This photograph, the photograph that leads this story, breaks my heart.

The war started on March 15, 2011. That is two years, eleven months and one day ago. It seemed at first to be part of the Arab Spring. And perhaps it is. But Assad turned it into something else. He repeated the brutality of his father, dashed any hopes that he was a liberal reformer, and set his nation on fire.

Estimates of death toll vary wildly, but seem to center between 95,000 and 130,000. More than 6.5 million Syrians have been displaced, and about 2 million of those have found temporary shelter in neighboring countries. Some of the refugee camps are quite nice, others quite terrible.

The combatants are a mess. On one side you have Assad, backed up by his Russian and Iranian allies. On the other side you have a splintered array of rebel forces that range from secularists to potential future bin Ladens. Like in Afghanistan, which gave birth to bin Laden, the insurgents are funded by a range of nations from the United States to Saudi Arabia. The US tends to favor the secularists; Saudi Arabia tends to favor the Wahhabi proto-Osamas.

The conflict is a mess. It is unlikely to have a clean winner. Intervention is unlikely to be particularly successful. This is not the former Yugoslavia. This isn’t even the Afghanistan of the ‘80s; there’s no Evil Empire to bloody here. America is tired of war in the Middle East. France isn’t willing to lead the way. There is no will.

And then you see this photograph. The one at the top of this article. The one that’s part of the essay Syrian Military Funeral by Andrea Bruce. The family in this photograph is mourning the death of a Syrian Army soldier. Not a Free Syrian Army soldier. No. A soldier who died protecting the Assad regime. This makes the photograph no less heartbreaking.

Because what is there in Syria’s future? A renewed dictatorship ruling over a newly broken populace? A Syrian Taliban? Hezbollah control for some portion of the country, Wahhabi Sunni control for another… maybe a small secular enclave somewhere near Damascus?

What did this soldier die for? And what are the resistance fighters dying for? The foreign fighters? And how much longer will they fight?