US Report: Syrian Rebels’ Defeat in Aleppo Disaster for Turkey, Qatar

Local Editor

Countries supporting Syria rebels are moving from one defeat to another.
According to "The World Tribune", "rebels have sustained a strategic defeat in their attempt to capture Syria's largest city."

In this context, Western diplomatic sources told the daily "rebels supported by Qatar and Turkey demonstrated significant deficiencies in their failure to capture Aleppo in October."
"The rout of the rebels, many of them foreign jihadists, marked a defeat for Ankara and Doha and could lead to a reassessment of the civil war in Syria," the sources told the US famous daily.

A diplomat also confirmed: "Turkey had been training and equipping the rebels for this battle, and it was a disaster."
In parallel, the sources said "some 1,000 rebels, equipped with pickup trucks, anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles, advanced toward central Aleppo from several directions on Oct. 25."

"But within 24 hours, the rebels met fierce resistance, largely from "militias" organized by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in the summer of 2012," they added.
Meanwhile, a source who monitored the battle claimed "The Syrian Army did not play a major role in the fighting," and noted " instead, the defeat stemmed from Kurdish, Christians and even Sunnis, who hate the extremists even more than al-Assad."

"Within 48 hours the rebels fled six neighborhoods near central Aleppo. Hundreds of extremists were killed or captured, particularly by militias aligned with the Kurdish Workers Party," the World Tribune sources mentioned.
"The PKK and the Kurdish government in northern Iraq sent fighters to stop the Turkish-sponsored extremists in both Aleppo and other parts of northern Syria," the source said. "This was a proxy war between Ankara and Kurdistan."

According to the sources, "Qatar and Turkey had intended to either drive out al-Assad regime from Aleppo or spark a humanitarian crisis that would force the United States to intervene."
"Instead, the rebel defeat could prompt a reassessment by Ankara and Doha of their involvement in the crisis, which began in April 2011," they stated.
Moreover, another diplomat predicted " Turkey has some hard decisions to make over the next few weeks, particularly whether to keep 250,000 soldiers along the Syrian border throughout the winter."

"These troops suffer from declining morale as they sit around in the cold and rain waiting for something to happen," he said.


Source: The World Tribune, Edited by moqawama.org