The fall of Aleppo and what it could mean for Syria, the region

In a rapid offensive lasting less than a month, forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have recaptured the last opposition enclave in east Aleppo.

On Monday evening, the army cleared street after street as artillery and air strikes pounded rebel positions northeast of Ramouseh district. By midnight, only a tiny speck of territory remained in opposition hands and celebratory gunfire lit the darkened skies over west Aleppo.

On Tuesday evening, finally, news came of a deal brokered by Russia and Turkey that would see the remaining rebel fighters evacuate to opposition-held territory outside Aleppo, while civilians were to remain in the city under government control.

The collapse of the east Aleppo pocket marks the end of a four-and-a-half yearstruggle for control over northern Syria’s largest city, often referred to as the country’s industrial and economic capital.

To al-Assad loyalists, this is a great victory. In an email interview, a source close to the government in Damascus spoke of Aleppo’s “liberation from terror groups”, saying that the restoration of army control would “allow the hundreds of thousands of displaced persons to return to east Aleppo”.

There is clearly a sense of relief among government loyalists in Aleppo, who feel that their city may finally be on the path back to normality. On Monday night, the state broadcaster al-Ekhbariya ran loops of footage from street celebrations in pouring rain, where young men fired in the air and honked their car horns as television anchors handed out chocolates.

But to the Syrian opposition, the fall of east Aleppo is a political disasterthat threatens to sap morale and undermine international support for the uprising. Yet opposition representatives struck a defiant tone.

“We can’t ignore the fact that the revolutionaries in Syria have been left alone to face a large group of enemies, including the regime, Hezbollah, Iran, Russia, the militias, and Iraq,” Omar Mushaweh, a Turkey-based leader of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, told IRIN in an online interview.

But, like other opposition sympathisers interviewed, Mushaweh gave no hint of wanting to surrender. Indeed, with the al-Assad government’s own weaknesses demonstrated by its recent loss of Palmyra to the self-declared Islamic State, no one is under any illusions: the war will go on.

Beyond the political consequences, however, recent events in Aleppo mark the brutal conclusion to four years of human suffering. To Syrians with friends and family in the collapsing rebel enclave, the past weeks have been a nightmare. All through Monday and Tuesday, desperate messages and pleas for help trickled out from east Aleppo through private contacts and social media. Though many civilians had already managed to flee into government-held western Aleppo, the last days of the enclave saw tens of thousands of people thronging the streets.

“People are moving around and fleeing as they can in a very volatile situation, as front lines continue to shift on a daily basis,” Linda Tom, a spokeswoman for the UN’s emergency aid coordination body, OCHA, told IRIN in an emailed comment on Saturday. Tom estimated that more than 40,000 civilians had already been displaced at that point, with a further 100,000 still in rebel-held territory, though she stressed that all figures were uncertain.*

Médecins Sans Frontières has called the fall of east Aleppo one of the worst crises they have seen in years. For some of the displaced civilians, fleeing meant risking everything – not only their lives, but also their homes.

The writer filed this article for IRIN from Stockholm