“YA GHALI,” says a driver greeting the soldier manning a checkpoint of concrete blocks painted with the Syrian flag and plastered with pictures of Bashar Assad in regime-controlled central Damascus. This salutation was never in use in the capital before the war but is now standard at checkpoints. “Ghali”, or precious, is used in the coastal homeland of the Alawites, the sect from which Mr Assad hails. It is a sign both that the president is in control here and that, for all its talk of a state for all of Syria’s communities, his regime has been largely reduced to a sectarian militia, though the most powerful in the country.

This may be a harbinger of the future. The balance of power between the regime and the rebels has ebbed and flowed during the 27-month conflict, but the government’s recapture of the town of Qusayr from the rebels on June 5th has reinforced a feeling that Mr Assad has recently won the advantage. Rebels still control swathes of the north and east of the country and continue to clash with the regime in the countryside around the main population hubs of the west: Damascus, Homs and Hama. But nearly all the city centres are tightly in Mr Assad’s grip. In his determination to assert control, he has shown willing, if need be, to reduce rebellious towns to rubble.

In the aftermath of the fall of Qusayr, reports have circulated suggesting that the regime may capitalise on its gains by attacking Aleppo, the northern commercial hub that has been contested since last summer. Those reports may be premature, but the army has certainly dispatched reinforcements northward. Rumours now abound that Mr Assad will also try to cut a deal with Kurdish leaders in the north-eastern province of Hasaka, from which the regime tactically withdrew many of its forces last year. Officials in Damascus have regained confidence. They talk, albeit too grandly, of soon being able to take back the eastern provinces from the rebels.

Only a year ago Mr Assad’s throne seemed to be wobbling. While suffering dramatic military losses to the rebels, his political response was cack-handed. He owes his turnaround in fortune largely to the support of Iran and Hizbullah, the party-cum-militia it sponsors in Lebanon. Iran, say people in Damascus, has helped the regime to think strategically, while Hizbullah is training Mr Assad’s men in urban warfare. A new 60,000-strong national defence force (set to grow to 100,000) compensates for the regular army’s weaknesses. Defections have slowed as the forces have been pared down to a loyal core; morale among them has risen. In such circumstances a peace conference in Geneva mooted for next month looks increasingly unlikely to take place on time. For one thing, the opposition’s main political front, the Syrian National Coalition, refuses to attend while the regime’s attacks and advances continue. For another, Mr Assad will be more loth to compromise as he gains on the battlefield. The rebels’ backers in the West and in the Gulf find it hard to stomach the new reality that Mr Assad, after the death of at least 80,000 Syrians and the pulverisation of so many villages and towns, may be in the ascendant. His staying power and the increasingly sectarian nature of a regional geopolitical struggle that pits the rebels’ Sunni backers against Mr Assad’s Shia ones is even more disturbing to the United States, since Iran and Hizbullah, whose influence it would like to curb, are both plainly getting a boost. So American officials say they will look even more urgently at whether the rebels should or could be armed. The British and French, who last month forced the European Union to end its arms embargo, are doing the same. But the case for arming the rebels is not simple. If they got more weapons, Mr Assad’s allies in Iran and Russia might well respond in kind, increasing the level of violence, at least in the short run. Moreover, the opposition fighters, on the defensive, still lack a decent command-and-control structure. It would be hard to ensure that weapons from outside would not fall into the hands of extreme jihadists.

Besides, the rebels are losing support, in part because the regime has had some success in stirring sectarian fears. Many Syrians originally sympathetic to the rebels have been horrified by events such as the reported execution on June 9th of a 14-year-old boy by jihadists in Aleppo, allegedly for insulting the Prophet Muhammad. Downtrodden Sunnis who six months ago were the mainstay of the opposition may be thinking again. “I hate the regime,” says a woman from a poor Damascus suburb. “But if forced to choose, perhaps I would rather live under them than the rebels. I am tired of the violence.”

Qatari and Saudi support for the opposition has also scared a lot of Syrians. “This is now a war in Syria, but not a Syrian war,” says a dissident artist in the capital. “I have no illusions that the Gulf backers are interested in us having democracy.” Unlike the opposition abroad, many in Damascus were pinning their hopes, however unrealistic, on the Geneva conference as a way to persuade the regime to share power and thus bring the war to a close.

But in rebel-held areas sentiment is harsher. Many there have lost so much that the idea of the regime remaining in place, even in a transitional power-sharing format, is abhorrent. “I’d rather chaos for a few years than live under them again,” says a man from Tafas, a town in the south that is shelled daily. Ali Haidar, the government minister charged with national reconciliation, boasts of the regime’s efforts to support those affected by the violence. But whispered conversations in the streets of Damascus and continuing arrests hark back to darker days under Hafez Assad, the previous president and father of the present one. The UN says the regime’s crimes still far outweigh those of the rebels.

If the rebels are still to have a chance of victory, they would need a no-fly zone to protect their gains in the north; air strikes against Mr Assad’s tanks and missile defences; and sophisticated weapons, such as man-portable air-defence systems (“manpads”), to tackle Mr Assad’s air force and heavy armour. But Barack Obama is still not keen on supplying them.

Since the regime will find it hard to regain lost territory in the east and north, the dissolution of Syria into several fiefs, even mini-states, as happened in neighbouring Lebanon during its civil war of 1975-90, has been mooted. The country is already in practice divided into three parts. In the west a mainly regime-controlled axis runs south to north; the rebels hold the east and much of the north and north-west; and the Syrian offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party has the Kurdish north-east corner.

Officials in Damascus reject any thought of partition. Mr Assad may well hope that by remaining the strongest force until 2014, when elections are due, he can regain legitimacy. The rebels utterly refuse to accept that proposition. So a war of attrition, fought partly by proxies, looks set to grind on, with horrendous consequences. Half of all Syrians may have already been displaced. Mosques in the capital brim with those from the suburbs whose houses have been destroyed. Few Syrians now see a better future. And few think Mr Assad will go anywhere soon.