Day 1,096: What does the fall of Yabroud mean for the Syria conflict?

Today is Day 1,096 of the Syria conflict.

Below is a chart to help you understand just how many people are dying in Syria, put together by GlobalPost's Kyle Kim.

The big news of the weekend was that Syrian government forces and their Hezbollah allies recaptured the rebel town of Yabroud on Sunday — a tremendous blow to the rebels in terms of both morale and strategy: Yabroud was the final rebel stronghold along the Lebanese border, and, as such, a crucial link in the rebel supply chain. For years now, arms, fighters, and their provisions have been streaming over the Lebanese border into Syria, as refugees traveled in the opposite direction (Yabroud once had a population of 40,000-50,000). In the past month, the flow of refugees has been particularly heavy, due to the bombing of Yabroud that preceded the offensive.

GlobalPost correspondent Tracey Shelton, who visited the Lebanese town of Ansal last week, directly across the border from Yabroud, says that Ansal's population of roughly 40,000 has more than doubled due to the influx of refugees.

Sunday, hours after the fall of Yabroud, a suicide bomber struck the Shiite town of Nabi Othman in Lebanon, the latest in a string of retaliatory bombings against Hezbollah for their support of Assad.

Prior coverage of these attacks (which seem to point to the Syrian conflict's increasingly sectarian, cross-border nature), is available here and here: In Beirut, one coffee shop owner has become so habituated that he kept right on serving coffee after a bomb went off just a few doors away. In the Shiite, Hezbollah-dominated town of Hermel, residents have to live with a chance of dying through a terrorist attack that is 11,000 times greater than what, for example, an American might face.