A vast human tragedy is unfolding in front of our eyes in Aleppo. Thousands of innocent people are being killed and hundreds of civilians lie dead on the streets. The tragedy is two-fold: First, the scale of the killings in Syria’s second city is huge. And second, all this misery has been created by the victims’ fellow Syrians. This is not some natural cataclysm, but a deliberate and calculated act by the regime of President Bashar Al Assad and his allies. Syrian aircraft have been pounding east Aleppo for years and more intensively in recent weeks. They have used devastating weapons like barrel bombs and there have been recorded cases of gas attacks. In recent weeks, the army has used more precise artillery bombardment.
In the last few weeks, government forces have made significant gains and they now control 40 per cent of the territory once held by the opposition forces, who have been fighting the government siege of east Aleppo since 2012.
This weekend, hundreds of troops from the elite Republican Guard and the Syrian Army’s Fourth Division arrived in Aleppo in preparation for what they see as a final push that will require fighting street by street through the densely-populated southeast of the city.
In this terrible situation, two things have become a priority. Firstly, the government has to stop thinking of the rebels as terrorists. They are not Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant). They are Syrians fighting for a different vision of their state and if there is ever a political solution to Syria’s civil war, the rebels will be part of it. Second, the government needs to distinguish between the rebel fighters and the civilian population. Many thousands of civilians have already been killed but tens of thousands more may die.
In just last week, more than 50,000 people have poured out of east Aleppo, but instead of this highly dangerous route, Al Assad’s ally Russia has proposed setting up four humanitarian corridors into east Aleppo to bring in aid and evacuate severely wounded people. This humanitarian rescue is necessary even if Russia persists in following the regime line and insists that military operations will continue till the city is “cleared of terrorists”. If done in time, it can save tens of thousands of lives and the United Nations-backed humanitarian taskforce for Syria is ready to help.
