The ebb and flow of horror

ACCORDING to President Bashar Assad, Syria’s three-year-old fratricide may soon be over. Speaking at Damascus University on April 13th, he declared that his army’s “war on terror” had reached a turning point. From now on, he implied, it would essentially be a mopping-up operation. His allies echo this rosy view. “The danger of the Syrian regime falling has ended,” was the recent judgment of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbullah, the Lebanese Shia party-cum-militia that has pitched an estimated 5,000 fighters into the battle on Mr Assad’s behalf.

On the ground the picture is much more blurred. Rather than showing an irreversible tilt in favour of the regime’s forces, the latest fighting seems to have consolidated territories held by each side. True, Mr Assad faces a less imminent threat to his strongholds, but he lacks the manpower to extend any of his gains very far. Syria remains in effect partitioned into zones held by the government and a patchwork of opponents. Short of far more potent intervention by outside forces, it is hard to see any early military resolution to the conflict.

Mr Assad’s men have lately reinforced their control of the capital, Damascus, and made more secure its vital link to regime-held areas in the centre and west of the country. The capture on April 14th of Maaloula, a mainly Christian town north of Damascus held by rebels since December, further shrunk a remaining rebel-controlled pocket along the border with Lebanon. Rebel resistance in Syria’s third-largest city, Homs, is now in danger of being terminally crushed, bringing to an end a bitter and bloody two-year siege that has devastated the town centre.

Yet, despite infighting between rebel groups, the regime’s opponents have not only continued to harry the capital and other loyalist enclaves. They have also made their own territorial gains, in recent weeks seizing a coastal salient in the far north-west near Latakia, the Assad family’s homeland, plus chunks of territory along the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights in the south-west.

The rebels have also encroached on the remaining government-held parts of Syria’s second city, Aleppo. A rebel offensive there in recent days has for the first time cut the government’s key supply line into the western part of the city. Thousands of government troops as well as tens of thousands of loyalist citizens could find themselves encircled.

Moreover, the mainstream rebel forces appear to have contained, or at least diminished, what had been a looming threat from the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS). Last year this extreme jihadist group, which is commanded by Iraqis and largely manned by foreign fighters, had rapidly expanded its influence in rebel-held areas. Its cruelty and pan-Islamist ideology prompted a Syrian nationalist backlash. Since open intra-rebel fighting erupted in January, ISIS has been pushed back to a rump territory in and around the central city of Raqqa. ISIS’s efforts to break out, either into Kurdish-held regions of the north-east or towards the town of Abu Kamal on the border with Iraq, appear to have been repulsed. This is one reason why other rebels have been freer to reassert their pressure on government forces in Aleppo.

None of this is good news for ordinary Syrians longing for their nightmare to end. Scalded by the cost of achieving even small advances, Mr Assad’s forces are making increasingly indiscriminate use of heavy weaponry. Rockets, artillery and giant, nail-packed barrel bombs lobbed from helicopters help to suppress rebel fire. They also make life in rebel-held areas a misery, generating floods of terrified civilians.

Some of Syria’s rebels have followed the regime’s example by torturing, kidnapping and executing their opponents. They have also launched indiscriminate attacks on government-held areas. On April 14th, for example, more than 30 mortars fired from rebel areas landed on the loyalist Damascus suburb of Jaramana, killing five people. And rebel car-bombings aimed at soldiers inevitably hit civilians as well. One that went off in Homs on April 9th killed at least 25 people, of every stripe.

Despite the UN’s imposition last September of a programme to strip Mr Assad of his chemical weapons, two-thirds of which are now said to have been dismantled, there have been reports that government forces are using them again. The most recent documented event involved chlorine gas, which is technically not banned under international conventions. On April 11th-12th it was apparently fired at Kafr Zita, a rebel-held village 200km (125 miles) north of Damascus. Dozens of people reportedly suffered the symptoms of poisoning, causing widespread panic. The government accused the rebels of using the gas themselves to attract sympathy. This fails to explain how the state media were able to warn of imminent chlorine attacks on other nearby villages.