'... Yet, the bombs ceaselessly continue to fall, claiming more lives as students attended exams at schools where ballot boxes were placed'

"... Herein lays the importance of the elections to the regime, and why they make the opposition and the rebels despair and seethe with anger. The scenes from Lebanon last week, of tens of thousands of Syrians flocking to their embassy to vote, sent shock waves through the visibly irritated and angered anti-regime camp. Those scenes are being repeated today, as voting in regime-held parts of the country begins. The official Facebook page of Assad’s election campaign “Sawa” has put up pictures and videos of polling stations and voters, including Assad and his wife casting their ballots at a school in Malki, Damascus.It is scenes like these that infuriate many armed rebel factions, which have vowed to disrupt the elections in any way possible. Unfortunately, this inevitably meant bombing and shelling polling stations and regime-controlled areas, which they specifically threatened to do. One rebel posed in a picture with a cooking canister filled with TNT, with “election present” written on it. A later statement, reportedly issued by various rebel factions, said they would not target voters but warned people to stay at home in case the regime does. This seems to be, as is quite typical of such grandiose rebel declarations in the past, merely media fodder and ink on paper as the shelling continues unabated...."