A: They're all dead now.
Posted on 12/06/2016 7:10:47 PM PST by Mariner
Syria's army and allies pushed into rebel-held parts of Aleppo's Old City on Tuesday, a monitoring group said, looking closer than ever to achieving their most important victory of the five-year-old civil war by driving rebels out of their last urban stronghold.
A rebel official said they would never abandon Aleppo, after reports that U.S. and Russian diplomats were preparing to discuss the surrender and evacuation of insurgents from territory they have held for years.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said talks with the United States on a rebel withdrawal would begin in Geneva as soon as Tuesday evening or Wednesday morning. But sources familiar with the plans later told Reuters no talks would take place this week in the Swiss city.
The rebels, who controlled large parts of eastern Aleppo for nearly five years, have lost around two thirds of their territory in the city over the past two weeks.
Government forces entered rebel-held parts of the Old City late on Tuesday, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group reported. A rebel official denied they had entered but said the army and its allies were trying to enter and battles continued.
A military source said troops were "advancing in that direction".
The government now appears closer to victory in the city than at any point since 2012, the year after rebels took up arms to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad in a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, made more than half of Syrians homeless and created the world's worst refugee crisis.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
A: They're all dead now.
One has to wonder why Turkey was moving self-propelled howitzers and tanks toward Aleppo.
I know they have hundreds of irregulars, maybe thousands, directly involved and were the beating heart of “rebel” forces.
All I can think of is that their guys must be surrounded with no way out. And that would explain why Russia and the US are in talks to evac them.
But surely they didn’t think they’d be able to get away with it.
The Turks definitely want to push the Kurds back across the river, and prevent them from linking the Kurdish enclaves of Kobane and Afrin into a big Kurdish region right on the Turkish border. They initially claimed that their Euphrates Shield Operation was to secure a safe zone just inside the Syrian border with Turkey for refugees, but they were obviously countering Kurdish advances.
Turkish intentions have seemed to broadened recently toward directly unseating Assad, rather than just secretly supporting surrogates to do it (Erdogan recently made a statement to that effect, which he later retracted).
Moving additional heavy combat forces across the border was getting pretty significant - 15 Leopard tanks and 15 Armored Personnel Carriers, with additional heavy artillery in one day - that is a large flow of forces.
A serious armor thrust could punch through into Eastern Aleppo in one day to resupply or evacuate the rebels, if they were allowed to build up around al Bab. Or they could dig into al Bab, and refuse to leave. Or they could decisively defeat the Kurds, which the Syrian regime could use in the future as a counter to Turkey.
“Are these good rebels or bad rebels who are being driven from Aleppo?”
ALL rebels against Assad are bad rebels.
The rebels have wrapped themselves in "Muslim body armor", also known as women and children.
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