Category Archives: Aleppo

How Assad Won

By Manish Rai: President Bashar Al-Assad is starting to look like he will survive the uprising, even in the estimation of some of his staunchest opponents. It is a reality that almost everyone agrees to that the Syrian regime has revealed an extraordinary ability to survive. Despite the blows it has sustained in the initial…

After the Fall of Aleppo and Idlib; Turkey: The Fuse of WWIII

By Dr Jan Best de Vries: After the fall of Aleppo and Idlib, finally the real civil war in Syria will start. It is amazing how little Western media tell us about the real actors in the war which already for six years is going on in Syria. On one side Russia, Iran and Hezbollah…

Fall of Aleppo May Initiate End of Revolution

By Manish Rai: After reclaiming almost all of Aleppo, Syria’s former commercial capital, President Assad has got his biggest prize of the war. It puts his forces in control of the country’s four largest cities as well as the coastal region, and cap a year of steady government advances. It should be remembered that more…

Aleppo and Hatay

By Dr Jan Best de Vries: During the Ottoman Empire the now allegedly Turkish province of Hatay formed part of the Vilayet of Aleppo and on the basis of geography rightly so (just have a look on the map of West Asia). Now that Salafist Turkey, after the failed coup by remaining secular parts of…

Free State Aleppo

By Dr Jan Best de Vries: If the present-day province of Aleppo would have covered the same large area as that of the ancient realm of Yamkhad with its capital Aleppo, Yamkhad might have become again the future name of Syria after the deconstruction of this former, rather haphazard, mandate handed over to the French…