Aleppo, Syria’s second city, could face a catastrophe, triggering massive fresh flows of refugees, unless President Bashar al-Assad and the rebels fighting him agree to freeze the fighting there, the UN special envoy to the war-torn country has warned.
Staffan de Mistura, who has held talks with Assad and the armed opposition, told the Guardian that after the collapse of the Geneva talks earlier this year there was now “no other game in town” for ending a conflict that has cost an estimated 200,000 lives, made millions homeless and destabilised the Middle East since Syria’s uprising at the height of the Arab spring in March 2011.
“At the moment the alternative is simply a continuous conflict in which there is no winner and the only losers are the people of Syria,” the veteran Swedish-Italian diplomat said in an exclusive interview.
Syria’s fractured opposition is deeply uneasy about the idea of a freeze, fearing it will play into Assad’s hands and allow him to free up forces to deploy elsewhere. Monitoring a freeze in an atmosphere of profound mistrust is another issue, as critics of the envoy’s “bottom-up strategy” have cautioned. Sanctions for breaches would be hard to impose unless Russia and Iran, Assad’s allies, were on board.