Alice in Aleppo

"None of this makes sense anymore. It's all Alice in Wonderland stuff. There is no concerted strategy. It's all ad hoc and improvisational. For the first two years, the Syrian people were very pro-American, but we've done nothing to help them, and [Secretary of State John] Kerry just keeps making things worse, pretending there's peace negotiations while the Russians are dropping 800 bombs a day."
"It makes no sense, not unless you're living in Alice in Wonderland. There is no plan. There is nothing except this idea that if we could cut a deal with Iran, everything will be fine. It isn't fine."
Michael Weiss, co-author: Inside the Army of Terror

"We have agreed to implement a nationwide cessation of hostilities in one week’s time. That is ambitious."
"The real test is whether all the parties honor those commitments."
"Yes, I agree the bombing the of past few weeks has made a difference for Assad. But that difference does not end the war. [The more territory Mr. Assad seizes], the more successful he is in creating terrorists."
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry

Syrians waiting at a crossing gate near Kilis, Turkey, to return to Syria on Thursday. Credit Bulent Kilic/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Thanks to Russia's entry into the Syrian conflict that sees a president of a country ferociously attacking his own citizens whose dissatisfaction with his rule favouring a minority sect over the majority of the population -- leaving Bashar al Assad responsible for the deaths of over a quarter-million Syrians, and the displacement of over seven million people fleeing his onslaughts -- a civil war that only months earlier was moving in favour of Syrian Sunni rebels now favours Assad's regime.

He has chemical-bombed his citizens, he has strafed them standing in bread lines from helicopter gunships, bombed their neighbourhoods, arrested and tortured and murdered Sunni Syrian teens and anyone else in the thousands, that he believes plots against his continued Alawite Baathist regime's hold on power. With the use of barrel bombs and starvation sieges he has stifled his people's lives and destroyed the unity of the country along with its ancient heritage sites and urban environments.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's decision to favour the Syrian President with the full-fledged commitment of aerial bombing, troops on the ground, along with Iran's al-Quds Republican Guard Corps, Hezbollah troops, and Shiite militias have aided Syria's military in its determination to annihilate all opposition from rebels, and that encompasses the civilian Sunni population from among whom the rebel forces had arisen. And now that Syrian rebel forces -- not the malevolently vicious forces of Daesh -- have been reduced to a struggle to carry on, a 'pause' has been announced.

Meeting with his Russian counterpart, John Kerry in a news release, announced that an agreed-upon cease-fire, that is really a brief interregnum to allow food to be delivered by humanitarian aid agencies to the encircled starving Sunnis in Aleppo and elsewhere will commence in a week's time. This 'cessation of hostilities' which both Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lavrov referred to variously, is to be somewhat temporary, it seems.

Just as U.S. President Barack Obama stepped back gladly from his 'red line' over the use of chemical weapons by Syria against its population at the urging of President Putin who spoke glowingly of diplomacy over conflict, Mr. Kerry has obligingly stepped into the same trap, extolling now the virtues of a temporary halt in Russia's, Iran's, and Syria's extermination of Syrian Sunnis.

This is to be the 'pause' that refreshes the resolve of Bashar al Assad drive to restore his honour through the honour killings that have compensated for the irritating defiance of his unruly subjects who are, after all, "terrorists".