Thousands Flee Aleppo After Russia Onslaught

A few months ago Bashar al Assad had his back against the Mediterranean. A rebel coalition was driving his forces into an ever tighter enclave. His very survival was in doubt.

Then the Kremlin stepped in – throwing the weight of a resurgent superpower behind his cause to devastating effect.

This week, Russia launched wave upon wave of bombing sorties against opposition forces, some of them backed by the West, around Aleppo and Homs.

The immediate result has been what may be the biggest mass movement of refugees in five years of civil war.

Turkey estimates 70,000 people are on the move from around Aleppo towards its frontiers.

Several thousand have already washed up against its borders hoping to escape Assad.

Many of them, most of them, have walked through - or close to - areas held by so-called Islamic State.

They are heading for sanctuary in Turkey, a nation already filled to the brim with the masses of victims of war who arrived tired and huddled - 2.5 million of them.

Russian spokesmen have said they remain committed to trying to get ceasefire talks off the ground and implement "confidence building measures on the ground" amid increasingly strident condemnation for the airstrikes from the UK, America and NATO over recent days.

These claims will ring as hollow as the bombs are loud to refugees on the run.

"Russia's airstrikes haven't stopped. My brother was killed. My father was killed. My mother was killed. We fled to Al-Bab because of the airstrikes but the airstrikes followed us there," said a refugee on arrival at the Turkish border.

"Then we fled to Marea and the airstrikes followed us there. More than 25 people were killed because of the airstrikes - that's aside from the injured, aside from the devastation, the children, the children in the ground."

His misery can only be matched by what one can assume will be a sense of satisfaction - even of small victory - for the Assad regime in Damascus.

The latest exodus has been caused by a collapse of the rebel forces under the Russian air campaign and a ferocious push on the ground that has involved Russian Spetznatz special forces and commandos from Iran fighting alongside and advising Assad’s forces.

Aleppo looks close to being overrun - small wonder that the mostly Sunni civilian population is fleeing ahead of a Shia advance, which includes Hezbollah, the ferocious Shia militant group from Lebanon.

So for now, while Assad has the smell of a strategic victory in Aleppo strong in his nostrils there will not be the slightest whiff of hope for a ceasefire, but the stench of blood will continue in a nation that looks increasingly cursed.