Hintergründe zum Fall von Aleppo

Wenn wer ein wenig Übersicht über die Multifrontenkriege und -konflikte in Syrien verschaffen kann, dann sind es Michael Weiss und Hassan Hassan vom dem New Lines Magazine, die in einer exzellenten, ausführlichen und extrem gut informierte Analyse recht gut die Motivation beteiligter Akteure in Syrien und ihre Hintergründe erklären und ein paar Prognosen wagen, was nun passieren könnte.

Dee Artikel The Backstory Behind the Fall of Aleppo sei deshalb jedem zur Lektüre and Herz gelegt.

Folgend einige Auszüge:

Rebel sources have told New Lines that there were several factors behind the regime’s implosion in Aleppo. One was the penetration of a high-level security meeting in Aleppo, during which an Iranian brigadier general and several Syrian officers were killed. The result was chaos in the city’s security operations and fear among officials in the city. Another was the use of sleeper cells inside Aleppo, which coordinated with the rebels, ensuring the further disruption of efforts to mobilize a garrison from an intact fallback position. Yet another was that rebels chose their targets wisely, bypassing more fortified locations such as the Military Academy and Artillery College — strongholds located approximately 4 miles southwest of the city — where they might have been mired in static fighting. But even they were shocked at how phantasmic their enemy turned out to be.

Assad crumbled not just because of a well-planned jihadist campaign but because 13 years of civil war have left his army a husk, and his soldiers demoralized. When the Syrian Arab Army fought for Aleppo in 2016 against a hodgepodge of anti-Assad forces — including HTS in its earlier incarnation — it felt itself on the cusp of a glorious national victory, one that would restore Syria to prewar sovereignty. Instead, the nation was balkanized by competitive and contradictory Turkish and American protectorates in the north and east of the country and elsewhere mortgaged to Iran and Russia, which did the heavy lifting in retaking Aleppo and defeating Western-backed rebels in southern Syria. Shiite militias built or imported by Iran’s Quds Force, or Hezbollah or their Iraqi confederates, eclipsed the role played by conventional Syrian soldiers, whose rank and file are mostly Sunni. But those militias have been preoccupied with fighting new wars in the region, and so, faced with a dizzying prospect of squaring off against an army of jihadists, the Syrian soldiers just ran away.