Hama's streets are deserted. They are strewn with debris, not so much from the shelling that left gaping holes in many of the four- and five-story residential buildings along the city's main thoroughfares, several of which are now blackened, but from the desperate, makeshift barricades set up by residents in a bid to block Syrian President Bashar Assad's tanks. There are piles of broken cinderblocks, doors torn from their hinges, sheets of decorative wrought iron. At Roundabout 40, along a main road, there are even two fire trucks, now burned. "It didn't stop them," says a resident as he surveys the damage. "It didn't even slow them down."