Closer to the capital

A TERRIFIED girl hurried past but most onlookers stared blankly at the bloody aftermath of a car-bomb in Damascus on April 8th, the latest to rock the centre of Syria’s capital. Many of its people have got used to the violence since Damascus became ever more embroiled in the conflict. In recent weeks Bashar Assad’s regime has launched bigger missiles at the rebellious suburbs, while rebels have destroyed more checkpoints on roads leading into the city and have aimed more mortars at government targets in the centre. A battle for Damascus is brewing, though no one knows when it will begin in earnest. “We feel we are living the last days before the storm,” says a young professional.

Ever since the uprising began two years ago, the regime and the armed opposition have had their eyes trained on Damascus, the seat of military and political power. In recent weeks more preparations for fighting in the very centre have started to be put into place. Rebel commanders are loth to discuss plans but they talk of stockpiling weapons and of cells of fighters lying low, waiting for orders to spring into action. Meanwhile Mr Assad’s government has redeployed troops in and around Damascus, erected more checkpoints and warned in a state newspaper of “certain death” to the rebels if they dare to enter.

A year ago many believed that once the war had reached the centre of Damascus, the conflict would soon end. Those hopes have faded. Rebel fighters worry that they could get just as bogged down in the capital as they are in Syria’s second city, Aleppo. Stalemate has reigned there since last July. During that time the regime has bombed rebel districts to ruins, while internecine competition between rebel groups has flourished.

It could be even worse in Damascus, since Mr Assad’s forces are entrenched on Mount Qassioun, whose towering height offers a platform from which the regime can launch air and missile strikes. Mr Assad has also created a shadowy new militia known as the National Defence Force, some of whose members are reportedly being sent for training in Iran.

The opposition’s backers have recently concentrated on the south, where rebels have been trying to pave a way to the capital by cutting off the regime from its military bases near Syria’s borders with Israel and Jordan. Foreign friends hope to boost the rebels in the south and prevent the fragmentation that has plagued rebel-held areas in the north. Rather than replicate the situation on the border with Turkey, which fighters with arms cross fairly freely, the rebels in the south say limited supplies of arms come through the tightly manned border with Jordan—and only to groups vetted by Saudi Arabia and America.

While a regime counter-offensive in the north has been accompanied by increasingly frequent air raids and has resulted in the capture of a strategic outpost in Aleppo in the past week, rebels in the south continue to chip away, steadily cutting off roads, taking over villages and attacking military bases. But it is too soon to predict that they will operate more coherently than their comrades in the north.

Elsewhere in the country, tension between rebel groups and Jabhat al-Nusra, militarily the most effective of the extreme Islamist factions fighting Mr Assad, is rising. Reports this week that Nusra and al-Qaeda in Iraq had made a formal alliance seemed to justify Western fears.

The opposition leadership both inside and outside the country is still elusive. Ghassan Hitto, an American-educated IT executive who was recently made head of an interim government in exile, is starting to recruit ministers who, he says, will administer the liberated areas. But a number of Mr Assad’s opponents worry that the Muslim Brotherhood, which backed Mr Hitto, wants to dominate the opposition.

As the fighting intensifies, the humanitarian crisis worsens. The UN says roughly a quarter of Syria’s original population of 23m are now refugees or have been displaced inside the country; some say that could rise to a half by the year’s end. Yet aid agencies say they are running out of money because governments have handed over only a fraction of the $1.5 billion pledged in Kuwait in January.