"Pluhoy maichik" doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

Much to agree with in your post, but this is a pretty transparent SolRo bait post by orcs.

Your request is so specific it actually brought me joy to know that there is an aesthetically appropriate reply. This is my favorite kids' show outside the one where the lesbian teaches toddlers about gay sex with a talking teddy bear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69YhX1DF2ws&list=PLUAdPneuZl_A Pev3-ofIIlzDSWvvsORXr&index=15

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s72PSVv-1Rs

Holy shit, this is great. I didn't know I was being literal, but this is perfect.

Syria has been ruled since independence by its Alawite religious minority and Damascus mercantile class. The French liked things that way. The more numerous Sunni majority has at intervals rebelled, or called for reform.

After a 5 year drought in which millions lost their farms and settled in exurban slums, the Sunnis called for reform, and were suppressed with rooftop snipers. So they started a rebellion, supported by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other Persian Gulf states, with politics that were between "jobs now" and "we're Al-Qaeda". The US, noting the position of friends in the region, supported it.

Syria had been a refuge for Sunni militants opposing Shia rule in Iraq, and an element of Iraqi resistance under al-Baghdadi used the chaos in the region to install a media savvy promotional campaign to enlist a bunch of European slum dwellers and become ISIS, in the less populated Eastern Euphrates valley. That's not important to the story of Aleppo, because while ISIS has a eschatology where a battle in Aleppo is important to Allah's rule on earth, they don't keep many troops there.

The rebel troops occupying East Aleppo were mostly in the Al-Quada affiliatied Al-Nusra front (now rebranded Jabhat Fateh al-Sham), a few thousand with about 30k family defending East Aleppo. Most of the population had fled to government held West Aleppo.

Rump Syria isn't defensible without control of the north south M5 highway, which passes (north to south) through Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and Damascus. As the others were fairly under control, the sorely understrength Alawite regime enlisted Lebanese Hezbollah and Russian airpower to attack East Aleppo.

This was an issue in the US presidential campaign, as Clinton, expecting to win, knew that she had to keep good ties with Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States, while Trump, her opponent, is a charasmatic to some moron and malignant narcissist who to this day refuses to attend intelligence briefings.

Syrian warlords, Hezbollah, and Russian airpower evicted the Jabhat Fateh al-Sham from East Aleppo, who fled to nearby Idlib, the site of the next confrontation. In military parlance, this is called mopping up.

Thanks, godot.

I can't remember the precise details with this faulty sieve of a memory of mine, but I read "Chain of Command" by Seymour Hersh a few months back, and he goes into detail over one of the chapters on how it came to be that Syria started basically welcoming Sunni militants from Iraq seeking to flee US Forces as a deliberate tweak of the nose toward the US. This was due to a combination of factors, from the US naming them an axis in that stupid goddamn speech, to the US not continuing the somewhat friendly relationship they'd had with Assad's father, and even supporting the Mossad, who apparently had a bunch of operations going on inside Syria to support various "revolutionary" groups that wanted to kill Assad and bring down the government. The US even regularly invaded Syria's airspace, blowing up its citizenry near the borders on nighttime raids to bomb (manned flights) "insurgent convoys fleeing Iraq", which were indeed proven to be things like Syrian gas stations and Syrian motorists later on.

So, yeah, Syria kind of hoisted themselves on their own petard with the whole 'letting tons of Sunni militants in to give the finger to the US' thing, but at the same time, said militants wouldn't have even existed without the US invasion, so...blame all around, really.

CoC is a great book, by the way. I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't read it. Even knowing about most of the stuff detailed in the book, in broad strokes, having followed these events as they first came to light (mostly through poe-news), the amount of actual detail on WHY the stupid decisions got made, and how the stupid actions were carried out behind the scenes, was darkly fascinating.