AS SYRIA TALKS FIZZLE, ‘WAR HAS NO MEANING ANYMORE’

[Two years ago, the demonstrators protesting outside the United Nations building were Syrians who had immigrated to Switzerland or neighboring countries long before conflict broke out in their homeland. Now, many are recent refugees who fled bombings, extremist militants or the secret police during the civil war.]

By Anne Barnard

Demonstrators protested the Syrian government outside the United Nations

headquarters in Geneva last week. Some were recent refugees, having fled

to Europe since the last round of talks two years ago.

CreditDenis Balibouse/Reuters

GENEVA — Four Syrian rebel commanders huddled in a knot, all broad shoulders and shiny gray suits, surveying the hotel lounge. Gigantic portraits of Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix gazed down at the carpet, a checkerboard of faux zebra-hide in squares of orange and magenta. On a low sofa, a couple snuggled to the sounds of Amy Winehouse.

The fighters decamped to a smokers’ enclosure behind a plate-glass window, its back wall a trompe-l’oeil image of electric-blue waves that made it seem as though they were submerged in a fish tank. It was an effect that fit their mood. They were in Geneva, notionally at least, for peace talks, but back in Syria, the government and its Russian allies were battering insurgents with scores of airstrikes. With their men under fire, the commanders were asking themselves how much longer they could credibly stay.

“Maybe a day,” one, Maj. Hassan Ibrahim, said on Monday night.

By Wednesday, the talks were indeed suspended, as the intense fighting on the ground proved there was as little to talk about as ever.

In an interview earlier, under the watchful eye of an adviser from Saudi Arabia, Major Ibrahim had dutifully projected strength and determination. But when the Saudi man walked away, the Syrian, who had defected from the government army in 2011, leaned forward and confided that the fighters he led in southern Syria were struggling. Supplies of weapons and salaries from the United States and its allies are dwindling. Moving in and out of Jordan is getting harder.

“They are doing it to put pressure on us to accept a political process,” he said, one in which he doubted that the Syrian government — or Russia, a sponsor of the talks — would make any compromise.

Major Ibrahim was reflecting a growing foreboding among the opposition’s fighters and civilians, mirrored by growing hope on the government side, that Washington, interested only in bombing the Islamic State militant group, is ceding the field to Russia and leaving the opposition on its own.

So much in Geneva this week was exactly like the last round of Syria peace talks in the city two years ago. Soft-lit hotel lobbies sweltered in the heat of glass fireplaces. Room service offered staple Syrian food — “Oriental mezze” — for about $40, which in Syria might constitute two weeks’ decent wages. Government and opposition delegates still seemed to be coming from different planets and witnessing different wars.

And yet something fundamental had changed. Two years ago, for all the skepticism and ultimate lack of results, there was a measure of pomp and circumstance. It was the first time the opposition had participated in formal talks, a kind of international recognition for the ragtag group of dissidents and insurgents. By the same token, it provided a stage for President Bashar al-Assad’s government to show it was still an international player. And it was significant, after all, merely to have the warring parties pass each other in corridors, look each other in the eye.

Back then, the Islamic State was a novelty, a fringe group that controlled a few areas. It was also a novelty for Syrian journalists who support the opposition, in the safety of Switzerland, to stick microphones in the faces of government officials and ask freely about attacks on civilians.

This time, there was, on both sides, grim resignation to a longer conflict, with darker results. The death toll has doubled since the last Geneva gathering, and the Islamic State, not even a party to the talks, has swallowed half of Syria’s territory.

Two years ago, the demonstrators protesting outside the United Nations building were Syrians who had immigrated to Switzerland or neighboring countries long before conflict broke out in their homeland. Now, many are recent refugees who fled bombings, extremist militants or the secret police during the civil war.

Government supporters are still calling for a victory, but one that builds in some ugly contingencies. In conversations around Geneva, more furtive and rarer than last time, they spoke of leaving the Islamic State for now to rule the eastern city of Raqqa. (“Not a priority,” one said of the remote provincial city.)

They also brushed off questions about the bombings of schools, with a number of contradictory excuses: There are no civilians there, they are only the children of fighters, the schools are closed, the schools are teaching Islamism.

On the other side, some antigovernment activists like Adnan Hadad, 31, were asking themselves where the uprising went wrong. He had little patience for government supporters who denied systematic attacks on civilians, or for opposition partisans who denied the rise of hard-line Islamists in their ranks.

“We can’t deny that Nusra is among us,” Mr. Hadad said, referring to Qaeda-linked fighters entangled with rebel groups on the battlefield. “It would be like saying this lake is made of milk.”

Mr. Hadad was walking across a footbridge as a sapphire dusk descended on Lake Geneva. Neon signs lit up, advertising Swiss watchmakers, their stained-glass colors reflected on the water. The waterfront buildings, so solid and staid and clean, sat heavily along the shore like gold watches in velvet cases.

They could not have been more different from the jagged cinder-block rubble and delicate, half-destroyed caravansaries of Mr. Hadad’s hometown, Aleppo. He had visited from Turkey a few weeks before to record some footage, and his mind lingered there, on a cafe owner called Abu Ibrahim, briskly handing out cups of coffee with tears in his eyes, with only the briefest glance across the street at a row of nine unclaimed bodies.

“The people who still live with it every day are not even allowed to cry, because they know there will be more tomorrow, and the day after and the day after,” Mr. Hadad said, talking in part about himself. “But you don’t want to develop that resistance — to not care about people dying.”

He tried to stay focused on what passed for hope: Syrians were still united, if only by common suffering. On both sides of divided Aleppo, he said, gunmen ask for IDs at checkpoints, electricity fluctuates, shells fall, and people make plans for a dash to Europe.

On New Year’s Eve, he recalled, he was in a front-line building with insurgents who declared they had “a surprise” for government troops nearby. At midnight, they unleashed mortars — and shells came crashing back, nearly hitting the building where Mr. Hadad was.

Was there a military purpose?

“Absolutely not,” he said. “The war has no meaning anymore.”

@ The New York Times