Marking the End of Assad's Rule in Syria

"As his military failed to hold Aleppo and then Hama, Assad issued an order raising soldiers' salary by 50% - but that in itself is unlikely to turn the tide."

"Russian planes backed up Syrian forces in Hama, but clearly not strongly enough to make an impact.

The lack of all out Russian military support has fuelled speculation that Moscow may be less able to play the game changing role that it performed in Syria in 2015. That would be down to almost three years of war in Ukraine, draining its reserves of manpower and military hardware."

"But Russia still has compelling reasons to stay the course with Assad. President Putin's decisive, full-scale military intervention, which kept the Syrian leader in power when he was close to defeat, showed up the failure of Western allies - the US in particular - to honour their promises of support to the rebels."

BBC

Rebel fighters hold weapons in front of the Hama governor's building on Dec. 5 after Syrian rebels captured the city during their advance across northern Syria. (Mahmoud Hassano/Reuters)

On Thursday, Syrian insurgents entered Hama following days of intense clashes with government forces. The Syrian army contended its withdrawal from Hama after insurgents broke its defences was merely a tactic on their part to protect the civilian population. But it's clear that the weeklong offensive has bought large parts of Syria firmly under the insurgents' control.

 

Hama, Syria's fourth largest city, saw the Syrian army 'redeployed' taking positions outside the city, ostensibly to protect civilian lives. In all likelihood the next target for the insurgents will be the central city of Homs, the third largest in Syria, about 40 kilometres south of Hama. Homs is the gateway to Damascus, Assad's capital seat of power and control of the coastal region where he has his support base of Alawite Syrians.

 

The de facto chief of the Syrian insurgency, Abu Mohammed al-Golani, announced through a video message that the insurgency has taken the city of Hama in a "conquering that is not vengeful, but one of mercy and compassion". Somewhat like the sanctimonious statements of the Taliban when they took Kabul, attempting to reassure the international community that they had changed since the Western occupation of 2001; they were kinder and gentler, and would welcome international investors. As they went about their death-search for Western collaborators and supporters of the West-backed government.

Al-Golani, leader of Hayat Tahrir al0-Sham, one of al-Qaeda's branches in Syria, is considered a terrorist group and with good reason. Following three days of fighting with government forces on the outskirts of the city, the Syrian insurgents took Hama. After 'resisting' the insurgents for days, the Syrian military stated that a number of troops were killed, accusing the attackers of relying on suicide attacks to break through the city's defences. 

 

A charge that will certainly fail to embarrass and humiliate the insurgents whose methods are no different from that of the Islamic State, and who doubtless treated the statement with the jeering humour it deserved.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights based in Britain, explained that after fierce battles within Hama, opposition gunmen took control of police command headquarters as well as the airbase and central prison. Hundreds of prison detainees were free to leave. "If Hama falls, it means that the beginning of the regime's fall has started" Rami Abdurrahman, the Observatory's chief, stated, prior to the city's capture. 

An umbrella group of Turkish-backed Syrian militias called the Syrian National Army, appears to be fighting alongside the jihadi group HTS in the offensive. The conflict which began with a popular uprising in March of 2011 has been reignited after recent years of stagnation. Hama's fall to the Islamist group of terrorists without doubt features the end of Bashar al-Assad's rule following the stunning capture of Aleppo.

 

Syrian Islamist rebel leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani speaks at an unknown location in this still image from 2016 file video obtained on Dec. 5, 2024. (Orient TV/Reuters )

 

"The HTS leader known by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, issued a message to the Iraqi prime minister, Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani, pledging that the fighting in Syria “will not spill over into Iraq”, and urging al-Sudani’s government to “distance itself from the situation in Syria”."

"Speaking to CNN, al-Jolani said the insurgents’ aim remains to topple the Assad regime in Damascus.

“When we talk about objectives, the goal of the revolution remains the overthrow of this regime. It is our right to use all available means to achieve that goal,” he said."

The Guardian

Treating Bashar's Victims

"They looked almost like they were coming out of a concentration camp."
"They were coming in not just injured or dehydrated, malnourished and psychologically traumatized."
"They [surgeons] would have amputated below the knee but all these wounds were infected and so we had to perform amputations above the knee to get less infection."
"What we were seeing was probably the tip of the iceberg."
"I treated her [4-month-old orphan with broken legs and fractured pelvis] and had to leave her and hope she gets through to Turkey. She's a beautiful little baby but she's not eating or drinking and will be dead in a week if she doesn't get treatment."
David Nott, British surgeon-volunteer, Idlib province, Syria

Around 30,000 people were evacuated from rebel-held east Aleppo Credit: AFP 

Who will be there to give that baby the soul-nourishing love and emotional support and physical dedication she will need, to want to live? Deprived at her young age of the presence of parents, destroyed by a war they could do nothing to prevent their baby from experiencing, she will be deprived of the will to live, irrespective of the best efforts of humanitarian workers like Dr. Nott.

This man's exceptional dedication to giving aid led to his repeated trips into Syria since 2011 where he undertook the training of many doctors working in east Aleppo's hospitals, now makeshift, after their destruction by Syrian regime and Russian airstrikes deliberately taking them out of commission. Just as the barrel-bombing of civilian enclaves in east Aleppo had a defined purpose, so did the equally deliberate bombing of the city's hospitals.

Dr. Nott, along with other dedicated volunteers, much less the remaining medical personnel from Syria's second-largest city, are attempting to cope with the flood of the wounded who exited Aleppo. Men, women and children presenting with untreated wounds. The six-month siege that deprived them of food and water, medicine and hope, has been lifted, temporarily. An evacuation of 30,000 civilians and rebel fighters under terms of a ceasefire.

Dr. Nott estimated that among the patients he was seeing it was not the elderly and children, most vulnerable during the siege who would have long-since died of wounds. Those he treated represented the most fit of the Aleppo residents, able to survive the rigours of the siege for whatever reason; their basic health and availability of food they could scrounge, however pitiful the quantity and quality.

Doctors in Aleppo had no choice but to perform hundreds of amputations, to save lives. They had no anaesthetic, nothing which could be used, to sterilize wounds, leaving injuries susceptible to infection and inevitably requiring that they had no option but to amputate patients for a second time, to ensure they wouldn't die of catastrophic infection and gangrene.

On his own, Dr. Nott operated on 90 people in the space of a week. Among them 30 children. He described patients as being "in a desperate state", having had little food for months, then having to cope with no shelter in an atmosphere of snow and  freezing temperatures. The agreed-upon ceasefire with hopes it would lead to peace talks will at the very least suspend further atrocities committed by the state against its population.

Cold Comfort and Abandonment

"What is happening in Aleppo is tragic and it needs to change."
"Our [Canadian government] focus has always been in in Iraq and that is our focus now. Right now we have no plans to be militarily involved in Syria."
Canadian Defense Minister Harjit Sajjan: London meeting of defence ministers fighting ISIL

Reuters -- Israelis protested about the war in Syria in Jerusalem

"We slept in the streets [through rain, freezing winter temperatures]. It's shameful. Where is the world?"
"You don't know if it's an airplane [overhead] or shelling or rockets. You never know."
Unnamed east Aleppo Syrian, weeping in fear and despair, leaning on crutches

"It took four thousand years to build Aleppo -- hundreds of generations. One generation managed to tear it down in four years."
"We feel all strongly that the history of Aleppo through this war will be a black chapter in the history of international relations."
"[Aleppo] gave to world civilization, and world civilization was not there to assist the people of Aleppo when they needed us the most."
Jan Egeland, UN humanitarian aid co-ordinator for Syria

People walk as they gather to be removed from a rebel-held sector of eastern Aleppo, Syria, on Thursday (Abdalrhman Ismail/Reuters) 

Meekly seeking official agreement that the United Nations would be authorized by the Syrian regime to aid in the evacuation plans of east Aleppo, it has instead found itself locked out while pro-government forces prevent aid vehicles from entering the rebel-held districts from where an estimated 50,000 people have managed to flee. Precluding witnesses to summary killing of civilians, to detaining of young men.

The Syrian state news agency SANA reported that 985 "terrorists and their families" had been evacuated through the auspices of the regime, sending its infamous green school buses, re-purposed to transport fear-dazed residents of east Aleppo who show up at checkpoints out of the city systematically destroyed by their government in its determination to demolish any hope of opposition survival.

"According to several sources, an Iranian-backed militia blocked a road that the evacuees would be using to reach the Aleppo countryside. It then started firing."
"According to the reports, they were protesting against this evacuation deal, which would see the villages of Fua and Kefraya evacuated in a similar way east Aleppo was."
Al Jazeera reporter

Laying siege, starving out the residents, refusing to permit humanitarian aid to deliver medicines and medical assistance along with potable water, offering safe passage to those wishing to leave, permitting rebel fighters to leave to travel to rebel-held territories, making arrests, disappearing hundreds of young men, imprisoning and torturing others, never to be heard from again. Others yet forcibly conscripted into the military. And repeat and repeat where necessary.

Bashar al-Assad is jubilant. "History is being made. What is happening is bigger than congratulations", he exulted, describing it on a scale of world-class historical events, comparable to the birth of Christ and the Prophet Mohammad's introduction of Islam's Qur'an to warring Bedouin tribes. The buses that are assigned to pick up anguished Syrians to deliver them to rebel-held territory in Idlib, bear Assad's portraits displayed prominently.

According to Mohammed Abu Jaafer, head of the enclave's forensics department a "tremendous crowd" appeared at a pre-designated collection point to be evacuated by bus on Thursday. He estimates that 70,000 civilians are yet awaiting evacuation. The Turkish news agency Anadolou was informed by a Turkish official that Syrian government forces had taken at least 800 people into custody before the latest ceasefire agreement was suspended and with it, the evacuations.

Some injured children are being treated in a field hospital near Idlib -- Associated Press

Once government forces had retaken most of east Aleppo, some six thousand civilians and rebels are said to have since left. Among them an estimated 2,700 children, according to an UN agency report. Tens of thousands of cold and hungry people remain stranded in the east of the city, awaiting their turn to leave that immense graveyard of civilization. In Idlib and Aleppo provinces whee the rebels still hold ground, finding housing for the evacuees has become a high priority, many of them consigned to camps.

But the rebel-held areas are precisely where the evacuated Syrians out of east Aleppo choose to go, where they are at least temporarily safe. Until such time as the regime completes its command of east Aleppo, though rebel commanders state that thousands of rebel fighters remain there and intend to fight to the end. Once the end arrives, the regime will inevitably turn its attention to restoring other rebel-held positions to itself, through siege, bombardment, starvation, privation, barrel bombs.

Buses evacuate rebel fighters and their families from rebel0held neighbourhoods in the Syrian city of Aleppo. A convoy of ambulances and buses left rebel territory Thursday in the first evacuations under a deal for opposition fighters to leave the city after years of fighting. Karam al-Masri/AFP/Getty Images

The evacuated civilians who remain in Idlib and Aleppo provinces know that their agony is not over, merely suspended.

The Expected Massacres

"No place now to go. It's the last place."
"I don't know really what to say. Words can't go out now. I hope you can do something to stop the expected massacres."
"No one slept this night. I just slept for an hour. My wife, my daughter, all the people who I know, they're ..."
Ahdulkafi al-Hmdo, Syrian English teacher, east Aleppo

"We may not be able to send any more messages as regime forces push closer and closer."
"This may be close to if not the last communication."
"You really blew it this time. You really really had an opportunity to be the hero, fly in here with a cape and help out these poor people."
Bilal Abdul Kareem, American journalist, east Aleppo

"I am waiting to die or be captured by the Assad regime."
"Pray for me and always remember us."
Ameen al-Halabi, photographer, east Aleppo

Free Syrian Army fighters fire an anti-aircraft weapon in a rebel-held area of Aleppo, Syria. REUTERS/Abdalrhman Ismail

While it was raining, and the cease-fire held, thousands of Syrian Sunnis, men, women, children, trudged out of east Aleppo to find hopeful haven from the most immediate effects of the Syrian regime's war on its Sunni population. They were assured safety if they went toward Kurdish protection. They were assured more of the same if they streamed toward those areas still held by the rebels. Some of them would never again stream anywhere, summarily executed by Syrian troops whom they had the misfortune of coming across, a little glitch in the ceasefire.

It was, in any event, a ceasefire that, like all others, had no staying power. Russia claiming on behalf of the Syrian regime it so stoutly defends, that the rebels broke the agreement, certainly not the military. As though the honour of Hezbollah, the Iranian-supplied Shia militias and the Alawite regime's military would be impugned despite their righteous declaration of commitment to defeating "terrorists" for the greater good of the country.

The opposition "terrorists" have been giving west Allepo residents a taste of the gory misery suffered by east Aleppo residents.

Smoke rises as seen from a government-held area of Aleppo, Syria December 12, 2016. REUTERS/Omar Sanadiki

And while the rain added to the misery of the tens of thousands of Sunni Syrians in east Aleppo made homeless and fearing for their lives through the relentless government onslaught, let alone envisioning what will ensue when their ruined urban landscape streams with government soldiers and Shiite militias, anticipating a slaughter to come on a much larger scale than the initial one hundred residents summarily dispatched to death, it had a positive aspect in that the bombing temporarily halted since the planes court disaster flying in those conditions.

There is nothing of any value whatsoever left in east Aleppo. Which once housed an estimated two and a half million people. East Aleppo is a forlorn wasteland, a once-thriving business hub, a beautiful city with heritage substance and cultural value whose population lived in near first-world economic security has been reduced to a faded memory. All hospitals, medical clinics, schools and other civic structures of merit and need have been deliberately targeted and destroyed. Medical personnel are huddled together in cloistered areas hoping to survive the deluge of bombs.

It is no longer possible to collect the dead for burial, to bring the injured for medical aid to medical institutions for such civilizational edifices no longer exist in east Aleppo. The siege has led to scarcity of potable water, edible food, any notion of normalization where even band-aids might be available to help secure massive wounds. Backed by air power from Russia the Assad regime has destroyed the rebel defence networks, leaving over 100,000 people still moored and mired within the destroyed city, fearful of the regime's advance and what it will mean to their hopes for survival.

"Activists in Aleppo are tweeting out their final, harrowing goodbyes. They will almost certainly be detained/tortured/killed upon capture."
"The sinking feeling in your stomach as you read contacts' last messages from Aleppo. God forgive us for not helping our own people."

Forces loyal to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad stand atop a damaged tank near Umayyad mosque, in the government-controlled area of Aleppo, during a media tour, Syria December 13, 2016. REUTERS/Omar Sanadiki 

Cleansing East Aleppo of "Terrorists"

"We were sleeping when a barrel bomb fell near our home."
"We went down and discovered it was chlorine gas. The victims weren't activists or anything ... but they were suffocating so much, they turned blue."
"It was a man, four kids, and his wife. The oldest boy was ten years old. Why did this happen? May God curse you, Bashar (al-Assad)."
Aleppo resident

"It is imperative all parties agree to the plan and allow us to secure immediate, safe and unimpeded access to provide relief to those most in need in east Aleppo, but equally in all other parts of Syria where there are people in need."
Joint statement, Syria Humanitarian Coordinator Ali Al-Za'tari, Regional Humanitarian Coordinator for the Syria Crisis Kevin Kennedy

"[Saturday's bombardment of hospitals marked] a dark day for east Aleppo."

"The attacks have destroyed entire hospitals, electric generators, emergency rooms and wards, forcing them to stop all medical activities."

"It is not only MSF that condemns indiscriminate attacks on civilians or civilian infrastructure, including hospitals, but also humanitarian law. The message is simple and I don't know how to say it any louder: Stop bombing hospitals."

Doctors Without Borders emergency coordinator Teresa Sancristoval 

A wounded child is rescued by a White Helmets volunteer after airstrikes on eastern Aleppo Friday.  CNN

Full bombing of east Aleppo has been resumed by the regime of Bashar al-Assad, while his ally, Vladimir Putin is no doubt ecstatic to have ordered the pride of the Russian fleet including its sole aircraft carrier into the Mediterranean off the Syrian coast to show the international community that Russia means business and boasting that it is targeting Islamic State and al-Qaeda's Nusra militias, while denying that it has had any hand in bombing Aleppo now.

So it has had nothing to do with a suspected chemical attack that has destroyed the lives of civilians, nor with the barrage of barrel bombs that hit the neighbourhood of al-Sakhour, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the Aleppo Media Center.  Local medics confirmed that victims in the al-Sakhour district had suffocated to death as the bomb that hit them was laced with chlorine gas. Moscow may have distanced itself from the actual bombing in Aleppo at this point, but it is entirely complicit with the mass murderer who orchestrates it.

Rescuers were busy in an area where several hospitals were bombed on Friday, leaving the chief of a pediatrics clinic frantic to find somewhere to move his patients. "Now it [his pediatric hospital] is being bombed ... I am sorry ... I have to go to transfer the children", he stated through a text message. Dr. Hatem noted that his facility had been targeted multiple times on Friday and on the Wednesday before. Not strategically, of course, simply coincidentally.

The 275,000 Sunni Syrians still living in the rebel-held enclave fear to leave their homes, hoping that their personal shelters will suffice to protect them from the air assaults courtesy of their president who speaks of six or seven thousand rebels holding his, Assad's 'people', hostage to their agenda. That it is for this reason that he cannot, will not accede to a United Nations recommendation that east Aleppo be granted "self rule".

Impossible, huffed Assad, since that would be tantamount to violating "national sovereignty". Violating the human rights of Syrian Sunni civilians is obviously a matter of far lesser moment. Instead, this sanctimonious butcher chooses to bomb civilians as well as the hospitals where their wounds could be treated. Syria Civil Defence, the volunteer rescue service known as the White Helmets, confirmed that 180 air strikes hit east Aleppo on Saturday alone.

Dr. Mazen Kewara, director of the Syrian American Medical Society, warned that "For the first time, eastern Aleppo is out of hospitals operating at full capacity". Major trauma hospital were taken out of service, leading to the forced evacuation of babies, according to Doctors Without Borders. Though according to east Aleppo activists, five other hospitals in eastern neighbourhoods yet retain some level of practical functionality. Perhaps, under the circumstances, not for long.

Eastern Aleppo has been under heavy bombardment since Tuesday  Reuters

Enter the Resolute, Powerful New Russia

"The ancient city of Aleppo, a place of millennial civility and beauty, is today a slaughterhouse - a gruesome locus of pain and fear, where the lifeless bodies of small children are trapped under streets of rubble and pregnant women deliberately bombed."
"[The siege and bombardment of Aleppo's rebel-held east are among the] crimes of historic proportions [being committed in Syria]."
"[The Human Rights staff has] documented violations of international humanitarian law by all parties in Aleppo."
"Armed opposition groups continue to fire mortars and other projectiles into civilian neighbourhoods of western Aleppo, but indiscriminate air strikes across the eastern part of the city by government forces and their allies are responsible for the overwhelming majority of civilian casualties."
"These violations constitute war crimes. And if knowingly committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against civilians, they constitute crimes against humanity."
"[The failure of the international community - particularly the UN Security Council - to protect civilians and halt the bloodshed] should haunt every one of us."
UN human rights chief Zeid Raad Al Hussein

EPA -- Zeid Raad Al Hussein said the failure to protect civilians in Syria "should haunt everyone of us"

"Crimes of historic proportions" were being perpetrated in eastern Aleppo and elsewhere within the country, an impassioned accusation that an emergency session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva heard from its head, Mr. Zeid, causing Syria's permanent representative to the United Nations, Hussam al-Din Ala, to respond with his own livid and dismissive statement as he insisted that the Syrian government was entirely within its rights under international law to defend itself against terrorism.

A self-exculpatory explanation that obviously failed to impress those present, including the charity Save the Children which issued its own warning, that aid workers and medical professionals stationed in eastern Aleppo engaged in life-saving humanitarian efforts were sending reports of widespread use of cluster bombs, banned under international law. A statement surprising no one who can use their mental faculties to interpret what they see, hear and read.

How refreshing: the Human Rights Council actually exercising its franchise to pinpoint and illuminate with all the horrified dismay it deserves, the medieval criminality of a modern-day, supposedly civil-advanced nation in the Middle East, pitilessly targeting its own civilian population for annihilation with the use of both technologically advanced and internationally forbidden weapons, from chemical attacks to barrel bombs to bunker-busters. Ably assisted by an emerging world power; Russia.

And because of missing security guarantees, and given that humanitarian groups associated with the United Nations have previously suffered the misfortune of coming under fire from Russian and Syrian warplanes and bombs, the UN stated it had no option but to delay plans to proceed with medical evacuations from Aleppo, hoping to take advantage of the second eleven-hour "humanitarian pause" unilaterally declared on generous impulse by Syria and Russia. Who that pause has benefited has been a puzzle, other than to symbolically demonstrate the humanitarianism compelling the two allies.

Russia has told civilians to leave rebel-held Aleppo through several corridors-- Reuters

Russia plans, it has announced, to suspend air strikes between 08:00 and 19:00 local time on Saturday to enable both civilians and rebels to leave the city through what they describe as safe corridors. Both civilians and rebels can be forgiven for construing that invitation as a possible forfeiture of life and limb, given their experiences to date of Russian humanitarian offers. The result being that, unsurprisingly, very few people have reportedly taken advantage of the offer. As for the rebel factions, their lack of gratitude can be assessed in their assertion that to do so would result in forced displacement and surrender.


Meanwhile, passing through the English Channel in international waters, a Russian naval convoy of war ships from the Norwegian Sea is en route to Syria through the eastern Mediterranean. Among them is the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov, the only carrier in the Russian navy. The aircraft carrier is capable of carrying over 50 aircraft. Its weapons systems include granit anti-ship cruise missiles, a formidable combination. One can be forgiven for speculating further on the need to dispatch such a convoy, and to that particular geographic point.


According to Friday's Komsomolskaya Pravda: "This is no tourist trip to the Med. It will strengthen Russia's current naval presence off the Syrian coast and provide air cover. The aircraft carrier planes and on-board weapons may also be used for strikes against terrorists." Strikes against terrorists? What terrorists? The besieged Sunni Syrians in Aleppo and elsewhere who have already paid the price of protesting their unequal status in a Shiite-led government that describes its civilian opponents as terrorists?

The venerable British Broadcasting Corporation reads the ominous signs somewhat differently, as a symbolic message to the West, that Russia, powerful Russia, is back in the game, and equal in its resolute military manifestations wherever Mother Russia's interests lie geographically, to any significant presence the West is capable of cobbling together. Russia means business, it is a re-emerging power capable of rising above and beyond the criticism levelled at it by a jealous and paranoid NATO, and the rest of world had better recognize that fact.