When UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan met Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad on Tuesday, he warned that Syria was at a “tipping point”. Maybe in terms of international action against the regime, this will prove to be true. However for many, the real “tipping point” for Syrians themselves was in late February 2011 in Deraa.

This ancient city on the Jordanian border, 100 kilometers southwest of Damascus with around 100,000 inhabitants was then, like everywhere else in Syria, angry but fearful at the tight control and dangerous watchfulness of the regime’s security forces, intelligence operatives and networks of informers.

The Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt gave some hope of change, but ordinary Syrians could not see how revolution could come to their own country.

Then the police arrested 15 children, the youngest of them just nine years old, for spraying onto the walls of their school, graffiti mimicking slogans painted on buildings by Egyptian revolutionaries. Nothing was heard of the kids for some days. Then news got out that the children were being abused and tortured in police custody. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

When furious demonstrators left the Omari Mosque after prayers on Friday, March 18, 2011 they had lost all fear of the security forces. They wanted their children back. This courage cost three of them their lives as soldiers opened fire on the crowd, but the real tipping point had been reached.

But a tipping point to where? As the death toll continues to mount, the awful truth is that it is toward civil war. When a country goes to war with itself, the conflict is always harder to end than a fight between nations, because in an internecine struggle, both sides fear the consequences of losing. Worse than that, with every further day of brutality and bloodshed, that terror of defeat only increases, encouraging yet more extreme resistance.

If the Assad regime fled to Moscow tomorrow, its supporters who stayed behind, not least the shabbiha militiamen and security forces who have done its bloody bidding, would face a terrible reckoning. From supporting the rebels, the international community would have to move rapidly to stop a bloodbath of revenge. Given the continued fragmentation of the opposition Syrian National Council and the illusory unity of the Free Syrian Army, this would be extremely difficult. Without a respected and accepted central government, it is possible that the country would fall under the regional control of individual armed camps.

We have seen in Libya how some victorious militiamen have refused to disarm and have tortured and murdered at will those they consider former Qaddafi supporters. The transition from war heroes to armed thugs happened quickly. The same may occur in Syria.

Therefore it is time the international community started planning for the endgame, for the toppling point rather than the tipping point, for a Syria without Assad and his murderous clique. While this plan must include the detection and prosecution of war criminals, it should also embrace the protection of communities that gave Assad their political but not their military support.