As regime forces of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad tighten their grip on the rebel-held enclave of central and eastern Aleppo, there seems now to be little real chance that the estimated 80,000 who remain there will be allowed to evacuate anytime time soon under circumstance that might resemble a ceasefire. Of those that remain, it’s estimated that some 6,000 are actual fighters, the rest are civilians who have been caught up in the misery and desperation and who have been reluctant to leave their homes. A quarter of a million people from those neighbourhoods have already joined the columns of refugees.
While Moscow said on Thursday that it had suspended air attacks and ceased relentless bombardment on the rebel enclave, the evidence as witnessed by foreign correspondents — still brave enough to report from the city — is that the onslaught has continued. US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have met and continue to talk, but the reality is that there seems to be little appetite for a ceasefire now, not least when the coalition of Syrian, Hezbollah and Russian allies now has, for the first time in five years, the very real prospect of seeing the entire city capitulate under government control.
The sadder reality for those civilians caught up in the murderous maelstrom is that they have been largely abandoned by international community that is either unable or unwilling to put aside differences on the United Nations Security Council without use of a veto to secure humanitarian corridors for their safe evacuation and passage out of Aleppo. The scent of probable victory in the city has caused Al Assad to boast that the conflict, which has killed a million of his citizens and made every one in two homeless, is coming to an end.
With Idlib and Daraa set to become the only two areas under the control of anti-regime forces, the worst of this darkest chapter is but written. But when the book of this six-year insurrection and civil war is penned, it will look to the greatest exodus since the Second World War and note that few nations were there to help. And when it looks at the plight of Aleppo, it will say too that civilians died by the thousands as nations failed to intervene to save life and limb. Words fail to express the sheer horror of what Aleppo has now become.
