Category Archives: Syria

‘No place now to go’: Syrians post desperate messages from besieged Aleppo

The Washington Post reports: The shaky cellphone video shows Abdulkafi al-Hamdo, a Syrian English teacher, crouching behind a stone wall, the hood of a yellow Adidas sweatshirt pulled over his dark hair. Rain beats down in the background as he speaks into the camera.

Al-Hamdo says he has spent the night in eastern Aleppo fleeing from Syrian government forces, who had all but completed their brutal siege of the city’s last rebel-held neighborhoods on Tuesday.

President Bashar al-Assad’s troops are closing in, al-Hamdo says, fighting back tears, “maybe 300 meters away.”

“No place now to go. It’s the last place,” he says in the video, posted to Twitter just before midnight Monday. “I don’t know really what to say. Words can’t go out now. I hope you can do something to stop the expected massacres.”

He continues: “No one slept this night. I just slept for an hour. My wife, my daughter, all the people who I know, they’re . . .”

The audio cuts out first. Then the video ends.

As Syrian forces stormed the last sliver of the city controlled by the opposition, Syrians such as al-Hamdo posted desperate messages to social media, some of them saying they believed they would be captured or killed by government troops. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS retakes UNESCO heritage site Palmyra — so where is Putin’s army now?

Michael Weiss writes: “Our future Russian allies, with all their international legitimacy, are too busy elsewhere in Syria to help much against ISIS.”

So witheringly tweeted former U.S. ambassador Robert Ford on the day that the CIA went public with disclosures about Russian government hacks designed to get Donald Trump elected president; a report emerged that Trump’s imminent appointment for Secretary of State is ExxonMobil CEO Rex W. Tillerson, a personal friend of Vladimir Putin who awarded him Russia’s Order of Friendship in 2012; and news broke that ISIS has recaptured much of the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra, its most successful territorial revanche in two years.

Moscow, as Ford implied, was evidently too busy bombing the rebel-held parts of Eastern Aleppo to prevent one of its major symbolic prizes in the war in Syria from slipping its grasp.

The crossroads of several antique civilizations, Palmyra was sacked by the head-chopping fanatics of the so-called Islamic State in May 2015, just days after they seized the Iraqi provincial capital of Ramadi. After promising not to powder the standing Roman, Persian and Assyrian ruins which have made the city a UNESCO World Heritage Site, ISIS did indeed blow up millennia-old monuments, horrifying historians and archaeologists.

Palmyra’s recapture last March by Syrian government loyalists, backed by heavy Russian airstrikes and Russian-seconded ground mercenaries — including neo-Nazi veterans of the 1990s Balkans wars — was met with cheers from some Western officials, such as then-British MP and now British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, as a triumph of culture over barbarism.

Which was exactly the intended propaganda point being made by the Kremlin. [Continue reading…]

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‘We are dead either way’: Agonizing choices for Syrians in Aleppo

The New York Times reports: He had long been one of the more optimistic anti-government residents of the besieged, rebel-held section of Aleppo, trying to buoy others’ spirits even as loyalist forces closed in. But as the Syrian Army and allied militias took more and more territory in an apparently decisive offensive during the week, Yasser Hmeish, an accountant for the local medical council, grew frantic.

Soldiers seized his neighborhood on Wednesday while he worked at a clinic blocks away. Several of Mr. Hmeish’s neighbors were brought into the clinic wounded, but died before he could ask what had happened to his family.

“I don’t know anything, anything about them,” Mr. Hmeish said in an audio message, in one of scores of exchanges we had with people inside east Aleppo as the offensive unfolded. “We are about to die or be arrested.”

After years of bombing and months under siege, rebels had lost more than three-quarters of their territory in eastern Aleppo by the end of the week, throwing thousands of civilians and fighters into chaos. We followed the events in real time from Beirut, monitoring social media and talking via WhatsApp, Skype, telephone and other media with doctors, fighters, housewives, local council members, antigovernment activists, aid workers and others, including on the government side. All were people we had gotten to know through years of covering Syria’s bloody civil war.

They confided their dilemmas over whether to flee to government-held areas or stay put until the bitter end, a choice that split up many families. They described escalating bombardment and attacks that have killed women and children trying to reach safe ground. They revealed deepening rifts among rebel groups, and between fighters and civilians, over whether and how to surrender. [Continue reading…]

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The death strip at the Turkish-Syrian border

Der Spiegel reports: Bashar Mustafa, 14, was guiding a family from Aleppo through the Syrian-Turkish border area and was still a few hundred meters from the frontier when he heard Turkish soldiers yelling through their loudspeakers: “Stop!”

Bashar suddenly heard the clatter of machine-gun fire and threw himself to the ground. He saw his cousin Ali, 15, lying motionless in the dust a few meters away with blood running down his face. He had been hit in the head with a bullet and Bashar wanted to rush over to help him, but the soldiers continued firing. He was forced to spend the next several hours hiding among the thorny bushes and only when the border guards stopped firing the next morning was he able to recover his cousin’s body.

Bashar is sitting in the shade of an olive tree in the fields of northern Syria recently and relating the story of his dramatic experience, which took place in early summer 2016. He has short, black hair and is wearing an old polo shirt. He has tears in his eyes as he tells the story of what happened to him and Ali. It is the kind of thing that has been happening to people at the Syrian-Turkish border almost every day the past several months.

In its fifth year, the war in Syria has reached a new level of brutality. With the help of Russia and Iran, dictator Bashar Assad has intensified his bombing attacks on Syria’s civilian population and his regime is about to take control over what is left of Aleppo. Thousands of people have fled the city in the past several days, but the paths to neighboring countries are largely blocked. France’s ambassador to the United Nations even warned recently of “one of the biggest massacres of civilian population since World War II.”

Turkey, which has taken in almost 3 million Syrian refugees in recent years, has sealed off its borders in the wake of the spring 2016 refugee deal with the European Union. Syrians who seek to enter Turkey via airplane or ship from a third country, such as Lebanon or Jordan, require a visa, but officials only rarely issue them. And the overland route is blocked. [Continue reading…]

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Push for Aleppo aid drops using GPS-guided parachutes faces military and political resistance

The Guardian reports: Western diplomats have conceded that there are no technical obstacles to a plan to deliver airdrops of food and medicine to Aleppo using a GPS-guided parachute system, but the scheme has been stalled in the face of reluctance among military commanders and an absence of political will.

Diplomats and military from six governments – including the UK, US, France and Germany – have now seen the detailed operational plan proposed by an aid agency, which has been circulating among western officials for over a month.

The plan, which has been seen by the Guardian, relies on technology known as the the Joint Precision Airdrop System (JPads), which has been used by the US military since 2001 to supply troops in forward-offensive positions in areas of Afghanistan too difficult or dangerous to reach by road. It uses pallets dropped by parachute and guided by GPS navigation and a rudder.

According to the plan there are three identified feasible landing points inside east Aleppo. The main aim is to get some humanitarian supplies into the embattled and shrinking enclave to keep people alive in the hope that talks would lead to a longer-term solution. [Continue reading…]

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This is what will happen when Aleppo falls

David Hearst writes: Whether by habit, or tradition, the US presidential transition is the ideal time to deal with unfinished business. The handover from one administration to its successor offers tempting opportunities to create new facts on the ground in the Middle East.

Israel used the transition between George Bush and Barack Obama to launch Operation Cast Lead on Gaza which stopped two days before Obama’s inauguration on 20 January 2009. Russia is now using the transition from Obama to Trump to do the same in Aleppo.

Both sides in the Syrian civil war understand the significance of timing. The rebels foolishly depended on Hillary Clinton’s assurances to hang on until she came into power. They had no plan B for a Clinton defeat.

Conversely, the Russians understand that they have to finish off east Aleppo by the time Donald Trump is inaugurated. With the Old City fallen, the task is almost complete.

Vladimir Putin does not simply think he has just won back Aleppo. He also thinks he has won the argument with America. This much was clear from the tenor of Sergei Lavrov’s speech last week in Rome. He thinks the incoming administration has finally got the message that “terrorists” – however Russia happens to define them – pose a greater threat to US national security than Assad does.

His argument is one that few would now disagree: from Afghanistan to Libya, America used Salafi jihadis as levers for regime change only to find these weapons turned on them. Russia, Lavrov continued, was not married to Assad. But it was wedded to the Syrian state.

Russia’s actions, as opposed to Lavrov’s words, tell a different story. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, just over 10,000 people in Syria were killed by Russian airstrikes between 30 September 2015 and 30 October this year, of whom 2,861 were members of the Islamic State (IS) group, 3,079 fighters from rebel and Islamic factions, 2,565 males over the age of 18,1,013 children under the age of eighteen and 584 women.

From these figures alone, and there are others, it is clear that Russia has waged total war on an unprotected population in rebel-held areas. War on its people, its hospitals, and its markets, just like it did in Grozny 16 years ago. Its actions differ little from those of the Syrian army. Like all colonial powers, the Russian Federation has arrogated on itself the choice of deciding which Syrians live and which die. And if they are in rebel-held areas, they all die together. [Continue reading…]

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How to salvage Syria

Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan write: The war in Syria is more straightforward today than it was two years ago. That may sound counterintuitive, but “Syria,” properly speaking, exists now only in name.

A near-genocidal policy undertaken by the President Bashar Assad in Damascus has been followed by contradictory foreign interventions by Russia, Iran, Turkey and the United States, each of which has established its own zone of influence in the war-ravaged country. The resulting balkanization, a cauldron of endless conflict, has led to the worst humanitarian catastrophe of the 21st century; the deaths of 500,000, the wounding of more than 1,000,000, and the external or internal displacement of 11,000,000 — roughly half the Syrian population.

There exists, however, a narrow window of opportunity for an incoming U.S. administration to achieve minimally defined objectives: defeating the so-called Islamic State, or ISIS, guaranteeing that it cannot come back, and making sure that its main rival, al-Qaeda, cannot exploit the power vacuum that will come with the collapse of the caliphate.

Based on months of interviews with Syrian opposition figures, ISIS defectors, Sunni Arab tribesmen, U.S. military sources, and intelligence officials, we believe it necessary, as part of this plan, to keep small but effective U.S. garrisons indefinitely in eastern and northeastern Syria and western Iraq.

This is not as radical as it might appear. According to our U.S. military and intelligence sources, four installations already are being used by the anti-ISIS coalition, either openly or semi-covertly.

Developing these sites as solid anchors in the region will give the U.S. a badly needed intelligence-gathering capability in the Jazira, or Upper Mesopotamia, encompassing the arid plain that stretches across northwestern Iraq, northeastern Syria and southeastern Turkey.

In this century, the Jazira has been an incubator and a hideout for the transnational menace that, under a succession of names, including al Qaeda in Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS), and the Islamic State full stop, has bedeviled U.S. national security for over a decade. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey hosts new round of peace talks between Russia and Syrian rebels — it looks like the U.S. wasn’t invited

Business Insider reports: The US was shut out of a new round of negotiations between Russia and Syrian rebel factions hosted by Turkish officials in Ankara, a source within the Syrian opposition told Business Insider on Monday.

The opposition source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the negotiations, said American officials were not invited to take part in the talks because of recent tensions between Turkey and the US.

“The US is totally out of these talks,” this person said. “And they’re pretty angry about it.” [Continue reading…]

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How ISIS returned to Syria

Roy Gutman reports: In the spring of 2012, hundreds of militant Islamists crossed into eastern Syria from Iraq under the eyes of the Assad regime’s extensive security apparatus. As they arrived, Syrian intelligence services received two sets of instructions.

One was in writing, and contained the names and details of the jihadists, along with the instruction to “arrest and kill them.”

But that was the cover story. Even as it circulated a “kill” order, the regime sent out official messengers to convey the opposite message.

“They came from command headquarters and held meetings of the intelligence offices,” said Mahmoud al Nasr, a former intelligence official in northern Syria who defected in October 2012. ‘They told us: ‘stay away from them. Don’t touch them.’”

The jihadists arrived in groups of three, sometimes five, then it became hundreds, he said. “Everyone of them started to bring his friends,” al Nasr said. The majority joined Jabhat al Nusra, a group that publicly declared its affiliation with al Qaeda in April 2013 and then split into two groups, Nusra and the Islamic State. Some of the infiltrated jihadists joined Ahrar al Sham, a third and seemingly more moderate Islamist group.

The conflicting instructions sheds light on the little-known relationship between the Assad regime and the Islamic State. Assad claims that his domestic political opposition are all terrorists intent on destroying the Syrian state and regularly appeals to the international community for help in battling terrorism. But the regime in fact facilitated the buildup and expansion of the real terror group in Syria. [Continue reading…]

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How Facebook hurt the Syrian Revolution

Riham Alkousaa writes: “Will I die, miss? Will I die?” asks a Syrian boy in panic. The recent video shot in a wrecked hospital in Aleppo in the aftermath of a chlorine gas attack went viral on social media. Just a few months earlier, Aleppo hit the newsfeeds with another shocking image of an injured child: five-year-old Omran Daqneesh sitting in an orange ambulance chair.

Aleppo has been one of the highest trending news on social media in the United States for a while now. People express anger, sadness, disappointment; they like and share; they tweet. And what of it? Nothing changes in Aleppo.

At the same time, across the ocean, in the US, there has been a heated discussion about the major role social media played in the recent elections. Some have argued that Donald Trump’s tweets got him more media coverage and attracted voters’ attention while fake news, which spread on social media, helped him seal his victory.

So why is it that social media can help win an election in one country and cannot stop a month-long massacre in another?

Erica Chenoweth, a professor at the School of International Studies at the University of Denver, has argued that social media is helping dictators, while giving the masses an illusion of empowerment and political worthiness.

At a recent lecture at Columbia University, when asked for an example where social media played a negative role in a social movement, Chenoweth paused a little to finally say, “what comes to my mind now is Syria.”

Indeed, social media hurt the Syrian uprising. It gave the Syrian people the hope that the old dictatorship can be toppled just by uploading videos of protests and publishing critical posts. Many were convinced that if social media helped Egyptians get rid of Hosni Mubarak, it would help them overthrow Bashar al-Assad. [Continue reading…]

The Wall Street Journal reports: Steep losses by antiregime rebels in Syria have scrambled U.S. policy calculations at a crucial moment in the country’s long-running war, with the election of Donald Trump already pointing to the possibility of a dramatic shift when he takes office in January.

Mr. Trump hasn’t detailed his plans for Syria, but has outlined a likely break from the Obama administration, which has supplied small amounts of arms and funding to militias attempting to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad and has separately fought the Islamic State extremist group.

The recent gains by Mr. Assad’s forces have added impetus to calls among some of Mr. Trump’s closest advisers, as well as other top U.S. strategists, to cut back on support for the Syrian opposition. Some believe the war to oust Mr. Assad already has been lost and the U.S. should ally with Russia and possibly the Syrian government in an all-out assault on extremists.

“Show me a strategy right now that gets rid of Assad,” former House speaker Newt Gingrich, a close Trump adviser, said in an interview, suggesting no such strategy exists. “The Russians are for him and the Iranians are for him, and there’s no coalition of forces in the region that defeats him. So it starts with reality.”

Former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who also has met with Mr. Trump, said in an interview that it is unlikely Americans would support the kind of military commitment needed to unseat Mr. Assad.

“I think we have to begin by being realistic,” he said. “Assad is going to remain in power, and the Russians are committed to that.” [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: Syrian government troops pushed deeper into the rebel-held section of Aleppo on Sunday, now controlling about half of what had been for years the rebels’ enclave in the divided northern city.

Also on Sunday, airstrikes apparently carried out by the government or its ally Russia hit the towns of Maarat al-Noaman and Kafr Nabl in rebel-held Idlib Province. The strikes killed at least 20 people in each location, according to residents and White Helmets rescue workers. Footage from Maarat al-Noaman showed destroyed buildings and market stalls, and the crushed body of a toddler.

Airstrikes and shelling also continued in Aleppo, where there was no sign of a cease-fire in a bloody battle that could prove a fulcrum in the war. If the government manages to seize all of Aleppo, it will control Syria’s five largest cities. [Continue reading…]

The Guardian reports: The US and UK have been holding talks to explore ways to airdrop food and medical supplies to eastern Aleppo and other besieged populations in Syria.

The talks have been going on for months in Washington and have considered a broad range of possibilities, from parachute drops to creating an air bridge with drone flights, and even flying in edible drones that can be taken apart and eaten.

However, the discussions have been mired in disagreements between government agencies, the reluctance of the military to get involved and concern among officials that flying in aid without permission from the Damascus regime and its allies could hamper conventional humanitarian deliveries.

However, as the talks have stalled, the plight of the people of eastern Aleppo has steadily become more desperate. No road convoy has got through to the enclave for five months, hospitals have all been destroyed and rebel-held areas are under constant bombardment. [Continue reading…]

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Congress authorizes Trump to arm Syrian rebels with anti-aircraft missiles

Julian Pecquet writes: The House voted for the first time today to explicitly authorize the incoming Donald Trump administration to arm vetted Syrian rebels with anti-aircraft missiles.

While the language in the annual defense bill also creates restrictions on the provision of the controversial weapons, it represents a win for Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., a fervent advocate of helping the rebels resist President Bashar al-Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies. The Senate is expected to pass the bill next week.

Until now, the transfer of man-portable air-defense systems, or MANPADs, had been implicitly authorized in the absence of an outright ban. Critics, however, view the new provision as tantamount to a policy recommendation for the president-elect. [Continue reading…]

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Fearing abandonment by Trump, CIA-backed rebels in Syria mull alternatives

The Washington Post reports: Three years after the CIA began secretly shipping lethal aid to rebels fighting against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, battlefield losses and fears that a Donald Trump administration will abandon them have left tens of thousands of opposition fighters weighing their alternatives.

Among the options, say U.S. officials, regional experts and the rebels themselves, are a closer alliance with better-armed al-Qaeda and other extremist groups, receipt of more sophisticated weaponry from Sunni states in the Persian Gulf region opposed to a U.S. pullback, and adoption of more traditional guerrilla tactics, including sniper and other small-scale attacks on both Syrian and Russian targets.

Just over a year ago, the opposition held significant territory inside Syria. Since then, in the absence of effective international pushback, Russian and Syrian airstrikes have relentlessly bombarded their positions and the civilians alongside them. On the ground, Syrian government troops — bolstered by Iran, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and Shiite militia forces from Iraq — have retaken much of that ground.

From a slow and disorganized start, the opposition “accomplished many of the goals the U.S. hoped for,” including their development into a credible fighting force that showed signs of pressuring Assad into negotiations, had Russia not begun bombing and Iran stepped up its presence on the ground, said one of several U.S. officials who discussed the situation on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The United States estimates that there are 50,000 or more fighters it calls “moderate opposition,” concentrated in the northwest province of Idlib, in Aleppo and in smaller pockets throughout western and southern Syria, and that they are not likely to give up.

“They’ve been fighting for years, and they’ve managed to survive,” the U.S. official said. “Their opposition to Assad is not going to fade away.” [Continue reading…]

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New forms of fascism are rising east and west as a result of our collective failure in Syria

While addressing the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade in the Irish Parliament, Robin Yassin-Kassab said: Liberated Aleppo is falling. The suburbs of Damascus are falling, or have already fallen, and been cleansed of their recalcitrant population. The families of foreign militiamen are moving in. Silence is returning to a devastated and demographically-changed Syria. This presentation is therefore more a lament for the defeated Syrian revolution, and for our failure to help it, than a policy recommendation.

From spring 2011, in the context of the Arab Spring, millions from all backgrounds protested peacefully against torture, crony capitalism, corruption and poverty, and for freedom, dignity, and social justice. They called for the unity of all sects and ethnicities.

The Assad regime responded with extreme repression, shooting protestors dead, torturing many, including children, to death, and prosecuting a mass rape campaign. By summer 2012 it had provoked an armed uprising of military defectors and civilian volunteers grouped under the umbrella term ‘Free Syrian Army’.

The regime deliberately started a war because it knew a serious reform process would end in its demise. It calculated (correctly) that in a war situation it could count on strong foreign allies – unlike its opponents. And it was following the blueprint laid out by Bashaar al-Assad’s father Hafez. In the late 70s he had met a widely-based challenge with severe repression. This provoked a desperate armed uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood in the city of Hama in 1982. The regime responded by razing the city centre, killing tens of thousands. The memory of this destruction kept Syrians silent for the next three decades. [Continue reading…]

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How Assad staged al Qaeda bombings

Roy Gutman reports: When Syria’s national uprising began in March 2011, Gen. Awad al Ali was in charge of criminal investigations in the Syrian capital. One year later, the country’s top police professional was a marked man.
A string of mystery suicide bombings had targeted major security installations in Damascus and Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city, starting in late December 2011, and al Ali, fearing he’d be next, took the modest precaution of blocking off a street near his office.

The real threat, he later concluded, was not from “terrorists” that the regime said was behind the suicide bombings—but from the regime itself.

The first sign the regime was behind the bombings was when a top military aide to President Bashar al Assad stopped by al Ali’s office to examine his security arrangements. Gen. Salim al Ali, Assad’s special assistant for Damascus affairs and no relation to Awad al Ali, wasn’t there to urge better precautions. Just the opposite. [Continue reading…]

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Syrian rebels in secret talks with Moscow to end Aleppo fighting

Financial Times reports: Syrian rebels are in secret talks with Russia to end the fighting in Aleppo, according to opposition figures, a development that shows how the US could become sidelined in some of the Middle East’s most pivotal conflicts.

Four opposition members from rebel-held northern Syria told the Financial Times that Turkey has been brokering talks in Ankara with Moscow, whose military intervention on the side of President Bashar al-Assad has helped turn the five-year civil war in the regime’s favour. Russia is now backing regime efforts to recapture the rebel’s last urban stronghold in Syria’s second city of Aleppo.

“The Russians and Turks are talking without the US now. It [Washington] is completely shut out of these talks, and doesn’t even know what’s going on in Ankara,” said one opposition figure, who asked not to be identified.

US President Barack Obama’s administration has provided limited training and weaponry for the rebels but had been hesitant to give forceful backing that could turn the tide in the opposition’s favour. President-elect Donald Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly signalled willingness to back Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s efforts to shore up the Assad regime, arguing they are working to stamp out Islamic extremists.

While the secret contacts are not the first time a rebel representative has met with the Russians, those familiar with the talks said it was the first time such a large number of opposition groups were involved. [Continue reading…]

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A turning point in Aleppo

Aron Lund writes: Starting on November 27, the defenses of Aleppo’s rebel-held area suddenly gave way, allowing the government to try cutting the enclave into two. Fearing encirclement, opposition forces in the northern part of the enclave fled south, while civilians scattered in every direction—some deeper into rebel areas, some toward government-held western Aleppo. The resulting chaos enabled new regime gains. Since then, government forces and their allies have also moved into the southern Sheikh Said district, and as aircraft pummel the city, they are now putting pressure on rebel forces from nearly every direction.

The reasons for this sudden collapse remain obscure. Perhaps there were, as some have speculated, backroom deals and betrayals, or perhaps the rebels were in disarray after infighting earlier in November. In the end the truth may be straightforward: With rebel resources having been depleted by a six-month siege, the insurgents could not hold out against far superior forces.

Still, fighting in a place such as Aleppo is arduous, and it is possible that the government offensive will stall. The Russian government is reportedly still talking to both the United States and to the Syrian rebels about a truce, as opposed to a full army victory, though it seems unlikely that Assad is on board with the idea. The situation could drag on for another round or two—whether counted in days, weeks, or months—with the pro-Assad forces reportedly seeking full control over the city by January. Whatever the timeframe, the final outcome now seems inevitable: Assad will retake eastern Aleppo.

Should this happen it would represent a dramatic defeat, with powerful political repercussions for the Syrian opposition. Though many have sworn to continue fighting, some are likely to conclude that without Aleppo and with Donald Trump in the White House, there is no longer any hope of achieving a victory over Assad. [Continue reading…]

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