Fall of Aleppo spells the beginning of the end for Syrian rebels like Stalingrad for Hitler, says top Oxford Historian
THE fall of Aleppo is a kind of Stalingrad. Just as defeat for the Germans in the Russian city during World War II was the start of the end for Adolf Hitler, so this is a turning point from which the Syrian rebels cannot recover.
They are going to lose the war. The question is how quickly and horribly this will happen.
There is a chance that Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad will be statesman-like.
But it is more likely he will decide to eliminate the up to ten thousand young men with military experience who remain in Aleppo.
Assad controls about 80 per cent of the population, because a lot of the country in the east under either IS or Kurdish rule is largely desert.
So another key question now is whether the population will turn passive. There is a chance - after five years of this war people will be desperate for peace and the president will be in a stable position.
Or it could be that we will see a similar situation to Egypt and Libya where there is the instability of terrorism, with opposition groups planting car bombs.
Enough people have been radicalised to undermine President Assad.
Other crises could erupt in the region.
Along with the continued threat of ISIS continuing, there is tension between Turkey and the Kurds and the prospect of a more powerful Iran aiding Hezbollah with better weapons against Israel.
The people of Aleppo may say their country is such a wreck that it will be better to travel to Europe.
The Turkish government have in the past few days quietly been letting more refugees pass over their border into Greece.
One problem I can see is that we won’t just see ISIS fighters returning to Europe, but also Syrians who believed in President Barack Obama feeling very bitter against us.
They hate Assad, but a few of them may blame the West for their defeat because we didn’t provide enough support.
The US President drew a red line, saying he would bomb Assad’s forces if they continued to use chemical weapons.
But the Syrian regime did use more chemical weapons and the US didn’t attack them. So Obama has ended up red faced.
It has been a huge blow to Obama’s credibility and to the West in general. Britain and the EU largely supported the US position.
We backed some so-called moderate rebels against Assad, but never with sufficient force for them to ever win.
Now we face an emboldened Russian President Vladimir Putin, who backed Assad and who may wish to back further military action in another country.
related stories
Old Cold War allies of the former Soviet Union are now back on their side. The President of Egypt has been talking favourably of the Russians.
It is a game of geo-political chess with the West against Russia and their Iranian allies.
The question Britain and the US need to ask themselves is whether they can find a group which they can support in Syria.
We could back the Kurds as a regional force, but that wouldn’t be accepted by Nato’s Turkey.
It seems there is no good outcome for the Allies and perhaps there never was one.