Stopped at the last minute in Kobane, the terrorist group known in the Arab world as Daesh — we do not use Islamic State, because the group is neither truly Islamic nor a state — is dispatching its murderers to other points along the Syrian-Turkish border. And at the end of the road lies Aleppo, the bastion of the moderate opposition.
Syria’s second-largest city and part of humanity’s ancient heritage, Aleppo is the martyred center of the resistance to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, having been under constant bombardment by his forces since 2012. Now Aleppo is caught between the regime’s “barrel bombs” and Daesh’s cutthroats.
The city is almost entirely encircled, connected to the outside world by a single road to Turkey. The regime is seeking to destroy the resistance through cold and hunger. While 1 million people have left to join the flood of Syrian refugees, some 300,000 Aleppans are holding on, threatened with the same death and destruction that the regime has inflicted on Homs and the suburbs of Damascus.