Washington: As Russian-backed Syrian regime forces grind the last rebel fighters into defeat, the imminent fall of the besieged city of Aleppo heralds the collision of two new realities in the massively destructive Syrian civil war.
Both of these new realities were implausible a year ago. Each will dramatically alter the dynamic of the conflict. But neither of them is likely to end it.
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Battle for Aleppo 'at its end'
The Syrian army says it is in the 'final stages' of recapturing Aleppo after a sudden advance that has pushed rebels to the brink of collapse.
The first is the likely survival, even as a pariah, of the regime of Bashar al-Assad. The second is Donald Trump's imminent arrival in the White House.
Today Aleppo is a slaughterhouse. But once it was Syria's commercial heart and its most populous city.
It has been reduced to piles of rubble as Russian, Iranian, Hezbollah and regime forces have stepped up a brutal bombardment that has reduced the rebel-controlled east to a humanitarian tragedy of unspeakable proportions.
Children's body parts litter some streets – and kids with less than a 30 per cent chance of survival are left to die, in a city described by an aid official last week as "a slow-motion descent into hell".
Tens of thousands are fleeing; hundreds of thousands hunker because they have nowhere to go; hospitals, clinics and schools are deliberately targeted as an obscene adjunct to a "starve or submit" strategy by which the regime's stranglehold on aid convoys is geared to making life unbearable in rebel-controlled communities.
Leaflets recently dropped to the 250,000 to 300,000 residents still in Aleppo's eastern quarter read: "If you don't leave these areas quickly, you will be annihilated. Save yourselves – everyone has left you alone to face your doom".
![A Syrian boy displaced with his family from eastern Aleppo eats a vegetable in the village of Jibreen south of the city ...](/web/20161214044216im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/3/j/d/3/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gt7gl6.png/1481680730762.jpg)
True words in that last phrase – and the emphasis is mine.
My enemy's enemy
There is much hand-wringing in global corridors of diplomatic power, but nothing has been done that might save civilian communities sandwiched so bloodily between headstrong but under-resourced rebels and a determined Assad, whose great good fortune was to have historic alliances with Moscow and Tehran at a time when both Russia and Iran needed to make a point to Washington.
![Papering over the cracks?: A poster of President Bashar al-Assad on a destroyed shopping mall in Homs, Syria. The slogan ...](/web/20161214044216im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/n/q/w/l/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gt7gl6.png/1481680730762.jpg)
Assad is further blessed by the presence on his turf of Islamic State – the US is leading a global military coalition bent on routing IS.
Despite in-principle objection to Assad, Washington is troubled more by the advances IS might make in the absence of Assad; and like the rest of the world, Washington seems unmoved by Assad's grotesque abuse of his own people.
![Syrians flee rebel-held eastern neighbourhoods of Aleppo into the Kurdish-controlled Sheikh Maqsoud district of the city ...](/web/20161214044216im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/0/y/s/s/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gt7gl6.png/1481680730762.jpg)
In trying to hammer IS, the West tiptoed around Assad and his Russian helpers, in particular by turning a blind eye to Assad's mimicking of Moscow's utter destruction of the city of Grozny to see off Chechen separatists in 1999-2000.
Backed by Moscow and Tehran, the regime is opposed by IS and a mishmash of rebel groups, whose levels of radicalisation range from zero to friends of al-Qaeda, and which get varying degrees of support and weapons from the Gulf states. As a US-led coalition attempts to take the fight to IS, hoping not to knock Assad from his pedestal or start a war with Russia, Washington trains and funds a handful of supposedly "vetted" rebel fighters.
![Diplomatic failure: US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.](/web/20161214044216im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/d/p/p/l/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gt7gl6.png/1481680730762.jpg)
And on the northern front, Turkey has intervened, using its claimed pursuit of IS as cover to go after Kurdish fighters who, it claims, are in league with Kurdish separatists in Turkey's south-east – and the Kurds, perhaps the best fighting force in the conflict, are two-timers, sometimes doing deals with the regime and at others with the US.
What will The Donald do?
Aleppo's fall would put Assad in control of the country's five biggest cities and its more populous western half, but how Trump might proceed in Syria is a guessing game for the US and the world – in the campaign he said he'd "bomb the s---" out of IS; and he seemed to think that the Kurds deserved more and that maybe the idea of a "safe zone" for refugees within Syria was a good one.
![A man holds the lifeless body of his son near Dar al-Shifa hospital in Aleppo in October 2013.](/web/20161214044216im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/e/z/5/a/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gt7gl6.png/1481680730762.jpg)
Few took comfort from a characteristically cryptic claim by Trump in a November interview with The New York Times: "I have a different view on Syria than everybody else".
Given Trump's fawning over Vladimir Putin and the President-elect's stated refusal to support any of the disparate Syrian rebel forces – "we have no idea who these people are," he says – Trump likely would go along for the ride on a Putin-Assad victory lap.
![The US has backed Kurdish forces in Syria, seen here giving a press conference.](/web/20161214044216im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/j/a/u/o/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gt7gl6.png/1481680730762.jpg)
But Assad's survival strengthens Tehran's regional power, and Trump will want none of that because he and many on his team see Iran as a direct threat to US interests in the region.
Similarly, anything resembling victory for Iran will stick in the craw of Washington's long-term Sunni allies in the region - Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar - who to varying degrees and at varying times have been the Syrian opposition's most active and generous supporters.
![Giving Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.](/web/20161214044216im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/q/c/b/9/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gt7gl6.png/1481680730762.jpg)
And how Trump manages the seeming contradiction of giving the Iranians a leg-up in Syria - at the same time as he says he'll do them down by rejecting the Iran nuclear deal with the US and other powers - will shed light for us on how the new President plans, or doesn't, to manage the rising tensions between regional powers Saudi Arabia and Iran, a dangerous proxy war in which Syria, Iraq and IS are relatively minor players – but into which Washington, inevitably, will be drawn.
However, the US is weakened as a player in the Middle East. Barack Obama's reluctance to intervene directly in Syria left the opening by which Moscow asserted itself to take strategic advantage over Washington.
![Russian President Vladimir Putin addresses the audience during a video link with Palmyra before a Mariinsky orchestra ...](/web/20161214044216im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/o/o/b/7/h/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gt7gl6.png/1481680730762.jpg)
"Putin looks tough and wily, while America looks incompetent and unable to sustain its commitment," says Emile Hokayem, of the International Institute for Strategic Studies' Middle East office in Bahrain. "And that's a big win because you have a lot of countries in the region which are re-evaluating their relationships.
"Now, Russia is a relatively weaker power to the US, but with Trump there's no expectation that the US will serve as a guarantor of regional security, so Russia is a very attractive partner."
![A Syrian army tank is seen in front of a wall bearing the legend "Aleppo is the capital of culture" in the east Aleppo ...](/web/20161214044216im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/3/j/c/y/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gt7gl6.png/1481680730762.jpg)
No captains on a doomed ship
Importantly, if Assad's victory amounts to military control over Syria's cities, he will still preside over sectarian fractures. And he'll most likely have a security nightmare on his hands across rural and remote Syria, as radicalised Sunni survivors of the war get succour from two sources: Islamic State and its jihadist allies, and the Gulf States and others who'll happily fund and arm the rebels, if only for the pleasure of putting a burr beneath the saddles of Damascus, Moscow and Tehran.
That would be a significant security challenge that few US experts would advise Trump to leave to Moscow to sort out on his behalf - so the new President will arguably end up having more skin in the game than his predecessor.
![Omran Daqneesh, the child whose image has defined the misery of Aleppo for many. His 10-year-old brother died from ...](/web/20161214044216im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/j/s/5/7/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gt7gl6.png/1481680730762.jpg)
Drawing a comparison with historic unrest in neighbouring Lebanon, veteran US diplomat Ryan Crocker, predicts years of fighting and unrest within the borders of the space that nominally is the Syrian state – "the Lebanon civil war was long, hot and mean and it took 15 years to end and it only ended because the Syrians moved into Lebanon and stopped it – with Syria, we're just five years into it and there's no Syria to come in and end it", Crocker told The New York Times.
Now we all sit and wait. In 2014, international outrage forced Washington and others to get behind a band of fearless Kurdish forces to help them thwart IS efforts to capture Kobane, on the Turkey-Syria border. But there's no response to pleas from rebel forces now on their knees in Aleppo.
![Mohammed Jaafar, 60, a Syrian army soldier from the fourth division poses for a picture in the east Aleppo neighbourhood ...](/web/20161214044216im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/3/j/d/2/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gt7gl6.png/1481680730762.jpg)
And sickeningly, in some quarters there's an expectation that Assad should be further rewarded - that the world community should shoulder the task of rebuilding a country that his dictatorial inflexibility has destroyed. Having demonstrated through more than five years of war that they could exert no leverage over Assad, some people propose that massive reconstruction spending will become that leverage and curb his tyrannical excesses.
Syrian reconstruction is portrayed as essential to bringing millions of refugees home from Europe and elsewhere, rather than as a reward to Assad.
![Pyrrhic victory: Russian and Syrian army soldiers gather at the last checkpoint before the front line in Karam al-Tarab, ...](/web/20161214044216im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/4/c/d/w/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gt7gl6.png/1481680730762.jpg)
But quite apart from Moscow re-establishing itself on the chessboard of the Middle East, a plausible parallel line of analysis argues that Russian interests have been advanced hugely by the flood of refugees into Europe, draining national coffers and creating divisions and political tensions that cause a surge in support for political parties that are more sympathetic to Moscow.
There are warnings the Syria of the future is likely to be a theatre of long-term war and overwhelming poverty, because as Robert Ford, former US ambassador to the country, asks: "Where's the financing for rebuilding? I don't think that Russia and Iran can afford it, and I don't think China will do it – they need hundreds of billions of dollars".
Trump is not into nation-building. The US Congress is unlikely to open its chequebook and in global institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the US and Saudi Arabia can be relied upon to block handouts for Assad.
Whatever unfolds in the regional context of the Syrian struggle, history will make a separate moral judgment on how the West has conducted itself in this admittedly treacherous gladiators' pit – Washington assembled a mighty coalition, including Australia, to go after IS - which is responsible for hundreds of deaths in Europe and North America.
But in pursuing IS, the US-led coalition was indifferent to the slaughter of hundreds of thousands and the dislocation of millions of Syrians because Assad couldn't cope with a bunch of kids daubing anti-regime slogans on a wall in 2011.
"It's the beginning of the end," Abdullah, an activist in Aleppo, told Time magazine this week. "There is nothing left – the city we knew is gone."
So too is the Middle East we knew.
Timeline: Key events in battle for control of Aleppo
2011: In March, violence breaks out during mass demonstrations in Damascus demanding political reform, civil rights and the release of political prisoners. Aleppo has a few small protests.
2012: Rebels opposed to Assad take parts of the rural areas north west of Aleppo city. Protesters in Aleppo are shot at for the first time in July and rebels start to fight for the city.
2013: Rebels cut aleppo-damascus highway to the south, forcing government forces to use a longer route. The government-held half of Aleppo comes under almost complete siege as rebels briefly also cut the long route. In October government and allied forces retake it. In April the 1000-year-old minaret of Aleppo's Umayyad Mosque collapses after it is struck during fighting.
2014: Government control of the skies starts to show as it increasingly uses jets and helicopters to strike rebels.
2015: Russia intervenes with air strikes in October to put rebels on the back foot after a series of rebel advances puts Assad's government under pressure in north-west Syria.
2016: Siege and bombardment. In September the heaviest air strikes in months hit east Aleppo and the government announces a new offensive to retake it. Then Russia and Syria declare a pause in their campaign in October, urging rebels and civilians to quit east Aleppo. Intense air strikes resume against east Aleppo on November 15, putting all hospitals out of action. Pro-government forces take the northern part of the rebel sector reducing its size by more than a third.
Much of Aleppo's historic Old City is brought under government sway, leaving the rebels trapped in a small southern portion by early December.
On December 12 rebels say they are experiencing a "terrifying collapse" as the final hours of the battle play out.
(Timeline source: Reuters)
Read also: When the war began