The Second Fall of Aleppo, A New Phase in Syrian Civil War

A civil war that dominated international headlines for more than a decade has now been reignited. A coalition of Syrian rebels launched a lightning offensive last week, seizing Aleppo, the country’s second-largest city, from President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. The rebels took only hours to recapture territory that Assad’s forces had spent years reclaiming. Fighter jets from Syria and its ally Russia soon began bombing the area — killing hundreds of the rebels but civilians, too, according to a leading monitoring group. “This is a very unstable situation with a huge amount of flux,” said H.A. Hellyer, a senior associate fellow…