IT WAS early in the morning of September 11th in Damascus, the Syrian capital, when Barack Obama broadcast an important speech from Washington. Forty-nine years to the day after Bashar Assad was born, the ruler of Syria was to hear the American president pledge that his country would destroy the most vicious of Mr Assad’s own enemies, the jihadist terrorist group that calls itself the Islamic State (IS). What a relief, only weeks after IS forces dealt Mr Assad’s army a humiliating blow by overrunning a military base and marching its surrendered garrison into the desert in their underpants before riddling them with machine gun bullets, to have Mr Obama promise vengeance. In a different context this might have seemed a perfect birthday gift, adding to other recent good tidings for Mr Assad. The night before September 11th, word emerged that nearly the entire top echelon of Ahrar al-Sham, an Islamist rebel group waging war against Mr Assad’s regime, had died in a mysterious explosion at a bunker where they were secretly meeting. And on his birthday itself, Mr Assad could watch from his hilltop palace as bursts of flame and puffs of smoke arose from the far perimeter of Damascus. Mr Assad’s army has been pummeling the city’s poor, rebel-infested suburbs for many months, reducing whole suburbs to rubble, but this particular barrage of artillery, rockets and MIG-borne bombs was said to be the heaviest in a long time. Out of sight of Syria’s president, the air strikes on just one of the targeted districts, Douma, killed some 42 people that day.

Yet Mr Assad may not have been in a very good mood. His deputy foreign minister, Faisal Miqdad, tried to put a positive spin on Mr Obama’s initiative. He described the Syrian regime as a “natural ally” for America in its battle against IS and said he had “no reservations” about American airstrikes on the group in Syria (although last month his boss, Walid Moallem, the foreign minister, suggested strikes without Damascus's permission would be "an act of war"). By constantly portraying its Syrian opponents en masse as “terrorists”, a characterisation it has actively sought to make true by stirring sectarian rivalry and by targeting poor Sunni Syrians with indiscriminate violence, Mr Assad’s regime has lived in hope of galvanising Western fear of Islamist radicalism.

But Mr Obama made it clear he did not see Mr Assad as a partner. “In the fight against ISIL, we cannot rely on an Assad regime that terrorises its own people—a regime that will never regain the legitimacy it has lost," Mr Obama said. "Instead, we must strengthen the opposition as the best counterweight to extremists like ISIL, while pursuing the political solution necessary to solve Syria’s crisis once and for all.” In other words, not only will America not be coordinating any action with Mr Assad, but his downfall remains an American policy objective.

Although it is not a policy they seem close to achieving, Mr Assad's exclusion from a nascent anti-IS regional coalition was underlined by a meeting of ten regional allies with America’s secretary of state John Kerry in the Saudi port of Jeddah on September 12th. Neither Syria nor its allies Iran and Russia were invited. The group says it will increase aid to anti-Assad, anti-IS groups. To start with there is talk of a greatly expanded effort to train and equip opposition forces, with Saudi Arabia offering to take a first group of as many as 5,000 fighters. American airpower may not extend to Syria for some time, instead continuing to focus on IS in Iraq.

There is other bad news for Mr Assad. His blasting away at the Damascus suburbs, for all its destructive power, underlines the fact that a six-month offensive by government forces has failed even to fully secure the immediate region of the capital. This is partly, perhaps, due to the withdrawal of hundreds of Iraqi Shia “volunteers” who had been fighting on Mr Assad’s side to deal with the more pressing—for them—challenge of Sunni insurgents in Iraq. Meanwhile, government forces have lost ground further south, with the opposition making steady inroads into its turf along the Golan Heights on the border with Israel.

The decapitation of Ahrar al-Sham’s leadership, meanwhile, may not do much to dent the opposition. Long plagued by rivalries, ragtag rebel groups have lately both been moderating their Islamist bent and better cooperating with one another to target both government forces and IS. At the same time, signs have emerged of potentially serious dissent within Mr Assad’s core constituency, the Alawite minority that makes up 12% of Syria’s people. IS’s gleefully videotaped massacre of captive government troops sent shockwaves through a community that has suffered appalling decimation in the three-and-a-half year-old conflict. Only a day before the fall of the air base to the IS, state television had broadcast interviews with swaggering commanders who said the long-beseiged facility could hold out indefinitely.

Aside from a burst of bitter criticism from Alawites in social media, some analysts point as a sign of inner tensions to news, as yet unconfirmed, of the sudden demotion of one of Mr Assad’s closest intimates inside the Assad clan itself. His 43-year-old cousin Hafez Makhlouf was not only the feared head of a particularly nasty branch of Syrian intelligence charged with the defence of Damascus. He is the brother of Rami Makhlouf, the chief money man for the regime, whose interests in everything from mobile phones and hotels to manufacturing and trading have quietly bolstered the Assads. Mr Assad's greatest hope after Mr Obama's speech may be that, if America helps bash IS in Syria, his forces will be able to dedicate all their time to hitting the opposition.