ALEPPO THE TRAGEDY OF THE CENTURY
The Sunday Times’ Christina Lamb reports on a year of brutal fighting that has brought Syria to its knees
NOTHING THIS YEAR has been more horrifific than the destruction of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and one of the oldest inhabited cities on earth. As Western leaders stood by, those in the rebel-controlled east had their homes, schools and hospitals pounded by air strikes. Under siege since July, forced to eat leaves and burn furniture to keep warm, things got even worse as November brought a relentless offensive, with shells and bombs raining down and Russian-backed Syrian troops (with Hezbollah and Iranian help), sweeping into more and more of the area. With reports of civilians being shot on the spot and men taken to torture camps, one UN official said there had been a ‘complete meltdown of humanity in Aleppo’.
After five years of war, taking Aleppo is a major victory for the regime of President Basha al-assad, and means it will control the country’s five biggest cities and most of its more populous west.
Russian air power, Iranian expertise and Hezbollah and Afghan manpower has turned the war in Assad’s favour and left the rebels with only the province of Idlib, a few isolated pockets of territory in the provinces of Aleppo and Homs, and in and around the capital, Damascus.
Many of the rebels in Aleppo and the north are also from Islamist groups, such as the al Qaedalinked Al Nusra Front, leaving Syrians with the unenviable choice of Assad or those using brutal means to impose their own view of Islam. In other words, Assad is exactly where he wants to be. I interviewed him in his Damascus palace in October and he was in defiant mode, clearly believing he is there to stay.
Increasingly, it looks as if the West may have to deal with the man David Cameron called a ‘butcher’, the man who has crossed so many red lines, deploying chemical weapons in civilian areas as well as
WE HEARD A LOT about traumatised women during the final months of the US election, as it devolved into a referendum on our humanity and a cornucopia of our worst fears confirmed: society’s rabid hunger to punish female ambition, the futility of reporting sexual assault, gruesome lies about abortion debunked to mass indifference, millions of our friends and neighbours cheerily voting for our degradation.
A headline in New York Magazine in early November observed, ‘Therapists say this election is traumatising women’. Social media shook with a resounding, ‘Yes, duh.’ One psychotherapist told Time magazine, ‘Women I’ve seen for years are only now bringing up physical and sexual trauma from their past.’ The same glissade of revelations was happening in public: women flayed open our worst memories, begged to be listened to and believed and protected and maybe, finally, left alone. ‘See?’ we cried. ‘We are full of secrets. He said he did it. We say it’s been done to us. Surely that’s enough.’ (It wasn’t.)
The pain was heightened by the hope – we were so close to affirming women’s true, substantive equality and our culture’s trust in us. In the last days of the campaign, you began to hear an exhilarated fizz even
from some die-hard Hillary Clinton critics. For the first time in history, we were going to choose a woman as our commanderin-chief. She was to come on the heels of our first black President (my biracial stepdaughters, only babies under George W Bush, wouldn’t remember a time when a white man was President) and she would ascend to the office by toppling the acme of unearned male power and entitlement.
And then, loss. Not just loss, but worst-case scenario. So many groups of people were suddenly plunged into danger that it was impossible to know where to throw your body. Immigrants, Muslims, trans people, gay people, non-binary people, women, black people, brown people, disabled people, journalists, activists: any attempts to sum up the enormity of Trump’s ‘win’ and develop an action plan were inadequate by default. The overwhelming breadth of Trump’s targets feels designed: how can we defend everything at once? Despair breeds acquiescence, and they know it.
It’s strange to wake up and realise you were living in a golden age. I didn’t comprehend it until the morning of 9 November, but Barack Obama’s America felt like a place where progress wasn’t just possible, but inevitable. That’s not to say he didn’t let us down in some profound ways but, for eight years, we could work knowing that there was a grown-up in charge. We had nuanced conversations about diverse media representation instead of elementary arguments about whether racism is real. There was still boundless work to do on defending and expanding abortion access, but we were finally off the defensive about the necessity of the procedure. Powerful rapists were being brought low; college students were learning that the absence of a ‘no’ doesn’t mean ‘yes’. Things were moving.
And now, this. I don’t know if 2016 was the US’S last fair election. I don’t know if Western Europe will fall to white nationalism in much the same way. I don’t know if we can pull America back from the brink. But I do know that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by two million and counting. I know that, barring catastrophe, people of colour will eventually outnumber white people in the US, and if our democracy survives then white nationalism cannot. I know Donald Trump needed massive propaganda campaigns and strategic voter suppression and the exploitation of the electoral college and the interference of Putin to snatch back one final dynasty of dying white male supremacy. I know the people of my country made it clear with their votes that they want a progressive country. They want the future, not the past. That’s something to hold on to. To the future.