How long can the regime last?

EVEN by the standards of Syrian state television, the gap between fact and fiction yawned unusually wide on July 15th. With street battles rattling Damascus, the capital, for the first time in Syria’s 17-month uprising, a roaming camera crew struggled to find a picture of reassurance. “Nothing’s happening! Its completely quiet!” a trio of veiled women shouted at the microphone poked through their car window, as gunfire crackled in the background. They seemed anxious to speed off, as did a lone pedestrian waylaid on an eerily deserted boulevard, who briskly agreed that things were “normal—very, very normal”.

In the next few days Syria’s violently flailing regime dropped all such pretence. Even those blind and deaf to the sight of helicopters pumping cannon-fire into residential districts north-east of the city centre, to the whining growl of reptilian armoured cars on its ring road and the crump of mortars in southern suburbs, could not ignore the news, on July 18th, of the biggest blow yet to President Bashar Assad.