“OUT of control,” is how John Kerry, America’s secretary of state, described Syria’s war this week. “A miracle that is now fragile,” said Staffan de Mistura, the UN envoy to Syria, on the partial ceasefire that had brought a degree of calm since it came into force on February 27th.
Violence in Syria is rapidly escalating. Since April 21st the regime has been blasting Aleppo, the country’s biggest city. On April 27th it bombed al-Quds hospital, killing more than 55 people, including Muhammad Wassim Moaz, one of the city’s few remaining paediatricians. In February Médecins sans Frontières, a medical charity, stopped giving the co-ordinates of hospitals it supports to the Syrian and Russian governments. It worries that pro-Assad jets are deliberately targeting them.
The rebels are not blameless. They have intensified their shelling of the government-held part of the city, making life more dangerous for civilians there. On May 3rd a mortar shell fired by rebels killed three people in a hospital. The rebels said they were aiming at a tank nearby.
The regime’s attacks on Aleppo galvanised rare international outrage at Bashar al-Assad, who until recently had been seen by many governments as a lesser evil than Islamic State (IS). A social-media campaign entitled “AleppoIsBurning” sparked protests from Syria to Chicago, after it emerged that a new temporary cessation of fighting that was declared on April 30th excluded Aleppo, the very place that needed it most. Amnesty International and other human-rights groups have called on the UN to impose sanctions on those who deliberately attack hospitals, or otherwise treat the Geneva conventions as blotting paper. On May 3rd the UN Security Council passed a resolution urging members to prosecute those responsible for such crimes.
America, Russia and the UN are now running round trying to salvage the recent partial ceasefire. An extension of the truce to include Aleppo was announced late on May 4th, but it was not clear how it would deal with rebels fighting alongside Jabhat al-Nusra, the local al-Qaeda affiliate. This group is excluded from the ceasefire, along with IS, even though mainstream rebels are often intermingled with it. (They refuse to fight shoulder-to-shoulder with IS because it is too bloodthirsty.)
The rate at which people are dying from the fighting is climbing back to where it was before the ceasefire (see chart). At least 200 people have been killed in regime strikes in the past fortnight alone in Aleppo. If the truce is ineffective—and the parties could not even agree when it was to have started—it is unlikely that peace talks in Geneva will reconvene. (They ended in acrimony last month.)
Furthermore, two assumptions behind the talks are looking shaky. The first is that Russia wants to broker a fair deal between the parties. Although it says it is keen to do so, and has sometimes appeared annoyed at Mr Assad’s stubbornness, its actions have been aimed at giving the regime a military advantage. It is in any case unclear how much leverage Moscow has over Damascus should it wish to force a deal.
The second assumption is that America no longer insists that Mr Assad should immediately relinquish power. Yet it will be almost impossible to bring Syria’s war to a close so long as its chief instigator, who is responsible for most of the roughly half a million war deaths, remains secure.
This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline "Spiralling out of control"
