On top of everything else, last week Damascus suffered its worst dust storm in decades. It shrouded the city in a yellowish haze that masked a pale sun and the top of Mount Qasioun, from where government artillery pounds rebel areas on the other side of town. Still, as soon as it ended, the Z-Bar, the famously raucous nightclub on the roof of the Omayad Hotel, started taking reservations for a party to celebrate the improving weather.

Less unusual were the huge traffic jams at the checkpoints controlling access to government offices, big hotels and the main shopping centre: an alert was on for a car bombing or suicide attack and every vehicle was searched by soldiers or scruffy militiamen in camouflage trousers and T-shirts. And, completely normally, mortars fired by what the government and media simply call “terrorists” continued to fall and kill ordinary people at random.

Earlier this year, the Syrian capital experienced a very heavy snowfall, adding to the misery of a conflict that has been tearing the country apart since 2011.

“We’ve got the war, and we’ve had the snow and the dust, so all we need now is a volcano,” quipped Nizar, a school teacher. In Britain and other European countries, sudden interest in the crisis has been sparked by refugees fleeing in ever larger numbers. But, in Damascus, talk of a solution seems remote, barely relevant to the daily struggle to get by. Life certainly goes on, but death is never far away.

“It’s getting worse – politically, economically, and of course in humanitarian terms,” said Samer, a businessman from one of the city’s old Sunni families and a discreet but fierce critic of President Bashar al-Assad. “I can see no way it will end any time soon.”

And Ziyad Hashim, a doctor from Aleppo, who believes that the president is still the only man who can save Syria, agrees completely. Reports of new military assistance from Russia and Iran, Assad’s staunchest allies, suggest that escalation of the fighting may be imminent.

On Wednesday afternoon, a mortar killed three people near Bab Tuma, the Christian quarter of the old city. One of them was Maher al-Jizmati, 47, a tubby, genial-looking father of five. His end was recorded in the Diaries of the Damascus Mortar Shells, which has its own Facebook page and handy Twitter feed. In an earlier incident, a family of six, who were already displaced from their home – there are more than six million of them, as well as four million more Syrian refugees abroad – died together picnicking at night in the teeming centre of town.

Damascenes admit that their hearts have hardened. “I was walking down the street when a shell landed nearby and a man fell down – I didn’t know whether he was wounded or dead – in front of me,” recalled Hala, a middle-aged businesswoman. “So I just stepped over him and carried on. The violence has just become ordinary.”

The sound of explosions – followed by a plume of smoke – is now utterly routine. So is the thud of the shelling from Mount Qasioun and the distant roar of air force jets.

Danger is very close to home. Abbasiyeen Square in north Damascus borders on Jobar, from where rebels from Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaida’s Syrian affiliate, often fire their mortars. “Three of my next-door neighbours were killed on their roof and another shell landed on the corner by the cafe,” said a resident. “It’s just a matter of luck.” Last week, down the road, a car bomb killed a brigadier from air force intelligence, the most feared of several overlapping mukhabarat – security – branches. In a chilling novelty, the killing was filmed by Ahrar al-Sham, an Islamist group, and then posted on YouTube.

Even in the wryly named “green zone”, elegant areas such as Abu Rummaneh and Malki are not immune – as shown by the telltale cratering of mortar rounds and the spattering effect they leave on the ground outside military installations and in residential and business areas alike. During the summer, a rocket landed in the swimming pool of the Sheraton Hotel, home to many of the UN personnel dealing with Syria’s disintegration.

Civilians react to shelling in Damascus. Photograph: Mohammed Eyad/NurPhoto/Corbis

In the southern district of Midan, which saw big anti-regime demonstrations in the first weeks of the uprising, the rundown Rozana cafe serves a delicious pollo – a chilled mint and lemon drink – just 400 yards from the Yarmouk refugee camp, where Isis and other groups are holed up behind a cordon manned by the Syrian army, the Iranian-trained National Defence Forces, and Palestinians fighting with the regime.

Yet by all accounts things are far worse on the other side. Douma, 20 minutes from central Damascus, is held by Jaysh al-Islam – the Army of Islam – under a Saudi-backed Salafi cleric named Zahran Alloush, and has been under siege for three years. Douma and other parts of the surrounding eastern Ghouta area were hit by the notorious chemical weapons attack in 2013.

Last month, the area suffered another government assault – this time using conventional weapons – after days of mortar fire on Damascus. Médecins Sans Frontières reported 377 deaths and 1,932 wounded; 104 of those who had died and 546 of the wounded were under 15.

“It was one of the turning points of the war,” said Mudhar, an Alawite loyalist in his twenties. “It was one of the few times that people on this side said that the people on the other deserved it. There was no sympathy. The government felt it had to send a strong message.”

Economic pressure is growing, too, and is cited by many leaving for Europe as the main reason for their departure, along with the need to avoid military service. The value of the Syrian pound has dropped catastrophically against the dollar, so purchasing power has plummeted while prices have risen six- or seven-fold. Poorer people are facing malnutrition and hunger. Prolonged electricity cuts are part of the now normal abnormality of life. Food rots in the fridge and has to be thrown away. On sweltering days, there is no air conditioning. Diesel generators growl on the pavements and people routinely use the torches in their mobile phones to navigate the darkened streets as well as their homes.

“I get up at 3am to do the laundry while there is power,” said a mother of two teenagers, laughing. “And we don’t eat ice-cream any more. But we are at war. State employees still get paid on time. Given the circumstances, this government is functioning pretty well.”

Cyclists pass one another in the historic Souq al-Hamidiyah, in the old city of Damascus. Photograph: Youssef Badawi/Epa/Corbis

There is still fun to be had, especially after dark, when fewer mortars are fired. The Z-Bar and other popular nightspots heave until the small hours, with punters belting out songs praising the president.

Restaurants and cafes buzz with life. “People go out to enjoy themselves because they don’t know what will happen next,” said a 30-year-old female official. “They are trying to forget what’s happening outside. They say, ‘Live today, and don’t worry about tomorrow.’” Hotels host lavish, noisy wedding parties, but many are now held in the safety of Beirut, often because the groom is working in the Gulf.

“What this country needs is to get rid of Bashar,” insists an opposition supporter. “That’s the solution.” No one has any illusions about the risks of activism: stories are rife of arrests and torture in mukhabarat detention, of young men disappearing and their families being told months later to collect their bodies.

But many are far more worried about Isis and Jabhat al-Nusra than Assad – although some argue that it was his crackdown on the protests that paved the way for the rise of Islamists financed and promoted by the Saudis, Qatar and Turkey. In any event, the spirit of the Arab spring has all but gone. “No one in the government-controlled areas believes in the revolution any more,” said Nur, who left Aleppo for exile in Beirut. “Now it just looks naive.” Others who saw hope then have opted for the relative security of Damascus. “I hate Bashar,” said Mais al-Kreedy, a Druze intellectual. “But I want to stop the killing. If the regime is defeated, it will be a catastrophe. Yes, we want freedom. But we want to stay alive.”

Military setbacks in recent months have led to retrenchment by the government, pulling back its overstretched forces from outlying areas such as Raqqa, Idlib and the north-east to consolidate its hold on the area around Damascus and a central strip, via Homs, leading to the Alawite areas on the coast – “Regimeistan”, some call it. The fate of Aleppo, the country’s commercial capital, remains uncertain.

Ali is a skinny young soldier from Latakia who spends six days a week on security patrols in Damascus and his day off driving a battered yellow taxi: he needs the extra cash because the army doesn’t pay enough and he has to ask for directions around the capital – sometimes encountering fellow servicemen doing the same thing. He spent three years fighting the rebel Free Syrian Army in Homs, but was not impressed by them. “They are just terrorists,” he sneered. “Syria will defeat them because we are strong.”

It is common to hear such expressions of confidence in ultimate victory, but there are darker moments, too: a young female employee at the ministry of information – her job is to monitor media coverage – was staring at pictures of the soldiers captured by Jabhat al-Nusra when their long-besieged airbase near Idlib fell after a suicide-bombing assault last week: the soldiers appear gaunt, humiliated and frightened. “These men are soldiers, look at them,” the woman said, aghast, on the verge of tears. “They weren’t able to run away to Europe.”

The human cost of Syria’s tragedy is rarely out of sight. In the Mujtahid hospital, it can be seen in the injuries suffered by Ahmed Qujah, an 11-year-old with dark skin and big eyes. He lost both legs when Isis blew up a lorry in Qamishli in the north, where his Kurdish family had fled during the battle for Kobani earlier this year. Standing at the bedside, Ahmed’s father, Subhi, launched into a sudden patriotic speech – perhaps prompted by the unidentified man in civilian clothes standing quietly by the door.

“Isis are cowards to do things like this,” he said fiercely. “He is just a boy. He wasn’t carrying a gun” – pulling back the sheet to display his son’s disfigured body. “President Assad rules us, so we are not afraid, whatever the Turks and the Saudis and Syria’s enemies do.”

Some names have been changed