Trump will have to deal with what is left of Aleppo

An already nightmarish situation is steadily getting worse in Aleppo, as the United Nations warned of summary killings and mass disappearances on Friday. “Family members say they lost contact with the men, between the ages of 30 and 50, after they fled opposition-controlled areas of Aleppo around a week or ten days ago,” Rupert Coleville, Spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in a statement. “There are also approximately 150 activists inside opposition-controlled Aleppo who fear being detained by Government forces if they attempt to leave. Given the terrible record of arbitrary detention, torture and enforced disappearances by the Syrian Government, we are of course deeply concerned about the fate of these individuals.” Syria has largely fallen out of the American media cycle. But this is just the latest development in Syria’s civil war that is nearing its five year anniversary. Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city, is divided into the rebel-held East and government-held West but recent advances by government-aligned troops mean the war could be at a turning point. The rebel-held part of the city still has around 100,000 civilians inhabiting it, while 30,000 are thought to have fled to government-controlled areas. “What makes the Syrian war so dangerous is Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s determination to fight not simply by attacking opposing combatants, as the laws of war allow, but by targeting and indiscriminately firing upon civilians and civilian infrastructure in opposition-held areas, blatantly flouting those laws,” Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, wrote in the NY Review of Books. “Hospitals, markets, schools, and apartment buildings — the institutions of modern urban life — have all been targeted with unrelenting cruelty. For the past year, Assad’s attacks have been supplemented and intensified by the Russian air force under Russian President Vladimir Putin’s command without a discernible change in targeting strategy.” When President-elect Donald Trump comes to power in January, Syria will be one of the major foreign policy challenges he faces. In the past, Trump has indicated a willingness to let Russia sort out the problems facing Syria, and his son supposedly held talks about Syria with Russia supporters last month. During the presidential debate, Trump said Russia is fighting ISIS in Syria and that the United States shouldn’t get involved. Trump’s assertion that Russia is fighting ISIS in Syria is wrong. Russia’s involvement in Syria has been strictly to support the Assad regime against all opponents. It has repeatedly bombed hospitals and other civilian infrastructure in what Secretary of State John Kerry has called “war crimes.” Despite his past stances and continued defense of Russia, it is still unclear what role Trump will take on Syria. While all the current evidence suggests Trump trusts the Russian role in Syria, there are those who maintain hope that the next administration takes a proactive role in settling the conflict. “We hope that the new U.S. administration will play the normal and logical role of the U.S. as the defender of democracy that helps people gain their rights,” Riad Hijab, the head of the High Negotiations Committee, an organization representing Syrian opposition and rebel forces, said in an interview in Saudi Arabia. “Without a political transition, there will be no peaceful solution in Syria and no stability, not just in Syria but in the region.” Going forward, Trump will have many big decisions to make on Syria. Until now, the U.S. has had an active role in trying to scale down the war through various attempts by Kerry to negotiate ceasefires with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov. But the current strategy has widely been viewed as below par, to say the least, and experts familiar with the conflict suggest Trump’s administration would do well to apply more pressure on Russia. “The reluctance to publicly pressure Russia for its actions in Syria meant that a powerful strategy was not deployed,” Roth wrote. “Assad at this stage is beyond shaming for his military’s war crimes, but Putin is not... Public pressure on Putin should be seen as a necessary companion to peace negotiations rather than an obstacle, particularly because Russia had been so unresponsive to private entreaties.” Hope isn’t high though, with activists telling various media that the situation in Aleppo, and Syria more generally, is beyond repair. The situation for Syrians may be dire, but it could continue to deteriorate should Trump turn a blind eye to the country and let Russia have free reign. “Even after Aleppo falls, President-elect Trump will have to address the war in Syria, whether he wants to or not,” Owen Matthews and Sophia Slater wrote in Newsweek. “Ignoring the conflict, and its aftermath, will not make it go away; a failed state in the Levant would be a disaster for all sides.”