The West’s grim failure
The following is an excerpt from an editorial in the Guardian: Exhausted parents clutching terrified children in their arms, young people pushing the old in makeshift carts or wheelchairs and families pulling overstuffed suitcases: the scenes from east Aleppo are those of a new exodus.
As Syrian government forces move on the last urban stronghold of the anti-Assad opposition, helped by Shiite militias from Iraq, Iran and Hezbollah, hundreds of men have been rounded up and disappeared. Their relatives, as well as human rights activists, fear they may already be dead, or have become victims of Assad’s network of jails and torture centres where thousands have been murdered.
Rebel-held Aleppo seems condemned to utter destruction and defeat. A United Nations representative has described the situation as a “descent into hell.” U.S. State Department officials have made it clear that nothing much can be done.
Meanwhile, Russia’s propaganda machine is hard at work alongside the Syrian regime’s, trying to frame these events as the “liberation” of a population described as hostages of Islamic terrorists.
This is as false as it is cynical. “Terrorists” is the label attached to the opposition to Assad ever since the outbreak of the 2011 street uprising against his dictatorship — a revolution that morphed into a full-on civil war after the Damascus government decided to deploy military power, including missiles, barrel bombs and chemical weapons, against its own population. By the summer of 2015, Assad seemed on the verge of being overthrown. Then Russia launched its military intervention — all the while paying lip service to a diplomatic process the U.S. administration pursued to no avail.
The fate of Aleppo spells the abject failure of the west’s contradictory and piecemeal policies. It is a humiliation for the UN. Its fall will be an unequivocal victory for Russian strategy. The consequences, both for radicalization and for the balance of power in the region, are hard to fathom exactly. But they will not be good.