No one is likely to disagree with Natalie Nougayrède that the situation in eastern Aleppo is nightmarish (Opinion, 1 August), and that a negotiated settlement would be a fine thing. The trouble is, in a civil war, with each side determined to win, the scope for negotiation isn’t great. She refers to the “Assad regime”, meaning the Syrian government, supported by the great majority of the country’s Shia Muslims, Alawites, Druze, and four types of Christians – the plural society that in happier times made Syria what it was. If Bashar al-Assad dropped dead tomorrow, would the situation significantly change? Would the Saudis stop assisting the rebels, or the Iranians the government? More importantly, would the Isis menace suddenly dissolve?
And, in her anxiety to clobber the Russians, she failed to mention the Syrian army’s signal victory (with Russian help) in recapturing Palmyra, and demonstrating that Isis isn’t invincible.
Robin Milner-Gulland
Washington, West Sussex
• Natalie Nougayrède was right in asserting the need to avert a human catastrophe in Aleppo. Rwanda and Srebrenica remain poignant reminders of the ineptitude of the global community to diminish racial polarisation.
The world has paid a heavy price for the lack of vision in the Middle East. Jordan has received more than 1.5 million Syrian refugees. This is bound to sap its health, security, defence and educational resources. We cannot afford to lose credible allies in the vanguard of fighting international terrorism and offering safe havens for the most vulnerable.
Dr Munjed Farid Al Qutob
London
• As you observe (Editorial, 30 July), it doesn’t help that western attention is focused on terrorism in Europe and the US electoral campaign, and this must point to the urgent need for news media to shift that focus to the unfolding disaster in Syria in order to promote the critically important mobilisation of global public opinion to which you refer. At the same time, how necessary it is for the pope, having remembered in silent prayer the crime against humanity that was Auschwitz, to now rage at the top of his voice against the cruelty being cold-bloodedly inflicted on hundreds of thousands of people in Aleppo.
Patrick O’Brien
Aberystwyth
• The west’s pie-in-the-sky thinking envisages engineering regime change in Damascus while retaining Syria’s secular state structures. It risks triggering a refugee exodus of Biblical proportions from government-controlled areas and the end of Syria’s ancient Christian community. The terrorists posing a threat to the west are Sunnis not Shias. Assad, Hezbollah, Iran and Russia are not our enemy.
Yugo Kovach
Winterborne Houghton, Dorset
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