Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Who should we support in Syria’s brutal civil war?

Today, Syrian rebels in Idlib shot down a Russian helicopter; five Russians were killed and footage from the site shows people dragging away at least one body, and not, I fancy, for Christian burial. The Russian defence ministry says that the crew had been engaged in humanitarian air drops in Aleppo, though I suppose there’s no way of knowing.

So…what are we to make of this gain for the rebels, the loss for the Russians and, by extension, the Assad forces? Who are we cheering, who booing? Judging from the coverage right now of the siege of Aleppo by Assad forces, the Russians are in the villains’ corner.

John Humphrys’ interview this morning with David Miliband, the former foreign secretary, was a case in point. Discussing the siege conducted by the Syrian government, backed by Russia, Mr Humphrys was at his most incredulous. ‘Surely this must call for a military response?’ he cried. Then: ‘why does the world do nothing?’ And ‘why would a Syrian mother whose children have been killed believe that the world will do anything for her?’ David Miliband was sympathetic, urging greater involvement by the United Nations. And encouragingly he observed that one of the Syrian factions (actually, the al Nusra front) had dropped its affiliation to al Qaeda in order to provide unity among the rebels. So … that’s a good thing?

All of which suggests that some of the most acute and intelligent people in British public life are getting the Syrian conflict precisely wrong. I don’t think any civilised individual would suggest that President Assad has conducted anything but a barbarous war against his own people, that his use of barrel bombs and chemical weapons are not morally repugnant and that he didn’t, quite calculatedly, play a dirty game in relation to Islamic State – they were rather useful for his purposes at the outset, since they provided handy black propaganda against the rebels as a whole.

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