The evacuation of rebel fighters and civilians from eastern Aleppo [7] has begun, with a truce in the stricken city said to be holding. More than 3,000 were bussed out on the first day of the evacuation Dec. 15, but the UN says as many as 50,000 remain trapped. And the evacuees are just leaving one war zone for another. Most will be taken to rebel-controlled areas in neighboring Idlib governorate—likely the regime's next target for recapture. While the world's attention has been focused on Aleppo these past weeks, Idlib has been repeatedly hit by regime air-strikes, with dozens of deaths reported. And Idlib is the domain of extremist jihadi factions [8]—in contrast to the more secular militias that liberated eastern Aleppo in summer 2012, ending the regime's reign of terror [9] there. So secularists are likely to find no refuge from either regime or opposition forces in Idlib. The fall of Aleppo signals a double defeat for Syria's secular revolutionaries. (BBC News [10], CNN [11], Dec. 16)
And the US is deeply complicit in this disaster. In Brussels recently, John Kerry essentially blamed the victims for the destruction of Aleppo, saying he had tried to broker a deal for the city's evacuation. "But the opposition would not buy into a ceasefire. They didn't want to have a cease-fire. And there was a refusal to embrace the ceasefire, despite many of us saying that's the best way to get to the table and have a negotiation in order to resolve this politically. But people chose to fight." (Newsweek [12], Dec. 13)
This hardly the first time Kerry has tried to foist surrender [13] onto the Syrian opposition. Further evidence of Washington's de facto collaboration with Assad [14].
