So the 28-year-old corporal, who asked to use only his first name, Majid, because he has family in Syria, worked up his nerve. He bribed a superior to let him take a two-day leave, saying he needed to visit family in Damascus. Then he linked up with rebels who specialize in helping would-be defectors escape. Soon he was bumping along back roads in a busload of fellow fleeing soldiers, bound for Turkey, where he arrived this weekend. “This threatening [of a U.S. strike] is even more effective than the strike itself,” Majid says…

On Wednesday, a senior opposition figure claimed that the top Syrian official to date had defected and escaped into Turkey: Ali Habib, who served as defense minister until August 2011. Unlike the vast majority of defectors—such as Majid, the corporal from Deraa—Habib is a member of Assad’s Alawite sect, a minority that dominates the government and security forces in the predominately Sunni country. But Habib has yet to appear publicly, and Syrian state media denied the defection, insisting that Habib was still at home.

Analysts tracking the conflict say that an uptick in defections—which have helped to fuel the rebellion since it began—does seem to be underway. “The psychological impact of not actual strikes, but of suspected strikes, has been huge. And we’ve seen a large number of defections,” says Elizabeth O’Bagy, a senior Syria analyst for the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, DC, and the political director for the Syrian Emergency Task Force, which lobbies the U.S. government on behalf of the Syrian opposition. “[News of the U.S. strikes] did to a certain degree change the calculations on the ground.”