Aleppo

The battle for Aleppo is officially over.

Having concluded the evacuation of rebels from their last enclave in the eastern part of the city, the Syrian army said Aleppo has returned to government control, ending the 4-year rebel control over parts of the city that years ago was the largest metropolitan center in Syria and is now a landscape out of Call of Duty.  The evacuees have been taken to rebel-held territory in the countryside west of Aleppo and in Idlib province.

Readers who have been following the crisis in Aleppo have seen media reports of videos and photos allegedly originating from innocent children victims, pleading against the advance of the Assad forces. And while there have been various accusations that these clips, like the infamous "chemical attack" YouTube clip from 2013, were staged, such reports were promptly slammed by the mainstream media as "fake news" and roundly ignored.

While the UN condemns Syrian and Russian "atrocities" in the battle over East Aleppo, which as noted previously was a key victory for the Assad regime in the past week, one which will end the stalemate and sway the balance of power in the ongoing war between regime forces and US-coalition armed rebels, little attention had been paid to the subversive tactics employed by such "moderate rebels" as the al Qaeda linked al-Nusra front.

Submitted by Finian Cunningham via Stratgic-Culture.org,

As Russian forces help liberate the Syrian city of Aleppo this week from a four-year terrorist siege, Washington and Europe step up threats of cyber war and economic aggression with sanctions. That’s no coincidence. It is the response of accomplices bitter in defeat.

Submitted by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

In this world, it is often dangerous to be an enemy of the United States, said Henry Kissinger in 1968, but to be a friend is fatal.

The South Vietnamese would come to appreciate the insight.

So it is today with Aleppo, where savage reprisals against U.S.-backed rebels are taking place in that hellhole of human rights.

Yet, again, the wrong lessons are being drawn from the disaster.