We begin the day with what is looking
more and more like the final fall of
Aleppo. The regime of Bashar al-Assad,
Russia, Iran, and they're affiliated
militia are the ones responsible for
what the UN called a complete meltdown
of humanity. The battle for Aleppo is over
"Are you truly incapable of shame is
there literally nothing that can shame you?"
Aleppo has fallen. The city, formerly
the most populous place in Syria was the
site of a major battle between Bashar al
Assad government and rebel forces.
The rebels control the eastern half of the
city and Assad the West.
The story of Syria's Civil War is a
story of flip-flops. Early on it looked
like the Assad regime was finished,
intervention by Iran and support by
Russia help prop them up. Then the rebels
backed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar and
several other sides turned the tides and
this happened a number of different
times inside the conflict.
September 2015 was a turning point in the Syrian
civil war. That's when Russia intervened
directly for the first time.
Russian airstrikes began pounding rebels
under the cover of hitting ISIS. Russian
airstrikes played a decisive role in
allowing Assad to encircle Aleppo. The
bombardment made it very difficult for
rebels to operate freely allowing Assad
to move towards Aleppo and eventually
encircle the city.
A siege is a military tactic where forces on one side
surround the other side, including any
civilians trapped in there and deny
supplies from entering the city. There is
a grim logic to imposing a siege on Aleppo.
If you deny the rebels food and medicine
eventually they lose the physical and
mental capability to fight. Assad's vicious
siege worked as intended. The rebels
collapsed allowing assad forces with
Iranian and Russian backing to stream
into eastern Aleppo. Almost immediately
reports of massacres started filtering
out of civilians being killed on the
streets of women committing suicide to
avoid being raped by Assad's forces.
It's hard to know how many were killed in
this initial purge. We do know
shortly after the siege was broken an
evacuation agreement was struck allowing
again an unknown number of civilians to
escape into other territory mostly to
the city of Idlib, still in rebel hands.
The United States had the military power
to break the siege of Aleppo and prevent
the city from falling but doing so would
have been extremely dangerous.
For one thing the United States would
have needed to have coordinated with
rebels on the ground, some of whom were
extremists. For another it would mean
that American planes would have been
flying in hostile airspace with Russian
planes. If the United States were to
engage Russian planes that would mean a
direct exchange of fire between two
nuclear-armed powers a risk that very
few in Washington were willing to take.
Third,
even if the US had temporarily broken
the siege of Aleppo and prevented it from
falling it would have required a
tremendous an open-ended commitment to
prevent Assad from simply reimposing the
siege after Americans left. Whether or
not you think an American intervention
would have been worth the risks
there's no way to save Aleppo now. The
city has fallen and Assad's troops have
gone and committed untold atrocities
with who knows how many more left to go.
The rebels have been dealt a devastating
blow one it's not clear they can
recover from. This victory for Assad
has been achieved with the support of
two major international powers Russia
and Iran and it has involved atrocities
that are supposed to be prevented under
international law. They fought
horrifically and they won that's the
lesson of Aleppo.