The liberated neighborhoods of eastern Aleppo, under the control of neither the Assad regime nor the jihadist forces, fell in mid-December. Residents endured a continuous stream of air raids while pro-regime forces — hundreds of elite soldiers from the Republican Guard and the Syrian Fourth Division, with thousands of foreign fighters led by Iran and Hezbollah — advanced on the ground.

Eastern Aleppo has been under siege since July 2016, and the civilian population lacked food, water, medicine, and other necessities. Before the takeover, about fifty thousand people had fled, mostly to regime-controlled areas. Several thousand, however, went to the Sheikh Maqsoud neighborhood, which is under Kurdish control. Some sources report that the regime has ordered the Kurdish armed forces, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), to leave their stronghold before the end of the year.

Meanwhile, a few days after the official announcement of the takeover of Aleppo, on December 29, Russian military officials hosted a meeting in their air base at Hmeimim in western Syria with various representatives of Kurdish movements, including both the Democratic Society Movement (Tev-Dem) — implicitly representing the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) — and the Kurdish National Council (KNC), supported by the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), to mediate future relations between them and the Assad regime.