The Fall of Aleppo

The Syrian city of Aleppo has fallen. Iran, Russia, Hezbollah and the Bashar al-Assad’s Arab Socialist Baath Party regime have won.

Long known as Syria’s Stalingrad, the Battle of Aleppo has raged since July, 2012, when the Free Syrian Army opened fire on Assad’s security forces in the Salaheddine district.  

Four and a half years later, after being held by checkboard of various rebel factions, Assad’s army has retaken the city with a rogue’s gallery of international allies.

It’s just about the last place on earth you’d want to be right about now.

“Mass murder by chlorine gas,” Terry Glavin writes in Canada’s National Post. “Massacres of innocents. Bombardments by Russian jet fighters. The deliberate targeting of hospitals and clinics. The firing of mortar rounds into crowded neighbourhoods. The terror of barrel bombs dropped from Syrian army helicopters. The starvation siege that followed the city’s encirclement by Shia death squads and Assadist militias on Sept. 8.”

It’s not fashionable to care about Aleppo right now or even anything that happens in Syria aside from the eradication of ISIS.

Millions of people all over the world not named Gary Johnson believe that the Assad regime and the Russians have been fighting ISIS in Aleppo, but nope. ISIS is not in Aleppo. ISIS has never been in Aleppo. ISIS is just about the only armed group in the entire country that hasn’t been fighting in Aleppo.

Aleppo is, however, the epicenter of foreign involvement in Syria. Which brings us to Hanin Ghaddar’s excellent point in the Washington Post. We should stop calling the Syrian war a “civil war.” I’ve been calling it that for years, but I take her point. Yes, various factions inside Syria are fighting each other, but the overwhelming majority of the dead are on the anti-Assad side. The war is basically a war against all waged by the government with assistance from Russia, Iran and Hezbollah. Assad has managed to transform himself from a totalitarian Baathist into a what we might call a brutalitarian like Vladimir Putin when he laid waste to Grozny in Chechnya.

Here’s Ghaddar:

According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights, Assad’s forces have killed 95 percent of Syrian victims. Additionally, Assad controls the army, including tanks, planes and barrel bombs. He has shelled areas that witnessed peaceful protests. Assad has used chemical weapons against his own people. He controls the intelligence, security and military apparatus that have diligently and systematically worked since 2011 to arrest, torture and kill all nonviolent activists.

Assad also released dangerous Islamists from prison and allowed them to organize and build armed groups. He did this not by accident, but as a part of a strategy to create a civil war and radicalize what remained of the revolution. His strategy has been to shift the narrative from reform to sectarianism by emphasizing Islamic terrorism, thereby presenting himself as a partner in the global war on terror.

Assad can never be a partner in the global war on terror. He’s the biggest state sponsor of international terrorism in the entire Arab world, and his staunchest ally is the Iranian regime, and it’s the biggest state sponsor of international terrorism in the entire world.

And ultimately, this is Iran’s victory.

“Aleppo was liberated thanks to a coalition between Iran, Syria, Russia, and Lebanon’s Hezbollah,” says Iranian defense minister Seyed Yahya Rahim-Safavi. “Iran is on one side of this coalition which is approaching victory and this has shown our strength. The new American president should take heed of the powers of Iran.” [Emphasis added.]

“The Syrian army as a fighting force is largely spent,” writes Michael Weiss in the Daily Beast. “Without Russian air support and the some 6,000 to 8,000 Iranian-run paramilitaries Assad now relies on to wage war for him, Aleppo would never have been recaptured.”

An Iranian victory against ISIS would be one thing. We could plausibly shrug and take Henry Kissinger’s view of the Iran-Iraq War. It’s too bad they can’t both lose.

We could take a half step toward the point of view in Aleppo. Many of the rebels are Islamic extremists. Some of them, like the Nusra Front, are aligned with Al Qaeda, though as of two month ago they only had 1,000 fighters in all of Aleppo.

The truth is that rebels aren’t even “the rebels.” There are more factions than most of us can keep track of, and many of them are mutually hostile.

And they aren’t all Islamists. Secular leftist Kurds have been fighting in Aleppo, too, alongside non-political elements in the Free Syrian Army, the Syrian Turkmen Brigades, and the Syrian Democratic Forces that advocate a democratic, secular and federal Syria.

If the Assad regime were to fall instead of Aleppo, the war wouldn’t end. Everyone left standing would still have to battle it out. Lord only knows what would happen or how long that would last. It would depend in part on whether or not “the international community,” such as it is, felt like motivated to do anything to prevent the worst factions from seizing power. In the worst-case scenario, the entire country could become a Sunni Islamist terrorist state, which is why so many people are rooting for an Assad victory even though he is a monster.

An Islamist-controlled Syria would be only one possible outcome, however, if Assad were to fall. I’ll go out on a limb and say it would be the most likely outcome. Terrorists thrive in failed states, after all, and Syria is drawing them from all over the world.

Still, millions of people in Syria have no interest whatsoever in living under a Taliban-style regime, and the only reason many of them are throwing their support behind the extremists is because they want Assad and the Iranians out of power more than anything else. Hardly any of these people would join a deranged revolution if there wasn’t a modern-day Caligula in Damascus to revolt against.

In any case, what the world is getting instead of the possibility of a Sunni Islamist regime in Syria is the certainty of a terrorist state backed by the full weight and power of the Islamic Republic regime in Iran. So don’t go popping any champagne corks.

“[President-elect Donald] Trump has made it clear he wants to join the Russian side in this war,” Weiss writes, “while he is adamantly opposed to the Iranian side. But in the world of real reality they are the same side.”

The Obama administration didn’t want to do anything that threatened Assad’s stranglehold on Syria because he didn’t want to scotch his nuclear deal with Iran. Donald Trump doesn’t want to do anything that threatens Assad’s stranglehold on Syria because he wants to team up with Russia and Assad to fight ISIS, even though Russia and Assad have had little or no interest in fighting ISIS.

Since fighting alongside Russia and Assad means fighting alongside Iran and Hezbollah, the latter will bolster their victory and influence in the Middle East no matter who’s president, and they will do so at America’s (and Israel’s) expense.