AFTER Syria’s rebels were chased out of the town of Qusayr, near the border with north-east Lebanon, at the beginning of June, the momentum seemed to be turning in favour of President Bashar Assad’s forces. He was well on his way, said many observers, to consolidating a pro-regime axis running from Damascus, the capital, through the pivotal city of Homs, the third-largest in the country, down west to the ports of Tartus and Latakia, in the heartland of the president’s own minority Alawite community. Homs, it was confidently predicted by regime loyalists, would be cleared of rebels next, and Aleppo, the country’s long-contested second city, could soon be back wholly in government hands, too. Moreover, the rebels, especially those in the suburbs of Damascus, were finding it harder to keep their supply lines open, from Lebanon in the west and Jordan in the south. The regime might expect to secure all the key roads between all main cities of the western part of Syria, where most of the country’s people reside.

It has not quite happened like that. If anything, the momentum has edged back the other way. A chunk of Homs has remained under rebel control, albeit perilously. The road between Aleppo and Hama, en route to Damascus, has continued to be attacked and occasionally cut. Several places on the way, such as Marat Numan, in the north-west, are still dominated by rebels, who continue to strangle the provincial capital of Idleb and smaller towns such as Nubl and Zahra, near Aleppo. The towns of Zabadani and Madaya, just north of the main road between Damascus and Beirut, which the government is determined to maintain as an international land line, remain in rebel hands.

The regime’s predicted push against the rebel-held northern and western side of Aleppo has not materialised, while the rebels earlier this month captured one of Aleppo’s main airbases, at Minigh. They have also consolidated their hold over Raqqa, the only provincial capital wholly in their hands; have tightened their grip around Deir ez-Zor, in the east; and now control most of the main border crossing points into Iraq, though the government in Baghdad supports Mr Assad. Most dramatically, earlier this month, the rebels made their biggest assault in two years on the area just north of Latakia, albeit that they subsequently had to pull back.
The recent chemical attacks on the southern and eastern suburbs of Damascus, especially on East Ghouta, which coincided with unusually heavy bombardments of the same areas, may well have been provoked by a resurgence of rebel activity in those areas, well known for their disaffection. “The rebels have held on there and have made their presence known further into the capital, for example in an apparent attack on President Assad’s convoy,” says Charles Lister of IHS Jane’s, a London-based intelligence and defence consultancy, referring to a rebel-reported artillery rocket assault on August 8th in the Malki district of Damascus.
From the Western point of view, the worst feature of the rebels is the persistent growth of Islamist influence in their ranks, albeit that the two most extreme groups, Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), both of them linked to al-Qaeda, may number fewer than 12,000 or so fighters between them, perhaps less than a tenth of the total insurgency. But the biggest and most powerful rebel group, Ahrar al-Sham, which may have between 15,000 and 25,000 men, is also strongly Islamist—too much so, in Mr Lister’s view, for Western governments to feel able to give them arms. “The reality,” he says, “is that most of the more moderate rebel groups have become Islamist to an extent.”
Differences between some of the Islamist groups, let alone those between Islamists and secularists, have complicated matters more—making it still harder for Western governments to contemplate giving them arms. ISIS, led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who campaigns for a regional caliphate, seems to have made ground at the expense of Jabhat al-Nusra, led by Abu Muhammad al-Golani, who wants to focus on conquering Syria before widening the war for jihad.
There is growing talk, among the rebels and among Arab governments behind them, of a possible sahwa, or awakening, similar to what happened in Iraq after 2007, when Sunni tribes to the west of Baghdad, outraged by the brutal excesses of groups linked to al-Qaeda, formed their own militias and turned against them in co-operation with American forces there. Of the Syrian rebels’ two key Arab backers, the Qataris are cosier with the more extreme Islamists, whereas the Saudis want to help the more secular Free Syrian Army, which is more fragmented. Such talk raises the spectre of a civil war between the rebels, should Mr Assad fall, and the prospect of a regime sympathetic to al-Qaeda taking over—hardly the hoped-for outcome of Western intervention.
All the same, the rebels seem to have recovered their breath after their defeat at Qusayr—which was due mainly, they note, to the regime reinforcing itself with Hizbullah, the Lebanese Shias’ party-cum-milita, which was called in—they say—because Mr Assad’s forces were too weak to prevail on their own. Should the West bomb Mr Assad’s command-and-control centres, say the rebels, the momentum could swing back their way.