March on Aleppo raises fears of new exodus

Beirut, Lebanon: With Russian warplanes in the air and Iranian special forces on the ground, an emboldened Syrian President Bashar Al Assad is turning back to the biggest trophy in his country’s civil war, and this time Europe is also on the front line.

As his troops head toward Aleppo, Syria’s former commercial hub and largest city, helicopters are dropping warnings to residents to vacate areas. Should Aleppo and other Sunni towns fall to Al Assad’s forces, the potential for another, larger, wave of refugees would be nightmarish, according to one official in a European government.

The province is roughly divided between Al Assad and the militants. If they see government forces advancing, Syrians “who have been on the fence will be convinced that it’s time to go,” said Ghanem Nuseibeh, founder of London-based consulting firm Cornerstone Global Associates.

“You would expect another wave of refugees to try to head toward Turkey and eventually to Europe before the regime closes the border,” he said.

More than four years of fighting has displaced 7.5 million people within Syria and turned it into a country that exists only in name. For the US, the question is how much political and military capital it wants to pour into another Middle Eastern country, while rivals Russia and Iran take advantage of its reticence to prop up their ally in the region. Meanwhile, Europe is faced with one of the biggest geopolitical challenges in decades as hundreds of thousands of Syrians seek haven.

The number of migrants who arrived in the European Union in the first nine months of 2015 is already more than twice the total during the whole of last year, and another 2 million are still in Turkey, the main transit route between Syria and the EU’s southeastern frontier.

“Syria may be beyond any solution,” said Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East analyst at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Half the remaining population has escaped the war zones and they lack jobs or homes. Many of the towns have suffered a great deal of damage.”

Al Assad is looking to consolidate his hold over the swath of Syria he controls. The prize for the Syrian government and its allies will be Aleppo also because of its proximity to the Turkish border.

Taking it would give Russia, Iran and Al Assad more bargaining power at any future settlement talks and more say in how the region will be redefined. A European official said that one of Putin’s goals is to present Europe with a Syria dominated only by two main groups - Al Assad and Daesh - and ask the west to choose which one to support.