After years of bloody conflict, culminating in a week of heartbreaking pleas for help amidst a final siege by Syrian government forces in Aleppo, the Assad regime officially announced victory on Thursday and that it had retaken full control of Syria’s second biggest city. The Syrian military said the recapture of the city was a victory against terrorism and would usher in “the return of safety and security to the city of Aleppo,” a place that has been divided for four years into rebel and government-held sections.
Syrian state TV broadcast an army statement declaring the defeat of rebels there was part of a “strategic transformation and a turning point in the war on terrorism and a deadly blow to the terrorist project and its supporters.” Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said the victory was also one for Russia and Iran, whose air raids and militias helped boost the Syrian government and turn the tide in the besieged city.
“The rebel evacuations were set in motion last week after Syria’s opposition agreed to surrender its last footholds in eastern Aleppo. Since then, some 35,000 fighters and civilians have been bussed out, according to the United Nations,” Agence France-Presse reports. “The departure of the last convoy paves the way for Assad to assume full control after more than four years of fighting over Syria’s largest city. It marks his most significant victory since an uprising against his family’s four-decade rule swept the country in 2011.”
“The arrival of thousands of refugees from Aleppo in Idlib aroused fears that the rebel-held city in northwestern Syria could be next,” according to Reuters. “Assad has said the war is far from over and his armed forces would march on other rebel areas.”
