“The collapse of the opposition in Aleppo”, “The sun sets on the terrorists, as the besieged city awaits the decisive battle.” Similar headlines can be found across all Middle Eastern media sources after the withdrawal of the jihadists, especially those from the Al-Nusra Front, from the strip of the territory they used to control in Aleppo – Syria’s second largest city.
Once the Jabhat al-Nusra forces have received a beating, says the influential Lebanese newspaper As-Safir, Damascus will not be able to push other armed extremist groups from the city they occupied for so long.
This turn of events in Aleppo has clearly caught off guard those forces in the Middle East that have been supporting the radical armed opposition, providing it with both the petrodollars, arms and media support.
These forces continue parroting the same old accusations against Syria and Russia that they’re “brutally” bombing the civilian population of Aleppo, thereby “organizing a humanitarian disaster”. Sure, they want to find an excuse for the failure of their jihadists in Aleppo, while raising the spirit of those still capable of fighting. But it’s all over now, as the head of the so-called Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is being cited by Western media sources on the daily basis, has summed it up: in Aleppo the so-called opposition suffered the biggest defeat since 2012.
It is no coincidence that this defeat is being recognized by anti-government forces as well. The opposition has never been so weak, says Faiz Farah, one of the prominent leaders of National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces. It remains a deeply divided politically and military organization, that has seen countless clashes within its leading groups everywhere.
Now that it has started losing if foreign support, Farah argues, the opposition is getting even weaker since it’s being constantly reminded how fragile it has become by its sponsors. If it keeps going that way, the opposition will face the inevitable – a slow and agonizing death.
Faiz Farah is urging the opposition to undergo a “radical” political transformation, that remains its only chance of survival. It is necessary, in particular, to abandon any contacts with all sorts of crooks fighting in Syria, including those terrorist and extremist groups like Jabhat al-Nusra.
Yet another member of the Syrian opposition, Haj Hussein says that opposition members have become mere pawns in the hands of external forces. Foreign funding discredits the struggle for the “national cause”, he argues. It is obvious that the opposition is undergoing a deep systemic crisis, harvesting the yields of the decisions taken back in March 2011. Back then, by voicing the demand to overthrow the legitimate government it plunged the country in a pool of chaos and destruction, thus making itself illegal.
The opposition has not been able to put forward a single idea for positive development of the country. What we can hear from it are the constant complaints that the West allegedly “abandoned them”. Now the most popular slogan within these groups is that the US and its allies have cut the “Russian bear” a lot of slack.
The opposition, says the London newspaper Al-Arab, in spite of the strong support that it is getting, has so far failed to convince the world that is able to play a role comparable to that played by Damascus. She prefers to resort to the easiest justification of its actions, saying there’s been all kind of conspiracies against the so-called “revolution of the Syrian people”.
This “revolution” is often referred to by some journalists as some mystical force, which is, as they claim, is too complex for ordinary people to comprehend. The latter have already made their voting, casting the most ancient kind of vote in human history. They fled the areas controlled by the opposition, seeking refuge in the territories controlled by the government or abroad. Today, one can witness the same scenario repeated in Aleppo: hundreds of thousands of residents of the eastern part of the city, in spite of death threats made by radical Islamists, are heading to the western districts, which are under the control of Damascus.
Yury Zinin, Leading Research Fellow at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”