“Just societies cannot be run by big money or armed forces with their too narrow agendas.” ~ Plato
The battle for Aleppo does not look it will end well for the rebels and jihadis who have held the city for four years, living off the looting of the houses and businesses of Damascus supporters who long ago fled the city with just a car and a few suitcases.
I met one of these émigrés during the Damascus Counter Terrorism Conference in December of 2015. She was one of the Veterans Today team’s guides and interpreters. Her manufacturing family had fourteen diversified, medium-sized businesses in Aleppo before the war, but lost them all, with the equipment and inventory loaded onto trucks and taken to Turkey to enrich the army of parasites that have fed off the Syrian War.
I don’t call the Syrian struggle a civil war, as that would give cover for the international geopolitical hoodlums who used Syria as an example of what could happen to those would not submit to their domination. As with most all the “color revolutions”, they used local assets as the cannon fodder, but the upheaval was foreign-inspired, while trained and supported by various countries and business interests seeking to profit from a future Balkanized Syria.
The Syrian Army and its allies have finally surrounded the rebel and jihadi forces in their Eastern Aleppo stronghold and brought that battle to what may be its final resolution. An extra bonus in following the news coverage has been seeing how the international anti-Syrian media has launched its own final battle to smear Damascus and the Syrian Army for doing what an elected government and loyal army is supposed to do… defend the country.
In Syria’s case the fight has been not only been with traditional opposition rebels, but also Western and NATO countries teamed up with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey to carve Syria into spheres of influence, in a classic throwback to the old colonial days. And when that did not work, the Western and Gulf State Intel agencies unleashed a large-scale terror war against the Syrian people to help tip the scales in their favor − and it almost worked.
But the above-mentioned scoundrels had another institutional helper in their dirty deed. Western media became the Syria-busters’ PR weapon to keep the Assad regime and its supporters under constant assault. Running a multi-year proxy terrorist regime change operation required a steady smokescreen operation, and I have had a front row seat watching it reach its peak during the current Aleppo battle.
Over the past ten days, I was able to do a number of TV interviews, including two Debate Show features with Press TV, with opponents who were anti-Assad regime boosters. The first was a professor from John Hopkins University in Washington, Daniel Serwer, where the topic was Battle for Aleppo. The second Debate Show a few days later was on Assad’s amnesty offer for the Aleppo rebels.
Both of these guys were walking propaganda delivery boys using the same talking points that most of the anti-Assad faction had had emailed to them by their minders. Prof. Serwer seemed to have been assigned to caste Assad as being responsible for the 400,000 deaths from the Syrian War, barrel bombing, and of course all the hospitals he claims were blown up on purpose. He even claimed that the Russia air wing was also responsible for some of these, a black lie because Russian Air Command caught the French Doctors without Borders putting out a bogus story of like eight or nine of them bombed over a few days, but where research later showed that most of the towns mentioned did not even have hospitals.
Prof. Sewer would not acknowledge that Aleppo was being liberated, but was “a conquest by an autocracy”. This outrageous statement ignored two elections, where Assad was reelected by a huge majority. One election I attended as an election monitor in 2014 in the city of Homs, where I visited five polling stations where we had free rein to interview whomever we wanted, which included the governor, Tala Barazi. The event was as much a celebration for Assad and the Army keeping the country from being taken over by the Western and Gulf State-backed jihadi terrorists as it was a political event.
My second Debate show opponent was a Michael Lane, who was supposed to be the founder of a think tank-sounding entity called the American Institute for Foreign Policy, founded in 2004. A quick Google of both came up with absolutely nothing on the Institute, and nothing on Lane, other than his Press TV shows. He had the profile of a planted talking head, where his public background had been cleaned off the internet.
And talk he did, about how Assad’s amnesty offer could not be trusted, describing it as an “unverified offer”. I countered with the long record we already have on numerous Assad amnesties which have worked just fine, where many of the takers were incorporated into the civil defense units.
Lane was also selling how humanitarian effort could easily have succeeded if the Syrian Army had stepped back and allowed the UN to handle it all. I again counter that the UN could not do that in the middle of a big battle without the Syrian Army having to be tied up providing it with security from car, truck and suicide bombers to block the rebels’ human shields from getting out of the city. We also have the track record that during the initial ceasefire, the West, Turkey and Saudi Arabia poured in more reinforcements, ammo and new weapons, like the TOWS and MANPADS, which were then used to support counter attacks all over Syria.
Corporate media has also shown its true colors on Aleppo coverage. The Guardian actually had an editorial whose purpose seemed to be an effort to save the surrounded rebels and jihadis by pressuring Syria to stop the battle. The UN could pump in all the food and supplies for the civilians, while the rebels could get resupplied by their various sponsors to later launch more counter attacks. The strategy is to continue undermining Assad via endless war, regardless of how many lives are destroyed.
The Guardian pulled out all the stops to paint the worst picture possible: “It would not just be a defeat for the rebels, perhaps an irreversible defeat for the uprising – it would be the beginning of a new, humanitarian catastrophe of unprecedented proportions in Syria…International pressure must be put on Russia to force Syrian troops to retreat, so that lives can be saved…Its machine of repression makes no distinction whatsoever between armed combatants and civilians.”
The Guardian editors appear to have gotten an assignment from British Intelligence to try to put lipstick on a pig. I had predicted during one of my Debate Shows that the Aleppo jihadis would attack the humanitarian corridors to scare their human shield civilians from taking that path, and within a day they were doing car bomb attacks and shelling the corridors.
The rebels have been counter attacking Syrian lines in an effort to open up their own supply corridors. It is they who have refused to join the peace process via a political solution, as they bet that their backers would continue to keep them in the fight during the phone ceasefire.
Turkey’s coup may have been the tipping point for a change in Erdogan wanting to concentrate all of his resources on the home front and ease out of the Syrian conflict. His main war aim now seems to be in taking on the international Gulen organization and its main sponsor, the U.S. But Erdogan seems unpredictable now, with his attempt to blackmail the EU with his demand for a visa regime by October or he would reopen the refuge floodgates.
This is hardly a predictable situation by any means, especially when we see Russia-Turkey relations being normalized, something that began before the coup; and some say this may have had an effect on its timing, as Erdogan has now openly charged the CIA and FBI with supporting the coup.
The rebels shooting down a Russian relief helicopter returning to base might have put a wooden stake through their hearts. They will now be met with cold resolve. Assad and the Russians know that the rebels and Jihadis have nothing to fight for when they have lost Aleppo, and their backers will abandon them.
Gone will be the Saudis’ dream of an energy pipeline to the Mediterranean and onward to Europe. Gone will be the dream of an autonomous rebel region that might want to someday host US military bases or even NATO in Damascus’ rear and block Iranian-Russian flights through Iraq.
The Russian cruise missile strikes from the Caspian Sea launches have not been forgotten, neither the importance of having friendly and safe ground to fly over when projecting military power. That is why the US coalition wants to keep its rebel forces in control of Aleppo.
Jim W. Dean, managing editor for Veterans Today, producer/host of Heritage TV Atlanta, specially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.