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I noted a couple of days ago that Bashar al-Assad’s forces, under Russian air cover, have moved to encircle Aleppo by breaking rebel sieges of a couple of government-held towns, Nubl and Zahraa, to the north of the city. This is actually very good news for the people in those towns, who were, par for the course in this war, being starved to death by their besiegers. Unfortunately, it doesn’t end there. Now Assad is in a position to establish a siege of his own, around Aleppo. It’s unlikely that he’ll try to directly assault the city, which would mean a lot of dangerous street by street fighting, but he may be able to starve its remaining population to death as he’s doing in Madaya. Only where Madaya contains a few thousand people at most, there are hundreds of thousands of people trapped in Aleppo. The threat of a siege has caused many to flee the city and head north, creating a brand new refugee crisis along the Turkish border. Buzzfeed reported today on this budding humanitarian catastrophe, the latest of so many in this war:
Rami Jarrah, a Syrian journalist and activist who has worked extensively in Aleppo, said the government plan seemed to be “to promote as much desertion of the city as possible now in build up to performing a total siege of Aleppo. Sieges have proven to be successful in terms of draining the opposition into submission.”
Fearing this, civilians have been pouring out from Aleppo and toward the Turkish border. “The regime is pursuing a policy of deportation,” said one rebel fighter from Aleppo by phone on Friday. “It will put pressure on Turkey by increasing the flow of refugees.”
Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey’s prime minister, said in a speech on Thursday that between 60,000 and 70,000 people were headed toward Turkey from Aleppo. As of Friday afternoon, Turkish authorities had not opened the border to let them pass. In an emailed statement, Pablo Marcos, the operations manager for Syria at Doctors Without Borders, said the group was closely monitoring the situation in the town of Azaz, where those fleeing were massed. “The situation is extremely fluid, and we expect the humanitarian consequences to be severe,” he said. “We are already seeing massive displacement as people flee north towards the Turkish border in search of safety.”
Assad already forced the rebel surrender of Homs in December by starving the people inside, so his forces know how to go about an operation like this. Assad’s victories also cut the rebels’ Idlib stronghold off from one of its key supply routes:
Yesterday, after the Geneva talks had fallen apart altogether, John Kerry had a phone call with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in which he “warned” Russia to stop its air campaign in Syria. They’re supposed to have talked again, either yesterday or today, but to what end I don’t know. Does Russia have any reason to stop what it’s doing? Assad’s position looks stronger right now than it has since at least 2014, and if Aleppo falls that will be a huge blow to the rebels. From Russia’s perspective, things in Syria couldn’t be going much better. I’m not sure what “warning” Kerry could have made.
On the other hand, maybe he was warning Lavrov to let up before the Saudis invade Syria and shake everything up. Which they’re now volunteering to do:
Saudi Arabia has offered for the first time to send ground troops to Syria to fight Islamic State, its defence ministry said on Thursday.
“The kingdom is ready to participate in any ground operations that the coalition (against Isis) may agree to carry out in Syria,” said military spokesman Brigadier General Ahmed al-Asiri during an interview with al-Arabiya TV news.
Saudi sources told the Guardian that thousands of special forces could be deployed, probably in coordination with Turkey.
The Saudis are hell-bent on getting rid of Assad, of course, so the idea that they’d deploy to Syria just to fight ISIS is dubious, to say the least. Asiri claims that the war in Yemen is going so well that the Saudis can “free up” some forces to head to Syria, but really? Fighting there is still bogged down around Taiz, and the only discernible “progress” has been in terms of the civilian body count (luckily the Saudis are now planning to “investigate” the high number of civilian deaths, so I’m sure things will start improving quickly). On the plus side, I guess, a US drone strike earlier this week killed Jalal Baleedi, who was reportedly either a high-ranking official within al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula or a recent defectee to ISIS and the brand new head of their Yemen operations. Anyway, The Guardian talked to a Saudi analyst named Mohammed Alyahya, who said that “there is frustration with the current efforts put in place to fight Daesh” within the kingdom. That’s a bit rich, but sure, OK.
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 