Did Aleppo Fall? Or Was It Liberated?

By William Van Wagenen

As the Syrian government and its Russian allies conducted a campaign to re-capture the northern Syrian city of Aleppo from US-backed rebel groups in December of 2016, Western media outlets gave the impression that the Russian and Syrian forces were mercilessly bombing defenseless civilians in the city, and lamented supposed Western inaction in the face of these alleged Russian and Syrian crimes. The idea that the West needed to come to the aid of Aleppo’s civilians in the face of the Syrian and Russian onslaught was ubiquitous in the Western press. One commentator writing at CNN claimed that, “time and time again, the free world has looked away,” from Aleppo, while another, writing in the Washington Post, asks “how can the world stand idly by,” suggesting that what was happening in Aleppo constitutes the “genocide of our time,” thus invoking past tragedies in Rwanda, Bosnia, and the Holocaust.