Western leaders are framing the issue in moral terms: Syrian attacks on civilians and opposition fighters in Homs and other cities are, to their way of thinking, plain wrong. That’s true, but Syria is complicated. Assad’s government is dictatorial, but has protected minorities such as Christians and his own Allawite sect. Many Syrians fear that change would not bring in a more democratic or less brutal regime.

That makes it much harder to figure out the moral imperative of what to do. Arm the rebels? That will inevitably lead to an escalation, and more bloodshed. It would also put weapons in the hands of a fractured and fractious group of oppositionists, some secular, some sectarian, some possibly jihadi. A no-fly zone, like the one imposed in Libya, would have a limited impact as most assaults are on the ground, not from the air.

What about a safe haven on the Turkish border? Not a bad idea, but hard to police – one attack from Syria and the Turkish military would be drawn into war with its neighbour. Is that a good idea? The moral position becomes complex when you analyse where it leads.

The Russian position is based on interests. Syria is its last significant ally in the Middle East. It buys Russian weapons and allows Russian navy personnel to use Tartus, a Cold war naval base. The Russians say broader principles are at work – they’re angry that Western powers stretched the meaning of the UN Security Council Resolution on Libya, which they never intended should lead to military intervention.

According to them, the UNSC should never take sides in a civil war, or call for the ouster of a government. (Interestingly, that didn’t stop them from calling for the ouster of President Mikheil Saakashvili, the democratically elected President of Georgia, back in 2008 when the two countries were at war. It was the Americans who said at that time such a call was “completely unacceptable” and “crossed the line”. Which goes to show how interests tend to trump principles on these occasions.)

The conflict has major regional implications: the basic tension in the region is between Sunni, Arab Saudi Arabia and Shi’a, Persian Iran. Syria is a pivot. Iran backs Assad, partly because he is from the Shi’a Allawite sect. Saudi Arabia supports the rebels, who are primarily Sunni. This is rapidly turning this into an old Cold War-style proxy war, with the West backing Saudi Arabia and Russia supporting Iran.

So where next? Western nations are talking of a “Friends of Syria” group, which could authorise action outside of the framework of the UN, much as NATO acted in Kosovo. The legal cover could be provided by the Arab League, which has moved against Assad, at the urging of Qatar and Saudi. Expect sanctions and further diplomatic isolation for Assad. But all military options run the risk of making the situation worse. No-one, it seems, is going to save the people of Syria, cowering in their houses from bombs and tank shells.

This much is clear; 74 people were killed and hundreds were injured. Many fans died in stampedes to escape football thugs armed  with knives, sticks, stones and fireworks; thugs who were clearly spoiling for a fight.

The army and the police were at the ground, but clearly not doing their job properly. Some say this was deliberate, with violence serving the useful purpose of reminding Egyptians that they cannot be trusted to mind their own affairs without Egypt’s military rulers in charge.

Egypt’s largest political grouping, the Muslim Brotherhood, has blamed “foreign fingers” for stirring up trouble. Plus ca change. It was the same argument President Hosni Mubarak used before he was toppled almost a year ago, and it points to a decades-old inability of many in Egypt to take responsibility for the parlous state of their country.

Common sense will tell you the police were probably overwhelmed and at the very least scandalously incompetent last night. Police morale has not recovered from last year’s revolution, officers often don’t turn up for work, and there may have been a reluctance to intervene at risk of making a bad situation even worse.

Last night’s events also point to a shocking degree of thuggery within Egyptian football which has little to do with politics. One fan tweeted that it is quite common for travelling football fans to be pelted with stones by die-hard rival supporters, as they were yesterday.

Yet in a way, the truth no longer matters. It is how Egyptian politicians, protesters and supporters now manipulate that truth which creates its own reality. And today’s reality is that thousands are demonstrating, accusing the military and police of causing chaos, with MPs in the new parliament calling for the military junta to give up power.

These are jittery times in Egypt. The revolution isn’t finished yet. Many fear it never will be, that the army has no intention of relinquishing the reins, though it has said it will do so this summer. And fear of state-sponsored thuggery has honest enough origins; a year ago, thugs appeared around Tahrir Square after other forms of crowd control – tear gas, water cannon and bullets – had failed to restore order. One bunch of these thugs threatened my team and prevented us from leaving our hotel to report.

But thuggery cuts both ways. If it wasn’t for a hard core of violent youths, many of them football fans, manning the barricades and taking on the police a year ago, would Egypt’s revolution have gone as far as it has?

Today happens to be the anniversary of the infamous “camel charge”, when Egyptian camel owners from the pyramids cantered through Tahrir Square. Defending the square were fans of Cairo’s Al-Ahly team, many of whom were killed or injured yesterday, which of course leads many to believe last night’s violence was some form of official revenge for the fans’ role in the revolution.

While the conspiracy theories swirl, consider this; decades of dictatorship and now military rule have fostered a political class understandably incapable of taking responsibility for Egypt’s massive social and economic problems. Only when the military step down, can these problems really be addressed.

Follow Jonathan Rugman on Twitter: @jrug

These young men (so far, it’s only men who’ve done this) deliver news with attitude.  They are untrained in the journalistic arts of impartiality and balance, their Arabic is unpolished and coloquial.  Sometimes, witnessing a dramatic firefight, they find it hard to contain themselves and an “Allah-hu Akhbar” (God is Great) slips out.

But their output is compelling and some have become overnight media stars.

This You Tube Syrian news revolution is happening across the country. There’s a fantastic gallery of pictures by Italian photographer Alessio Romenzi, showing amateur video journalists – known in the trade as VJs – at work in the small town of Al Qsair, near the besieged city of Homs.

But it’s Homs itself, a city known as the Capital of the Syrian Revolution, which is now the undisputed Capital of Syrian Revolutionary Video Journalism too.

There, entire neighbourhoods have been sealed off from each other for months by Bashar al-Assad’s tanks.  Most Homs city districts now boast teams of revolutionary newsgatherers, fronted by reporters.

The most famous is Khaled Abou Salah, from Bab Amer, an opposition activist who’s now a rising star on Al Jazeera Arabic, where he goes live on satellite TV, and is introduced as a member of Homs Revolutionary Council.

Khaled Abou Salah began his reporting career on Facebook and You Tube, where this report first appeared, before being re-run on Al Jaz.

This is an impressive humanitarian report by another Homs VJ, Omar Telawi, from the Baba al-Sebaa area of Homs.

He has reported on the living conditions of Homs residence – and he’s also done an embed with the embryonic Free Syrian Army. That’s him holding the revolutionary flag and dodging bullets towards the end.

Abo Jaafer, a VJ from al-Bayada, Homs, has ventured into nearby al-Rastan to document siege conditions there.

Here he reports from a house hit by government shells.  He’s appeared on Al Jaz Arabic as well.  Don’t be fooled by the number of views, by the way; these videos are posted by every Syrian oppostion network.

Last night on Channel 4 News we featured Danny Abdul Dayeem, a British-Syrian activist, who, with a friend who wields a handycam, reports on bad things happening – unusually, and helpfully for western audiences, in fluent English.

We see Danny making a terrifying dash through sniper-fire to bring us pictures of an oil-pipeline just targeted, he tells us, by government mortars. He pops up in what he describes as a “field hospital” where he shows us those killed and injured in what he says is government shelling on Monday morning.

Each report is datelined; exact location and the date.  This doesn’t in itself necessarily authenticate the report, but combined with other reports from other districts of the same attack filmed from a different location, the reports have the effect of corroborating each other.

For example, Danny Abdul Dayeem’s report on Tuesday of the oil pipeline explosion was also filmed and reported from another nearby district by another amateur VJ.  Some, like him, prefer to use pseudonyms. He called himself “Aljaad” – or Grandfather.

The Syrian regime has long contested the authenticity of some of the tens of thousands of videos on YouTube, claiming they were either entirely fabricated or shot somewhere else at some other time.

The audience for these online TV stars is not just the news programmes of the outside world – like ours – who are unable to obtain official visas to enter Syria. The videos are known to be watched inside Syria as well. Although the government blocks internet access to YouTube and social networking sites, Syrians use networks of proxy servers to watch what many there consider “the real news”.

This is not surprising, given what’s served up by Syrian state TV.  If anyone’s in any doubt why young Homsi VJs are risking their necks to tell the world their version of events, you only need to listen to the account of Younes el-Yousef, a former state TV cameraman who (like all his colleagues, he insists) doubled as a secret policeman.

“Our role was to fabricate,” he told Channel 4 News in Cairo, where he recently fled, having been sickened by the deceptions his job required.

He described turning up at opposition protests, which had been reported by satellite TV stations, where his role was to “lie about them happening”.

“We would arrive after protests ended,” Younes el-Youssef said. “They would fire tear gas, the crowds would disperse and after that, we would turn up. Then we would ask locals:  ‘Was there a protest here?’ They would say ‘No, there was no protest.’ The people were afraid.”

“We would film under orders of the army,” he said. “Our filming was always for the benefit of the regime, army and nation.” He claims he fled into exile after a disagreement with a correspondent, who informed the security forces he was working for the revolution. He added that agents for the regime had twice tried to kidnap him in Cairo.

Follow @millerC4 on Twitter.

“Maintain non violence,” he says. “Do not organise mutinying soldiers to use violence against the army. That is suicidal. That’s what the government would want you to do. Don’t play into their hands.”

Professor Sharp is the guru of non-violent protest, the author of the manual “From Dictatorship to Democracy”, which has been translated into 34 languages and used by protest movements in Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia and more recently across the Arab world. In it, he outlines 198 techniques to bring down dictatorships, from strikes and protests to civil disobedience and boycotts.

He’s in the UK to promote a film about his work. At 83, his eyes are rheumy and he speaks quietly, but he hasn’t wavered from the beliefs which landed him in jail in 1953 after protesting about conscription for the Korean War.

Nowadays, he frequently finds himself on the same side as the US government – in recent years, the American administration has frequently ended up supporting protestors. But he disagrees with foreign intervention which, he believes, distorts the process of change and means that any new government is subject to an agenda set by foreigners rather than by their own people.

Libya, he says, proves the point. – the Libyans, he believes, lost control of their own revolution by taking on Gadaffi’s forces with arms, and inviting in NATO. I put it to him that if Nato hadn’t intervened Gadaffi would still be in power. He wasn’t convinced – the process, he thought, would have been longer, but the outcome more likely to lead to democracy on Libyan terms.

Watch an extended version of Lindsey Hilsum’s interview with Gene Sharp here.

So what would Sharp advise the people of the Syrian city of Homs to do when the tanks are rolling down the streets towards them? Like the famous man carrying a plastic bag in Tiananmen Square, should they just stand there? Sharp’s answer is yes.

Regimes crumble when the military and police refuse to fire on the people. “They have to use mutinying soldiers to persuade rest to mutiny,” he said. The key moment comes when the army refuses to obey orders. The military will inevitably be better at violence than civilians, so taking up arms is a recipe for losing.

Even winning isn’t easy. “Bringing down a dictatorship is only Part 1,” says Sharp. “Part 2 is constructing a new society, a democratic system.

You can follow Lindsey Hilsum on Twitter @lindseyhilsum

It was the growing defence ministry budget that did it. Speaking to a Channel 4 News producer in Cairo today, he said that the young men known as “shabiha” who act as President Assad’s enforcers are paid the equivalent of US$100 a day.

“They bring these shabiha from the countryside,” he said. “In the city they need to be housed, and given food and phones. They’re criminals and drug dealers – small agents for the big merchants, the Syrian security services. Before, they used to work for them and split the profits. Now they have a new job, to suppress demonstrators and terrorise civilians.”

He said that MoD expenditure had increased so much that all other ministries had been forced to take a 30 per cent cut. The minister of finance, apparently, was not a happy man.

The answer the government came up with, he alleged, was to turn to Syria’s best friend, Iran. “The general state budget couldn’t cover the expenditure, so planeloads of money were coming in from Iran,” he said. “In addition there is military support.”

For months, there have been rumours of Iranian Revolutionary Guard providing backing for Syrian troops. Mr Hamad said he had seen Iranian snipers in security offices. “There were expenses for them under the heading ‘experts’. Delegations of experts? These are no experts! They were snipers and killers!”

He heard these men speaking Farsi, he said. It’s no surprise that the Iranian government is helping its best Arab friend, the government of Syria. President Bashar al-Assad has always said it’s the opposition, not him, who is getting help from foreign countries. But Mr Hamad’s story suggests otherwise.

Follow@lindseyhilsum on twitter

The men had been captured by the Homs branch of the Free Syrian Army, a group of defecting soldiers who are fighting President Assad’s troops. Rumours of Iranian snipers providing back up to government forces have been circulating for months, so maybe this was the evidence we needed.

Verifying Youtube footage is a complex business. An organisation called Storyful, based in Dublin, has established itself to unpick the clues – who uploaded it? from where? have they uploaded video before? When journalists can’t get into places, and have to rely on video which emerges, such technical expertise becomes an important reporting tool. While they did that, I asked an Iranian journalist not just to translate what the men were saying, but analyse how they said it.

Half way through the morning I noticed that Anita McNaught, a journalist with Al Jazeera, had tweeted out: “Looking for some opinions on this video. What do Farsi speakers think?” A few minutes later she posted an article from December 29th with a photograph of five Iranian engineers who had disappeared in Homs in December. Sure enough, they’re the same guys.

Now, were they really engineers or were they in Homs for another purpose? I have no way of knowing. Mahmoud Haj Hamad, who audited spending in the Syrian Defence Ministry until he fled to Egypt last month told Channel 4 News today that he oversaw the payment of Iranian snipers who would come as “military advisors” for six months at a time. But the footage doesn’t prove it.

More worryingly, it suggests that the Free Syrian Army interrogated these Iranians under duress and tried to use their “confessions” as black propaganda. Which goes to show how careful we have to be before airing footage we didn’t shoot ourselves, and how cruel and dirty this conflict has become.

For Afghans of course this is all a very mixed blessing. Many say it is good news in the longer-term in a country so badly affected by drought in recent years. But this is Afghanistan – there will always be extremes and people affected in extreme and differing ways.

President Karzai is sending urgent food aid to Badakhshan province in the north-east of the country where at least 46 people have died in avalances in recent days. It’s a threat ever-present in the vast mountains ranges of the Kush and one often nearer the capital than the remote northeast. Only last year 191 people were killed by avalanches in Salang, only about an hour’s drive from the capital, where the famous tunnel cuts through the mountains connecting the capital to the north.

The weather’s brought obvious hardships for peole just in terms of keeping warm. Already fuel has more than doubled over the past couple of months because of shortages in transporting it across this mountainous land in the blizzards.

The former Pakistan cricket captain and philanthropist is a man in high demand. When we drove up to his Tuscan-style villa, overlooking the suburbs of the nation’s capital Islamabad, I thought he would probably turn up to meet us. I was wrong.

Just a few months ago, something happened in Pakistan that astounded the country’s political pundits. Mr Khan’s ‘Movement for Justice Party’ (PTI) held a rally his home town of Lahore. Organisers secured a roomy venue and booked a couple popular singers to supplement the bill. The end result staggered everyone.  150,000 people turned up – one the largest political gatherings in the country’s history.

Watch John Sparks’ film from the campaign trail here

Strange really when you consider the former cricketer has spent fifteen years in the wilderness, chasing the voters with little success. His party doesn’t even have a seat in parliament. But something’s changed in Pakistan and Mr Khan is reaping the benefit.

We’d come to the nation’s capital, Islamabad, to find out exactly what that was, but when we got through the gates of his home we were told we’d have to wait a few days. His personal assistant said “Imran’s exhausted. He’s been on the go for months. Please understand.”

A list of challenges

Still, that gave us time to reflect on Pakistan’s current difficulties – which include rampant inflation, an electricity and gas shortage, the failure of the vast majority to pay any tax, mass disillusionment in the current coalition government and the threat of militant attacks. I should add that is not a definitive list.

It’s even worse in Karachi – Pakistan’s fractious mega-city of 18 million. Ethnic turf wars and vicious street battles between supporters of the city’s main political grouping left more than a thousand people dead last year. It’s not surprising then, that many of the city’s residents we spoke to were desperate for a change.

In a badly lit basement we found a team of young PTI volunteers, banging away at computers – some editing campaign videos, others posting snaps. There I found Imran Ghazali firing off tweets – at least when the power was working.  I asked him why he supported Imran Khan: “Well the main thing is change – and hope too. Change and hope.” It sounded like a certain American politician we all know – and yes, they’ve rolled out a ‘yes we Khan’ logo.

Campaign backed by ‘urbanites’

It’s younger urbanites like this bunch that have helped power Mr Khan’s campaign. An Ohio State graduate, Mr Ghazali has brought American-style electioneering to the city – despite some initial bemusement. “People used to joke about us,” said Mr Ghazali. “You can’t do anything with a ‘Facebook party’ they said. But we gave them a big surprise when we got hundreds of thousands to the rally,” he added.

When we got back to Islamabad, we found our luck had changed. A chat with the party’s charming, British-born media chief had smoothed the way. We’d attend a rally with Mr Khan and get the chance to do an interview a few days later.

So it was off to Bhalwal, a rural town in seat-rich Punjab. We travelled in convoy with Imran Khan’s brand new armoured car in the lead. We were soon surrounded by supporters with vehicles decked out in party flags, their drivers weaving in and out at speed. We double-checked our seat-belts and hoped for the best.

Further on, we were halted by hundreds of supporters equipped with placards and rose petals, flung in the armoured car’s general direction. Was this a political movement or a personality cult I wondered as we tried to keep up.

Tens of thousands turned up to the rally – an enraptured mass which greeted him with gusto – and if there’s a campaign pledge that really resonates, it’s Mr Khan’s promise to ‘rid the country of corruption in 90 days’. It sounded hopelessly optimistic to me – but devotees in the crowd told us it would happen, ‘because Imran said so’.

Corruption

Later I got a chance to ask him about it. In ‘Khan’s world’ corruption starts at the top and trickles down below; “the big corruption (in this country) is the prime minister and his cabinet. The moment you have a prime minister and cabinet that is honest, most of your corruption is gone.”

The solution is simple he argues – appoint the right people at the top and the rest will follow: “You basically need 200 people in Pakistan, clean people who are good managers. You select them from the police – get the best police officers – get your high court judges right… you need 200 clean people in Pakistan.”

Getting the right people has worked at the highly respected charity hospital which Mr Khan founded in 1996. But the government of Pakistan will prove a tougher nut than the ‘Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Centre.’ I asked Mr Khan whether he wasn’t raising unrealistic expectations but we waved me off. This is a man who thinks he can do it.

He’s got rippling self-confidence on his side – but his chief advantage may amount to this – he’s never been in government before. Pakistanis are sick of the usual suspects and who knows – they might be about to give him a shot.

But the Year of the Dragon has not started well in the Tibetan parts of China. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of ethnic Tibetans are being punished by the Chinese authorities for refusing to celebrate the annual Spring Festival. It’s not only because they see it as an example of the government in Beijing forcing Han Chinese culture on them, but also because they’re in mourning for 16 Tibetans who have set fire to themselves in the past year in protest at continued Chinese rule.

According to the pressure group Free Tibet, two Tibetans were killed and 36 injured last Monday when Chinese police opened fire on a demonstration in Sichuan province. At least one was killed the next day in another town in the same province. This is the worst violence since the Tibetan uprising in 2008. Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, is said to be calm, but one Tibetan is reported to have written on an internet chatroom: “I dare not look around in a casual manner. I dare not move around freely. Armed personnel are everywhere and police are on every corner.”

These days, Tibet is rarely big news. The Chinese government has thrown up roadblocks to prevent journalists from reaching the remote places where protests are taking place. Mobile phones and internet have been cut. Western governments avoid confronting China over human rights issues because they’re competing to attract Chinese investment, and for exports to the world’s biggest emerging market. The concern of celebrities like Richard Gere has done nothing to protect Tibetans from the harsher aspects of Chinese rule. But many Tibetans protest nonetheless.

The dragon is one of four mythical animals with special significance in Tibetan Buddhism. It is meant to bring thunder, but also symbolises compassion. There’s not much of that around in relations between Tibetans and the Chinese government, and at least one Tibetan has said he will also set fire to himself as a protest on February 22nd, the official start of the Tibetan New Year, also symbolised by the dragon.

The Saudi Ambassador was there, as the representative of King Abdullah, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, and the Saudis are the museum’s official partners for this unexpectedly visual feast.

Saudi Arabia is a country with no elected parliament or political parties, where women can’t drive let alone vote, a kingdom resistant to the charms of democracy or the Arab Spring.

So Neil MacGregor, the Museum’s Director, has pulled off a remarkable coup. He has struck deals with the Chinese and the Iranians, and now Britain’s foremost cultural ambassador has nimbly walked through another political minefield to bring Islam’s holiest site to this revered corner of Bloomsbury.

The Hajj is one of the five pillars of Islam, a pilgrimage all Muslims must make if they can. Some three million completed the journey last year, making the Hajj what this exhibition calls the “greatest peaceful gathering on earth”. Remarkably, a sense of this peace pervades the British Museum’s cultural “homage”, and the organisers make no secret of their desire to challenge Islamophobic ignorance and prejudice.

I can’t visit Mecca. As a non-Muslim, I am not allowed to, though I suppose I could follow in the footsteps of the Victorian explorer Richard Burton, who went on the Hajj disguised as an Afghan doctor in 1853. Muslims believe the Ka’aba or cube-shaped building at Mecca’s centre was first built by Adam and then rediscovered by Abraham (“the Upright”, as the Koran calls him) , but sadly this  Judaeo-Christian connection was not enough to allow the exhibition’s curator, Dr Venetia Porter, to visit either.

Still, Dr Porter struck me as a woman who had undergone some spiritual revelation of her own, as she sought to bring together objects which tell the centuries-old story of Islam’s central act of purification. And if dealing with the Saudi authorities was a nightmare for the British Museum, well of course she wasn’t saying. Forty individual lenders have provided artefacts, from Mali to Malaysia.

Loans from Saudi Arabia include a”sitara”, an elaborate cloth which covers the Ka’aba door. There is also an extraordinary Koran from the 8th Century, on loan from the Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris and produced only about a hundred years after the first Koran was written. The Prophet Muhammad led the Hajj himself in 632, the year of his death.

Like many good exhibitions, you leave it with all sorts of trivia; Harry St John Philby, the father of Kim Philby, the Soviet spy, converted to Islam in 1930. Why the family predisposal for junking established systems of belief?

The Hijaz railway, built in 1900, reduced the time it took to travel from Ottoman Istanbul to Mecca to five days, when it had previously been one month. Until, of course, Lawrence of Arabia blew the railway up.

And the man who organised the Hajj for Indian pilgrims in the1880s was a certain Thomas Cook.

Dr Porter told me the Arab Spring had had no visible effect on visitor numbers to Mecca last year; so please don’t use the winter weather, or the London transport system, as any excuse for not making your own pilgrimage to the British museum.