NOTHING is too good to last and in Syria there is rarely anything good anyway. The truce brokered by Washington and Moscow appeared to be an exception. It was not just that the fighting mostly stopped — a complete cessation of hostilities would have been too much to hope for in this country’s tragedy — but also that UN-organized aid convoys were able, after several false starts, to begin delivering food, medical supplies and winter clothing to besieged communities on both sides.
Though the Syrian air force launched a few attacks on territory controlled by the Free Syrian army and Kurdish rebels, the firing ceased enough for the aid convoys to start rolling. And then, with an horrific inevitably, it all went terribly wrong. On Monday war planes that were possibly Russian, but very probably Syrian, attacked UN vehicles as they were at an aid warehouse near Aleppo.
Red Crescent workers and medical personnel were among the dead and injured in the assault which also targeted a nearby health clinic. The point about this air strike was that, truce or no truce, the UN vehicles and the warehouse were clearly marked. The Assad regime always insists that it never specifically targets civilians and sheds crocodile tears over any loss of life among non-combatants which is brought to the world’s attention by international media. Yet there is no way that the Syrian or perhaps Russian strike commanders could have mistaken the distinctive white UN vehicles for anything else. And the abhorrent truth is that Damascus simply does not want any help whatsoever reaching civilians trapped by the fighting. It has overtly pursued a policy of starving as well as bombing and gassing civilians and fighters out of rebel-held areas.
The Syrian regime said on Monday that it was not extending the truce. But this in no way justified this monstrous assault on brave individuals who sought only to ease the suffering of women and children trapped in the midst of the carnage.
It is of course not hard to see why Assad and his henchmen abandoned the ceasefire. On Saturday US-led Coalition warplanes had struck a Syrian army position killing and injuring over 150 of Assad’s soldiers. Washington protested that the air strikes had been a mistake, though many in the Arab world will have cheered the fact that the Assad regime’s forces were getting a long-overdue taste of their own medicine.
It is clear that the already-shaky arrangements whereby the Americans and Russians liaise on attacks of Daesh (the so-called IS) terrorists broke down. Moscow said that its own air commanders were only informed of the air strike once it had started. When they protested that the Syrian army was being hit, the Coalition broke off the attacks.
Washington has expressed its outrage at the bombing of the UN aid vehicles but there is a certain grim predictability to the protests from both the Russians and the Americans. They each sit like witches using very different length spoons to stir the cauldron of carnage that is poor ruined Syria.
And the overwhelming irony is that the main beneficiaries of these latest air strikes are Bashar Assad’s brutal regime and the no-less bloody terrorists of Daesh. In Aleppo, the dove of peace which bravely represented humanity and decency in the face of unremitting violence has once again been targeted.
