Syrians Find Optimism at a Tent City in Turkey ISLAHIYE, Turkey - Almost all of the toilets in a refugee camp here for Syrians who have fled the conflict at home bear messages in spray paint for President Bashar al-Assad. But one note summarizes them all. "The house of Bashar," reads graffiti painted at the entrance to one portable bathroom, which also gave the president his local name: "Pig." And so it is throughout this tent encampment of 6,500 Syrians who are waiting out, or in some cases simply taking a respite from, the conflict just beyond the nearby border. The Islahiye camp is a place of hatred and defiance, a concentration of families who say they have been chased from their homes not just by rifles and government troops but also by indiscriminate aerial and artillery barrages. In its way, however, Islahiye is a place where anguish mixes with optimism. Syrians here, cheered by the success of rebel forces on their home ground, calmly insist that their enemies are weakening and that they will be going home. In Syria, a short distance away, the anti-Assad forces have made tactical progress in parts of the northern countryside, carving out areas largely under opposition control. In their most potent strike, a bomb attack killed four of Mr. Assad's top security officials last week. In many places, the opposition says, government units are confined to garrisons, from which they fire with artillery, mortars and machine guns, but rarely venture out. Some of these government-occupied outposts and bases, the opposition says, are now resupplied almost entirely by helicopter. Government patrols are said to be rare, leaving opposition fighters free to roam, and coordinate attacks, as anti-Assad activists said have been occurring in neighborhoods in the capital, Damascus, much of last week. Inside the refugee camp, Hassan Jubra, who before the conflict was a deputy dean at Aleppo University, offered his view on how a popular revolt that began peacefully will ultimately defeat a conventional military, no matter that military's superior organization at the outset, or its artillery, attack helicopters and tanks. "We have a cause," he said. They don't have cause. They have interests. There is a big difference between living in a cause and living for the sake of interests. For this reason, he said, he spoke of Mr. Assad, even as his army fights on, in the past tense. "He is gone," he said. He is finished. Whether this certitude and optimism are well placed is an open question; the pace and course of this conflict, many fighters and refugees said, is impossible to predict, even to those with unshakable confidence in its eventual outcome. And this camp is also a repository of sadness, of interrupted or shattered lives. Wisal Salo, 30, sat in her family's tent on a recent sweltering day as her 3-year-old son, Hadi, napped fitfully on a cushion on the tent floor. The Salos are from the tiny village of Surmani, near Hama. Ms. Salo said that as part of the collective and indiscriminate punishment of Sunni citizens suspected of supporting the opposition, government soldiers had raided her home and smashed the furniture. And then they left, and the random shelling of Surmani and the area nearby had begun. In places, she said, Syrian troops set fire to the forests, apparently to deny guerrilla fighters concealment. She began to cry, telling of the walk to Turkey, with Hadi and another son. "We left our houses and our land, and fled to here," she said. I want to go home, but people warn us the shelling continues, and that we must stay away. Her husband, she said, remained in Syria to fight. Now her brothers-in-law and other male relatives cycle back and forth between this camp and the northern Syrian countryside - fighting there, resting here. One of her relatives, Rimsan Salo, 32, was in the camp; he said he had left the rebels temporarily because they had too few guns. "I joined them, but there are no weapons," he said. If there are weapons, I will go back. Another relative stepped into the tent and said he would go back sooner. He needed only to pick up some more communications equipment.