SITTING in an Istanbul café, Khaled Khoja, a member of Syria’s Western-approved National Coalition, recalls how, when he was incarcerated in the 1980s, a prison guard rapped on the door of his cell and told the people inside to stop talking so loudly. “Why, what are you going to do?” replied a brave inmate. “Lock us up?” In similar fashion, Syrians—who for two-and-a-half years have withstood the regime’s barrel-bombs, incendiary weapons and chemical attacks—hope that things can hardly get worse. Yet there is a bleak and growing sense that they could.

Rebel fighters less sympathetic to extreme Islamism are struggling. That is partly because of corruption, infighting and bad behaviour in their own ranks. Moreover, since the Americans struck a deal with Mr Assad to rid the country of chemical weapons in the aftermath of a sarin attack on August 21st, thereby averting American missile strikes against his regime, the flow of arms to the more moderate rebels has slowed. At the same time, Saudi Arabia’s plan to build a rebel army at breakneck speed in the south looks overambitious. The money still being sent to rebel fighters by rich individuals in the Gulf, rather than by governments, goes to the more zealous Islamists, often channelled through Kuwait.

The mainstream rebels have suffered a further blow with the recent death of Abdulkader Saleh (pictured left), a leader of Liwa al-Tawhid, one of the most influential rebel groups in the north, who was wounded in an air raid. All along the border with Turkey rumours had swirled of a plan among powerful Islamist groups, including Mr Saleh’s but excluding the more extreme, al-Qaeda-linked ones, to unite.

Meanwhile the Islamic State of Iraq (ISIS) and al-Sham (meaning Greater Syria or the Levant), an al-Qaeda affiliate, continues to gain in strength. In a matter of months ISIS has spread across northern Syria. Clashes between ISIS and other rebel groups along the border have made the Turks wary of keeping the border open. ISIS has put checkpoints in strategic places so that anyone entering Syria from the north must pass through them. Foreign journalists and aid workers no longer dare go in. ISIS has arrested Syrian journalists, activists and liberals who annoy it.

The more moderate rebels are divided over how to respond. Tawhid has tried on the whole to avoid a confrontation with ISIS, holding back when in September it snatched the border town of Azaz, north of Aleppo. But other Syrian rebel groups have fought against it. On November 16th two men in a hotel lobby in Antakya, a town in south-east Turkey where many rebel organisers consort, despairingly passed round photographs on their mobile telephones of six members of a rebel group in the north-western province of Latakia who had recently been killed by ISIS.

Rebels who belong to the more moderate armed wing headed by Selim Idriss, a general who defected from Mr Assad’s army and gives his allegiance to the Syrian National Coalition endorsed by Western governments and the Arab League, are in a quandary. Seeing the weakness of the moderates and the growing strength of the more extreme Islamists, such as ISIS, some worry that the former will be tempted simply to throw in their lot with the latter. Others in General Idriss’s camp say he should reach out to groups tied to the Salafists, conservatives whose vision harks back to the days of the Prophet Muhammad. But if the general were to do so, would the West continue to back him? Either way, it is the likes of ISIS who seem to be making the rebels’ running.