Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

The Syria debate has become dangerously partisan

The collective hysteria about the impending fall of eastern Aleppo to government forces strikes me as understandable and laudable only up to a point. If the advance of Assad’s forces on the rebel-held part of Aleppo means, as the French government suggested, the biggest massacre of civilians since the Second World War, then obviously it would be a very bad thing. But the spectacle of MPs and the BBC presenting the conflict as Assad and Putin’s lot trying to kill or starve little girls (there’s an eight-year-old whose tweets from Aleppo are widely circulated) and their mums without mentioning the overall nature of the conflict, strikes me as partial at best, stupid at least.

This is a civil war in which the options are, in the modern euphemism, sub-optimal, a choice of two evils, of whom the Assad forces backed by the Russians seem quite plainly to be the least worst.  That is, there is a choice between a victory for the Assad regime and its Russian allies, which has plainly used appalling methods against its opponents,  and their opponents, which are far, very far, from the Arab equivalent of LibDems.

I don’t just mean Isis; the crucial component of the rebels in eastern Aleppo are 8,000 al-Nusra fighters, whose arms and funding came in the past from Qatar, Saudi and Turkey. They are, if not identical with al Qaeda, as near to them as dammit; they have been successful partly by dint of the intelligent use of suicide bombers but also by dint of their fanaticism. They are popular in eastern Aleppo. Their probable defeat strikes me as a good thing, and if it brings about the speedier end to the war through victory for the regime, that’s the best we can probably hope for.

That – and using our best influence with the regime to ensure that it exercises restraint in Aleppo, and that when it does win the war, it will allow the millions of Syrian refugees to return and, crucially, grant the Syrian Kurds legitimate autonomy (the PKK were for some time the best fighters against IS).

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in