The Aleppo battle is ending. Syria will win the war against foreign supported Takfiris as will Iraq. That requires new plans to implement the original aims of the war's instigators and sponsors.
This is a map of the east-Aleppo cauldron 2 days ago.
Map by @NatDefFor – bigger
This is the map as of this morning.
Map by @NatDefFor – bigger
Since this morning another part of the "rebel" held area in the south east of the cauldron, the Sheik Sa'ed quarters, has been liberated by Syrian government forces.
It is expected that the whole al-Qaeda "rebel" held area will be liberated and cleared of Takfiris as early as this weekend. Militants still there are offered to leave or to be – inevitably – killed.
You can compare those maps to the map (big) we posted in our last Aleppo piece. In total some 90% of the area held by the "rebels" just two weeks ago is now back in government hands. All "rebel" held areas north and north-east of the Citadel of Aleppo that yesterday were still held by al-Qaeda aligned Takfiris are now in Syrian government hands. The last progress was possible when a group of local "rebels" gave up the fight and surrendered to Syrian government forces. For the first time in 5 years the Citadel's main entrance can now be reached from the government held west-Aleppo.
In total 28,700 civilians were found in and have left those formerly "rebel" held areas. That is a bit higher than our old estimate of some 25,000 max in total in east Aleppo but way lower than the 250,000, 300,000, 500,000 or 1,000,000 civilians that the UN and opposition media claimed.
After winning the Aleppo battle the Syrian government will have some 35,000 aligned troops freely available to liberate those other areas of Syria which are currently still held by foreign paid Takfiris, This is a quite huge, experienced force and one can expect that most of the work still needed to be done to liberate all of Syria will be finished within a few months.
In Iraq the government forces are fighting the last Islamic State remnants which hold the city of Mosul in a slightly similar siege situation as it was in Aleppo. But the fight in Mosul is more difficult because up to one million civilians are still in the city and the ISIS fighter there are fanatics who do not shy away from sending hundreds of schoolkids as suicide bombers against the approaching Iraqi forces. Should such resistance continue it might take months to retake the whole city.
Luckily for Syria the city of Mosul is now completely enclosed. The original U.S. plan was to let the western area of Mosul open so that ISIS fighters could escape to Syria. The Iraqi prime minister Abadi stopped those plans by sending Popular Mobilization Forces to close the wide western gap.
The U.S. had already prepared the field for retreating ISIS troops to eventually take the city of Deir Ezzor in east-Syria which is held by ISIS encircled Syrian government troops. It would have thereby created the "Salafist principality" that it envisioned since at least 2012. The Iraqi move to close off Mosul, supported by Iran and Russia, has finally sabotaged this plan.
As that plan for handing the eastern Syrian and western Iraqi areas to some "moderate ISIS" has now failed, the usual "expert" suspects, starting with Michael Weiss and Hassan Hassan, now argue for the U.S. to occupy the whole area and to set up permanent military U.S. bases to control the oil-rich Syrian east and western Iraq. The U.S. special forces working with Kurdish YPG units in the north-eastern area of Syria have already set up several small air-fields.
Write those permanent war lobbyists:
Developing these sites as solid anchors in the region will give the U.S. a badly needed intelligence-gathering capability in the Jazira, or Upper Mesopotamia, encompassing the arid plain that stretches across northwestern Iraq, northeastern Syria and southeastern Turkey.
…
Keeping contingents of U.S. forces in the region, meanwhile, will provide a credible deterrent helping to defend trusted and capable anti-ISIS fighters and deterring the Assad regime from any effort at reconquest.
Upper Mesopotamia, al Jazera ca. 80 BC – Map via Wikimedia
Such a U.S. occupation entity in Jazera would:
- Block any traffic between Shia Iran and Iraq with the Syrian and Lebanese areas towards the Mediterranean coast. The so called Shia crescent would be interrupted by a U.S. controlled entity of mostly Sunni tribal inhabitants.
- Create space for an envisioned Qatar-Turkey-Europe natural gas pipeline while blocking a potential Iran-Mediterranean-Europe natural gas pipeline through the same area.
- Fulfill another step of the Yinon plan which calls for the disassembly of all Arab states into smaller entities to secure Israel's realm.
Expect more well bribed think tank "experts" to soon argue for such a lunatic new "mission" for U.S. forces.
President elect Donald Trump repeated yesterday that he will have none of such adventures:
[Trump] promised to make the military stronger than it has ever been, but said that under his leadership, the country would “stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about.”
“This destructive cycle of intervention and chaos must finally come to an end,” he said.
We can hope that Trump will stick to this reasonable position and stays away from any further interference with the local affairs of the people of the Middle East and elsewhere.