“When numbers get serious, they leave a mark on your door,” goes a song by American musician Paul Simon.

But in Syria those bloody notches show no signs of braking a headlong struggle to the death watched from afar by divided outside powers, most of whose leaders seem convinced that the risks of direct intervention outweigh any possible rewards.

Syrians realise they are essentially on their own, and 21 months after the start of protests against President Bashar al-Assad inspired by Arab revolts elsewhere, some of the civilians caught up in what has become a civil war are near despair.

“It’s all nonsense,” said Adnan Abu Raad, an elderly man wrapped in a scarf against the cold, as he watched fresh graves being dug after 11 people were killed in a weekend air strike in the rebel-held Syrian town of Azaz near the border with Turkey.

“Neither the Free Syrian Army nor Assad’s forces can protect us. The two factions are fighting each other, but no one is dying except for the innocent, the children, women and elderly.”

Abu Raad derided the peace efforts of Brahimi and his predecessor Kofi Annan as hypocrisy and dismissed reports of even limited outside help for the rebellion against Assad as fiction. “No one has sent us a single bullet. It’s all a lie.”

Some Western countries have provided what they call non-lethal aid to rebels, while some Arab states are reported to have sent weapons, mostly channelled through Turkey. Fighters complain of a dearth of ammunition even for the arms they have acquired.

Without a negotiated solution, Brahimi said Syria may soon resemble Somalia as a failed state plagued by warlords and destabilising its neighbours. But the opposition National Coalition rules out talks until Assad goes, while the Syrian leader says he will not give in to his foes.

The insurgents have grabbed swathes of countryside in the north and east, as well as holding parts of Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city, and some suburbs of Damascus, the capital.

Yet Assad’s power base is more cohesive than that of his fractious opponents. He controls the armed forces, using air power and heavy weaponry to contain rebel advances or to pound any towns or urban districts that slip out of his control.

With the military struggle evolving so slowly, no end to the bloodletting is in sight. The outside world appears impotent.

Indeed, many Syrians on both sides have concluded that by defining any use of chemical weapons as a ‘red line’, Washington has effectively given Assad immunity to use anything else.

The US and its European allies, after extricating themselves from Iraq and soon Afghanistan, show no appetite for another such venture, with Syria viewed as more likely to become an Iraq-style quagmire than a Libyan quasi-success.

For their part, Russia and China have vetoed three Security Council resolutions on Syria, for fear they might lead to sanctions or foreign meddling aimed at ousting Assad.

Shi’ite Iran fiercely opposes outside intervention against its main Arab ally. The Shi’ite-led government in Iraq also fears the consequences of any victory for mostly Sunni Muslim rebels against Assad and his Shi’ite-linked Alawite minority.

Egypt’s new Islamist leaders have called for Assad’s fall, but the most populous Arab nation, gripped by its own political and economic turmoil, is in no shape to bring this about.

Turkey, which swiftly turned against its former Syrian ally and for months talked of a possible no-fly zone, also said it would never intervene unilaterally.

US allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar have provided funds for weapons and other supplies to Assad’s opponents, albeit selectively by all accounts, favouring Islamists over others.

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