Kurdish corridor

The imminent fall of Aleppo to Russian and Syrian army troops will not put an end to a civil war that has so far cost the lives of over 400,000 civilians and displaced 8 million people, according to UN figures. 

The 900 Al Nusra Front fighters might agree to be escorted to Deir Ezzour where their main stronghold is heavily fortified. 

But their leader, Abu Mohammed Al Julani, does not trust the assurances of UN envoy Staffan de Mistura, and he trusts any assurances by the Alawite regime or the Russian generals even less. 

It is highly improbable that he would allow his hardcore fighters to be paraded in front of the enemy’s gun sights. 

Not far from Deir Ezzour stronghold, there is Al Bab, another equally fortified bastion that belongs to Daesh. 

With its 80,000 population of mainly Sunni Arabs, and with the recruitment techniques of mosque indoctrination, thousands of Al Bab teenagers have shown up in Mosul and Raqqa, defending Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi’s new “caliphate”.

One of the main players in the Aleppo scenario is the Kurdish forces within the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a militia trained by the Unites States. 

It has fought more than one battle against Daesh and won. The troops also have state of the art weapons provided by the Pentagon’s arsenal. 

Their ideological objective is to create a Kurdish corridor from Kobane to Manbij to Azaz to Afrin in order to guarantee the creation of Rojava — a Kurdish statelet — that would enjoy a federal relationship with its neighbours, and guarantee self-rule for the nearly 2 million Kurds in the area. 

With that goal in mind, the Kurdish fighters within the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), which dominates the SDF, have on October 3 taken Arima, a Daesh stronghold on the road from Manbij only 20km east of Al Bab, while other SDF units have advanced to 20km west of the city.

A year ago, a Kurdish delegation that was in Washington and was headed by the PYD managed to win a promise of recognition for Rojava, when the Syrian civil war comes to an end.

What is going on in Aleppo is just a part of the pre-planned grand design to create a Kurdish Rojava as a federal autonomous entity.

Kurdish enclaves will be adjacent and parallel to Sunni enclaves and Alawite enclaves, in what could be called the “Federal Republic of Greater Syria”.