KAFR NABL, a small town in north-west Syria, fell under rebel control early in the 30-month civil war. It has since gained fame as a scruffy Hollywood-in-a-bomb-shelter, turning out satirical videos about the war. The latest shows a rabble of angry cavemen charging repeatedly out of their caves only to be mown down by machine guns or blown up by bombs while Western and Arab spectators look on nonchalantly. When, after a third charge, these “savages” drop dead from a chemical spray, the audience objects. A character holding a Russian flag appears and hands the empty poison canister to the applauding onlookers. The cavemen protest but the slaughter resumes, now with bullets and bombs.

For now at least, this seems a fairly accurate portrayal of how things are going in Syria. The world is confused by it. It is squabbling over clobbering Syria for using gas and perplexed by the Syrian government’s sudden pledge on September 10th to give up chemical weapons it had previously denied owning. Western countries are in talks with the government’s protector, Russia; a report from UN inspectors on September 16th confirmed the use of sarin gas against Syrian civilians last month. But as diplomatic skirmishing over plans to dismantle Syria’s poison gas programme intensifies, the chances for peace on the ground, or even for a lull in the fighting that has so far left at least 110,000 Syrians dead and 6m homeless, seem remote.

Taking advantage of the lifting of any immediate threat of international punishment, the defiant regime of Syria’s president, Bashar Assad, has resumed and escalated artillery, air and infantry assaults on rebel-held suburbs of the capital, Damascus. Fierce battles rage elsewhere in the country, helping account for the 2,000-plus deaths from conventional weapons recorded since August 21st, the date of chemical attacks on two Damascus suburbs. Disparate rebel groups have in recent weeks made small inroads against the government in the east, south and north, including near the town of Safira, the suspected site of a chemical-weapons plant. But they are also increasingly fighting among themselves.

Kurdish militias in the north-east, keen on delineating their own ethnic region, have engaged in bloody clashes against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), a radical affiliate of al-Qaeda. ISIS has fought local rebel militias in several cities along the Euphrates valley, which bisects central Syria, and on September 18th launched a full-scale assault to wrest control of Azaz, a town near the Turkish border that straddles access routes to Syria’s second city, Aleppo, from a group supported by Western and Arab Gulf countries.

Grim talk of a looming war-within-a-war pitting nationalist rebel factions against the pan-Islamic jihadists of ISIS, which draws its leadership and manpower largely from outside Syria, now rings true. Rival groups openly denounce ISIS as an agent of the Syrian regime, while jihadists warn of a Saudi-funded, American-inspired effort to sow division by backing anti-al-Qaeda Islamist militias, as America successfully did in Iraq. Speaking from hiding, the al-Qaeda chief, Ayman Zawahiri, has added to the foreboding with a call, released on September 12th, for Syrian rebels to shun “secular parties that are allied to the West”.

It is into this maelstrom that, under terms sketched in an agreement reached in Geneva on September 14th between the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and the American secretary of state, John Kerry, UN teams are meant to deploy in Syria, secure chemical-weapons stocks and factories, verify that inventories provided by the Syrian government are complete and destroy the poisons. Syria is due to hand over an initial inventory by September 21st.

The Organisation for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons, which imposes compliance on signatories to the global convention against them, says it should be ready to start work on October 14th, when the treaty comes into force for Syria. The Russo-American deal suggests that the weapons could be eliminated by mid-2014, by coincidence just when Mr Assad’s presidential term expires.

Yet aside from the physical difficulty of operating in Syria, diplomatic wrangling suggests that this timetable is too ambitious. A first hurdle emerged in divergent responses to the report by the UN inspectors charged with investigating last month’s chemical attacks. They had no mandate to assign blame, yet their report provided details that, to Western governments and independent experts, unequivocally fingered the Syrian government as the sole possible culprit.

The quality of the sarin gas suggested a sophisticated manufacturing process. The rockets used to deliver the poison were of a type widely deployed by the Syrian army, but not yet observed in rebel hands. And the rocket trajectories estimated by UN forensics experts from two separate impact sites point directly to Qassioun, the barren mountain that dominates Damascus. This is largely occupied by a sprawling base of Syria’s Republican Guard, and it is from here that the government has long rained conventional shells, rockets and mortars on rebellious parts of the city.

Russian officials viewed the UN’s findings differently. At first they described them as inconclusive. But following talks with Syria, Russia’s deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, condemned the report as “politicised, preconceived and one-sided”. Small wonder that Mr Assad, after presenting Mr Ryabkov with purported new evidence implicating rebels in chemical attacks, thanked Russia for “creating hope of a new global balance”.

Russia’s sudden objection jarred oddly, considering its strenuous insistence on UN sanction under international law when Barack Obama threatened punitive strikes against Syria. The UN itself issued an unusually blunt riposte, describing the results of its investigation as “indisputable”. Western diplomats, for their part, speculate that the intent of Russia’s quibbling is to create a smokescreen around the next looming issue, the crafting of a Security Council resolution defining a mandate for the chemical weapons team in Syria.

Aside from tricky technical and funding issues, the stickiest part revolves around whether the resolution will be issued under Chapter 7 of the UN charter, which allows force to be used in case of non-compliance. Russia seeks to avoid Chapter 7, or at any rate wording that would authorise force without a vote in which its veto would still count. Diplomats remain tight-lipped, but former Western intelligence officials have expressed deep scepticism that Syria intends to abandon an arsenal long seen as its only deterrent against its main declared enemy, nuclear-armed Israel.

Igor Ivanov, a former Russian foreign minister, believes that Russia may try to spin out the diplomatic game as long as possible, since it is helping the hitherto isolated government of Vladimir Putin to regain international stature. “The Kremlin’s priority is not Syria itself but its relationship with America,” says Mr Ivanov. “Syria is only a playing field. Russia wants to be seen as a player in big international decisions, equal only to America.”