BEIRUT • Make life intolerable and death likely. Open an escape route, or offer a deal to those who leave or surrender. Let people trickle out. Kill whoever stays. Repeat until a deserted cityscape is yours.
It is a strategy that both the Syrian government and its Russian allies have long embraced to subdue Syrian rebels, largely by crushing the civilian populations that support them.
But in the past few days, as hopes for a revived ceasefire have disintegrated at the United Nations, the Syrians and Russians seem to be mobilising to apply this kill-all-who-resist strategy to the most ambitious target yet: the rebel-held sections of the divided metropolis of Aleppo.
The killing and destruction in Syria, of course, have stupefied much of the world during the past five years. But they could pale in comparison with a military assault to retake all of Aleppo, once Syria's largest city and still home to about two million people, roughly 250,000 of them in rebel-held territory.
A takeover battle could mean "a slow, grinding, street-by-street fight, over the course of months, if not years," the UN special envoy for Syria, Mr Staffan de Mistura, warned on Sunday, speaking at an emergency Security Council session on Syria, in which outright confrontation replaced any effort to find diplomatic common ground.
East Aleppo would be, by far, the biggest and most fortified area that government forces have sought to retake with scorched-earth tactics of siege and bombardment - called "starve-or-submit" after slogans scrawled outside besieged areas by pro-government militiamen.
The tactics have succeeded in much smaller areas: in encircled suburbs of the capital, Damascus, and in rebel enclaves in the central city of Homs - first in the historic Old City and, most recently, last week, in the outlying neighbourhood of Waer. In the past few days, pro-government forces have signalled that they are escalating efforts to press the tactics to their conclusion in Aleppo, step by step.
On Sunday, Syria's UN ambassador punctuated the message, declaring that the government would reclaim all of the city. First came new waves of air strikes, Aleppo's worst bombardment of the war.
The bombings were so ferocious that the United States and Britain accused Russia of "barbarism" and "war crimes" for backing the Syrian air campaign. A provisional death toll provided by local non-governmental organisations suggested that at least 85 people had been killed since early Sunday.
