ANALYSIS - Aleppo is a 'what'?!

By İhsan Gürsoy

ISTANBUL

Gary Johnson, the U.S. presidential nominee of the Libertarian Party and former governor of New Mexico, joined news channel MSNBC's live "Morning Joe" show to answer journalists’ questions. One of the panel’s questions, Mike Barnicle's, "What would you do, if you were elected, about Aleppo?" caught him off-guard, and the puzzled Johnson replied, "What is Aleppo?" Although Johnson committed a worse political blunder in the part of the interview coming after this question, the media was pretty much riveted on his "What is Aleppo?" question. While reciting all the political and ethnic groups in Syria in a series of nonsensical phrases, he remarked that the only way out of the Syrian "mess" that the U.S. could take was to "join hands with Russia" in a "diplomatic" move. When asked, "So alliance with Russia is the solution to Syria. Do you think Vladimir Putin and Russia are a good and reliable partner?” Johnson said, "Well, I think diplomatically that is… that has to be the solution. Joining hands with Russia to bring this civil war to an end."

The New York Times reported the event by sharing some of the tweets that mocked the nominee, and noted that some Twitter critics argue that the candidate "disqualified himself". But there was something strange in the Times' report as well: It identified Aleppo as the de facto capital of Daesh. Having realized its error, the Times changed its definition of Aleppo in a matter of minutes, but this new definition was also problematic: "the stronghold of Daesh". Although the closest that Daesh has ever gotten there is 10 kilometers away, in order to see Aleppo as a city with a strong Daesh presence, one must apparently look from as far as New York.

The Times emphasized this correction in the note it added below the article: "An earlier version of this article misidentified the de facto capital of the Islamic State [Daesh]. It is Raqqa, in northern Syria, not Aleppo". But a second correction below this note tells us of a far graver mistake apparently corrected before readers ever got to see it: "An earlier version of the above correction misidentified the Syrian capital as Aleppo. It is Damascus." The ignorance of a journalist, writing from a New York "rooftop", about which group is stronger in Aleppo may be tolerable. However, Aleppo's residents would rightly expect that anybody who has taken a geography class at an elementary level should have known that not their hometown, but Damascus, is Syria's capital.

What do the people of Aleppo say?

A number of Aleppo residents, asked for their comments on this chain of blunders, are clearly blessed with a far greater knack for political analysis, particularly compared to some U.S. politicians and newspapers. Randomly chosen for interviews as they were leisurely strolling the streets of Aleppo, the residents unanimously agree that U.S. Middle East policy is confined to furthering its own national interests. "The candidates will do nothing for Aleppo!" remarked Mus'ab Omar, who criticized U.S. policy as follows: "The United States is after nothing but securing its own interests, and they don't care a fig about the magnitude of the destruction they need to cause to achieve their goals. We have seen the same thing in Iraq before."

"The U.S., as a superpower, has had the power to stop the bloodshed in Syria since the very start, but it didn't do that," says Ibrahim Hajj Ibrahim, adding that "wars are a good source of cash flow to major powers such as the U.S. and Russia through the sale of weapons and ammunition. The U.S. will probably want this war to continue." Mahmoud Najjar remarked that the U.S. has a general policy towards developing countries based on the principle of "sparking conflicts and profiting from them". Referring to Johnson, Ahmad Ridwan said, "As we recently heard a candidate say on a TV show, the U.S. takes no interest in Aleppo." Ridwan finds this blunder very consistent with the nonchalant attitude of the current U.S. administration toward the use of chemical weapons and massacres taking place daily.

Aleppo's residents gauge US presidential candidates

Comments from various residents, for example, the one from Ibrahim, who said, "I don't think any candidate is interested in Aleppo, or in Syria," and the one from Mohammad al-Sheikh, who said, "I don't think U.S. presidential candidates are interested in Aleppo," demonstrate that there is a consensus among the residents of Aleppo. This is how al-Sheikh evaluates the candidates: "Well, [Republican Party presidential candidate Donald] Trump is already an enemy of Muslims. Johnson, another candidate, has no idea what Aleppo is. That is, despite all the destruction here, he has not heard of something called 'Aleppo'. On the other hand, what did [Democratic Party nominee Hillary] Clinton do for Aleppo when she was secretary of state that she will do something now, if she becomes the next president?" Najjar offers the most striking comment on the subject: "Presidential candidates are always nothing but puppets. Everything is run by the deep state. Not by mere presidents, who just appear on the scene for a few years."

Might the US mistakenly bomb Aleppo?

Al-Sheikh said there is a high likelihood that the U.S. Air Force might bomb Aleppo. "There are rumors that the operations center of the opposition forces fighting Assad was bombed by the U.S. Air Force, which is now targeting the leadership of Fath al-Sham," he said, referring to a meeting in western Aleppo where the opposition was hit. Ibrahim said, "The killings of Abdulqadir al-Salih and Zahran Alloush, and the recent attacks on Ahrar al-Sham and Fath al-Sham, bear the American seal." Ibrahim recalls that during a U.S. airstrike in Idlib last year on the al-Nusra Front, 40 people, including children, lost their lives. Mus'ab Omar also recalls that in the past the U.S. struck many civilian targets in Iraq and Afghanistan "by mistake".

Ridwan lashes out at the U.S. policy on Syria: "If you are remaining silent in the face of Assad's massacres, when you are powerful enough to stop him, you are an accomplice!" He adds that he no longer cares whether the U.S., "an accomplice in the shedding of Syrian blood", bombs the people deliberately or accidentally.

Consequently, even though we now have a very strong conviction that American politicians and members of the media have very poor geographical knowledge, we still do want to believe that U.S. military academies teach their cadets geography and how to read maps.

Translated by Ömer Çolakoğlu

*Opinions expressed in this piece are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Anadolu Agency's editorial policy.