The Syrian army has launched a ground offensive to retake Aleppo, in what could be a major turning point in the civil war. Pro-regime media outlets have already trumpeted the retaking of a key district in the central "old town" sector of the city, though the sustainability of this gain will only be confirmed in the coming day or two. Although the regime and its Russian, Iranian, and Lebanese Hezbollah allies are eager to occupy rebel territory, it also suits the Axis of Fatima to draw the Sunni insurgents out into the open in bold counterattacks that expose them to withering air power.
The longer this continues, the more Moscow corners Washington into caving into its demands for a combined front against the terrorist groups ISIS and Al Nusra Front as a precondition for any letup in the brutal attrition of rebel-held Aleppo's remaining civilian population.
With reports leaking out that the deep-pocketed Gulf Sunni monarchies may arm the rebels with advanced anti-aircraft weapons, now is definitely the time to press home the advantage of virtually unchallenged air power.
In fact, the Syrian air force's higher rate of jet losses since spring already indicates the presence of effective shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles throughout rebel-held territory, so it's questionable just how much more of a difference the stepped-up aid being proposed will make. The regime's aerial warfare tactics have doubtless constantly shifted and adjusted in the face of the growing SAM threat.
A bigger stretch is whether anything at all can be done to significantly dent Russian air dominance: not only do the Russian jets include advanced models like the Sukhoi Su-34 and Su-35, but even their older Su-24s and Su-25s doubtless employ more sophisticated countermeasures against anti-aircraft threats. It's also likely that should push come to shove, the Kremlin will unleash its long-range heavy bombers like the Tupolev Tu-22M3 to drop larger numbers of massive "bunker busters" (possibly from Iranian airbases again) that have wreaked such havoc on underground civilian shelters and subterranean rebel installations in Aleppo in recent days; these high-flying supersonic beasts need something more substantial than man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADS) to seriously target.
Only a massive jihadist counteroffensive can now save Aleppo from falling back into Assad's clutches and thereby effectively reducing the Syrian opposition to a predominantly rural insurgency with a glaring preponderance of radical Islamists. Absent such a dramatic turn of events yet again, in a month or so pro-regime forces will have neutralized Aleppo without necessarily occupying most of the rebel eastern sector - they simply need to constrict all potential pathways leading in and out of those areas (for both people and supplies) so tightly that it won't be plausible anymore for the rebel-jihadist alliance to ever recover from the encirclement.
At that point, Damascus and Moscow will have a powerful bargaining chip: they can demand that any remaining "moderate" opposition join a proposed national unity government if they still desire to salvage anything at all from their long and ultimately failed struggle for Western-style democracy. The only alternative would be to be ground down slowly and painfully over a further period of months as a pocket once containing close to half a million inhabitants is drained down to potentially less than 100,000 (from 250,000-300,000 currently) - while being surrounded by increasingly diehard resistance that can only be characterized by deepening radical Islamicization, anyway.
But in fact, even the best-case scenario of a new rebel-jihadist breach of the reimposed siege probably wouldn't be much more auspicious for whatever's left of the original Syrian spring. Such a victory will be the product of such a brutal pitched battle that it can only further solidify the jihadist extremist element of the resistance as the heart and soul of the whole cause. In that case, Messrs. Assad and Putin might even cynically allow the ruins of eastern Aleppo to become the premier magnet for Sunni terrorist and militant groups in the whole region, so as to dig in for the binary struggle between secular dictatorship and reactionary theocracy that they've always claimed the West must make; it would help Ayatollah Khamenei, as well, for Aleppo to serve the same purpose for Iran's new "Shia liberation army" drafted from the entire region that a bombed-out Beirut played for Lebanese Hezbollah (and its Iranian sponsors) three decades ago.
For the Axis of Fatima, crushing the Sunni extremists and terrorists would be really nice; but swaying the rest of the world that they're on the frontlines of blocking a global descent into medieval barbarism would be even better. The future looks sunny either way: between themselves and their most ferocious enemies, they have all but strangled the Syrian revolution stillborn and, with it, snuffed out the dying breath of the vaunted Arab spring. That great political wind which seemed to blow so hopefully in the liberal West's direction has at last settled on a new course of a colossal struggle for the fate of Islam in the third millennium.
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