Even against the backdrop of seven years of savage fighting across Syria the language being used about the impending push by regime forces into Idlib, the last rebel stronghold in the ruined nation, is chilling.
It is estimated that between two and three million people, including around 70,000 fighters, are trapped between Syrian regime forces – backed by Russia – and the Turkish border. Airstrikes have begun and regime forces have been massing for weeks.
Syria’s government and its opponents are preparing for a final, bloody showdown.
On Monday, a top United Nations humanitarian official, Mark Lowcock, said that unless some way of “dealing with this problem” was found, what is about to transpire in Idlib could descend into “the worst humanitarian catastrophe, with the biggest loss of life of the 21st century".
On Friday Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, held a summit with Russia's Vladmir Putin and Hassan Rouhani of Iran, the other key ally of the Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad, and urged them to accept a truce to avert a “bloodbath”. The summit came to nothing and Putin declared the defeat of terrorism in Idlib was "inevitable". Earlier his Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, described the militants in Idlib as a “festering abscess” that needed to be liquidated.
And now The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed Pentagon sources, has reported that the US believes Assad has already approved the use of chlorine gas in the impending attack.
The UN fears an attack on Idlib could uproot a further 800,000 people in a country in which, out of a pre-war population of 22 million, more than 6 million are already internally displaced and around 5 million have become refugees.
Given the world’s collective and compounded failures in Syria over the past seven years there is little reason to believe that some means of “dealing with this problem” will soon be found.
Smoke rises after a bomb hit a rebel position during heavy fighting in the Idlib province, Syria.
The Western order that once – sometimes – intervened in humanitarian catastrophes was already in retreat when this war started in 2011. This became clear to the people of Syria, as well as to Assad and Putin, when Barack Obama failed to enforce his own “red line” over Assad’s use of chemical weapons against civilians.
Today, with Donald Trump gleefully traducing internationalism from the Oval Office, it seems to be little more than a memory.
Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, has warned this week that the United States, France and Great Britain stand ready to respond to a chemical weapons attack with airstrikes against the regime, just as they have on two previous occasions. These strikes are rightly understood to be limited punitive actions – warnings to other fractious despots – rather than signals of determined intent to change the military and humanitarian landscape of Syria.
Assad and Russia are free to kill Syrians by other means.
Rather than imagining how the attack on Idlib might be averted most analysts are now trying to predict how it will unfold.
Idlib is the last of four “de-escalation zones” that were supposed to have been safe havens protected by combatants, including Russia, for humanitarian purposes. The other three have now been systematically overrun, with much of their populations joining the displaced.
But there is nowhere for the people of Idlib to go.
Turkey, which is already sheltering 3.5 million Syrian refugees, has hardened its border and this year there have been credible reports of its soldiers indiscriminately shooting Syrians who seek to cross it. However, there is some hope in that it may seek to protect Syrians in the north of the province around observation posts it maintains inside the provence.
In truth though there appears to be what Anthony Cordesman, a leading American strategic analyst, believes is a defacto international acceptance of Assad’s victory.
Fighters with the Free Syrian Army hiding out in a cave on the outskirts of Idlib.
In a analysis published last week by the US think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Cordsman observes that there have been examples of regimes successfully establishing stability and their regime's survival through the use of sheer and brutal force, but there is no real reason to see Assad’s Syria in this light.
He notes that even if Assad should obliterate the last organised military resistance in Idlib as expected, he would remain a “symbol of rule by a relatively tiny Alawite minority” in an overwhelmingly Sunni nation, a nation that has been utterly devastated, and one whose allies have little record of civil reconstruction.
“The end result,” he wrote, “would seem to be yet another version of a ‘peace’ that ends all peace.”
Nick O'Malley is a former US correspondent for Fairfax Media.
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