to a savage 1982 campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama, in which tens of thousands were believed to have been killed. The now-ousted Tunisian and Egyptian regimes "didn't send in the military and presidential guard early and they allowed the media to cover everything that was happening. We will not allow events to reach a point where they pose a danger to the regime ... we must drag this out for several months to tire the protesters, the system will emerge stronger."

It speaks of the assassinations of members of "certain sects and tribes, or blowing up religious houses of worship in areas witnessing large demonstrations" to sow divisions among the protesters. It says the fear of fitna, or discord, should be planted in people's minds "to frighten the Christians and Druze of the Ikhwan, and along the coast to encourage the Alawites to defend their regime and their interests, by suggesting they are at risk from the Sunnis." The Assads are part of the minority Alawite sect, believed to comprise no more than 10% of the Syrian population, most of which is Sunni but with significant Christian and Druze elements.

Several ministers should also be sacrificed, according to the document, and exposed as corrupt, to suggest official responsiveness to calls for greater transparency. Well-known bogeymen will also be blamed, including the Saudis (specifically former ambassador to the U.S., Bandar bin Sultan) and anti-Syrian Lebanese including former Prime Minister Saad Hariri, son of billionaire Rafik Hariri who was killed in a car bomb initially widely blamed on Damascus.

 Saudi Arabia only recently mended its ties with Syria, a prominent Iranian ally in the region. The document goes on to say that tying the plot together, of course, are the "Zionists and Americans." (Syrian TV on Wednesday aired the "confessions" of three men who said they were paid and armed by an anti-Syrian Lebanese MP allied with Hariri to carry out attacks in Syria.)

Ayman Abdel-Nour, a prominent former Baathist-turned-dissident who edits the leading independent Syrian website all4syria.org from Dubai, says that news of the Saudi conspiracy led by Bandar bin Sultan is already all over the Syrian press. "This is the propaganda they are using to scare people," he says. He says the regime is trying to sow the fear of sectarian conflict, highlighting the experience of strife-torn Iraq to the east and Lebanon to the west. It is also trying to co-opt various sects by appeasing them, offering stateless Kurds citizenship and revoking the ban on niqabs - full face veils - in public institutions to placate conservative Sunnis. Still, it is the intelligence agencies who are at the fore, not Bashar al-Assad offering political solutions, and that is a problem because it doesn't suggest that the regime is taking the people's demands seriously, he adds.

Abdel-Nour says regime insiders have told him that Assad wants to calm the streets in order to implement a new model of governance, similar to the secular Turkish system but borrowing one key element from the Iranian: that the president will serve in a capacity similar to Iran's supreme guide, an elected position for life. Four political parties will be formed, so that "it will look like there is democracy in Syria ... but they will all be under the control of the national security council, which is headed by the president."

But the degree of cohesiveness within the regime is a matter of debate, especially if key figures like Farouk al-Sharaa start peeling away from it. Sharaa, who is from Dara'a, was reportedly furious that force was used against the city in the first week. He had reportedly given personal assurances to local leaders that no such thing would happen. The death of his cousin may further strain his longstanding ties to the regime he has given his life to.