Aleppo is an ancient metropolis, and according to Wikipedia, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world – it may have been inhabited since the sixth millennium BC. Such a long history is attributed to its strategic location as a trading centre midway between the Mediterranean Sea and Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). Aleppo was always a mosaic of peoples and religions, with Muslims, Christians and a large Armenian community. Aleppo was always a symbol of a secular Syria and probably informs us of why it became such a potent symbol for the Jihadists, many of whom were ported straight out of Benghazi.
The importance of Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad’s victory cannot be gainsaid. Of course it is not only the optometrist President’s victory but also a victory for Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and for Iran’s Sayyed Ali Khamenei. Without that constellation of Iranian ground forces and Russian air power, President Assad would surely have been a foot-note just like former Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi whom Hillary Clinton said: ‘’We came, we saw, he died.’’
The Arab ‘’Spring’’ started in Tunisia and as the ‘’Jasmine’’ revolution with the self-immolation of the 26-year-old Mohamed Bouazizi.
However, in a Rumsfeldian move you will recall Rumsfeld said this after 9/11: “Hard to get good case. Need to move swiftly,” the notes say. “Near term target needs – go massive – sweep it all up, things related and not.”
Western powers saw an opportunity to topple Gaddafi and Bashar. Aleppo is where the regime change agenda was stopped in its tracks. This is the first and overarching point. Of course, the price that has been paid by ordinary Syrians to achieve this has been off the charts. The hand-wringing and grand-standing out of the likes of Ambassador Power is not correlated to their sense of tragedy about the lives lost, but entirely correlated to the geopolitical import of Aleppo. Proxy assets have been annihilated or about to be – and remember the last thing the owners of the proxies want is that the ‘’Head-Choppers’’ come home to Riyadh, Doha and Istanbul.
‘’As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods,
They kill us for their sport’’
The proxies will be dispensed with on Syrian soil because if they ever do go home, then we will really have an “Arab Spring’’ – not one that was manufactured. The propaganda that was the White Helmets, that was the idea that a bunch of Wahhabist Head-Choppers were going to bring democracy to Syria has been exposed, and is particularly poor in comparison with, for example, Russian interference in the US election, which was non-linear and seriously sophisticated.
President Assad, who was once hanging on in Damascus by his finger-tips, has been off former British Prime Minister David Cameron, US President Barack Obama, Italy’s PM Matteo Renzi, and the single-digit (popularity) President François Hollande of France. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is now surrounded on all sides in Europe. President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt has seen the way the wind is blowing and has skedaddled into the Russia, Iran Axis.
Aleppo is the moment when the trend changed, and Russia and Iran are now in the ascendancy; and those in their palaces in Riyadh, Doha and Istanbul need to appreciate how fluid this moment is, and how exposed they are now. Let me leave with you with the Poem Ozymandias By Bysshe Shelley:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said —“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
And ask who will be Ozymandias?
Aly-Khan is a financial analyst