This tragedy will end

Telegraph View: For all the bombast and posturing of Syria's Bashar al-Assad, the battle has turned against him and his days are surely numbered.

First, the dramatic setting: a packed opera house, the audience chanting its support as the president approached the stage to deliver his speech with, as backdrop, a flag carrying photos of the slain; then, when he had finished, a rush from the stalls to mob him as if he were a diva. Second, the monotonous message: yet another proposal for a political solution, immediately dismissed by an opposition whom the president characterised as a “gang of criminals”.

After 22 months of conflict, with a death toll estimated by the United Nations at over 60,000, the continued presence of Bashar al-Assad in Syria makes dialogue impossible. Like his Ba’athist counterpart in Iraq, Saddam Hussein, Mr Assad will only be removed by force, and on the battlefield the situation is turning against him. The regime has lost control of large parts of the country and failed to dislodge rebels from the suburbs of Aleppo and Damascus. The economy, suffering from sanctions and war damage, is being propped up by Iran, Iraq and pro-Syrian groups in Lebanon. The formation of the National Coalition for Revolutionary and Opposition Forces gives the outside world a conduit for the supply of lethal and non-lethal aid to Mr Assad’s opponents. In this terrible war of attrition, 2013 could see the ending of this stalemate.

Having rejected direct military intervention, the rebels’ foreign backers will have to work through the new coalition and the Free Syrian Army to limit the influence of the jihadis – and to hold together a country threatened by sectarian enmity, and by the Kurdish drive for autonomy. Iraq has given the outside world ample warning of what can follow the collapse of an entrenched dictatorship. But for all Mr Assad’s bombast yesterday, his days as Syria’s leader are surely numbered.