It is too late for the people of Aleppo. They will follow the restless souls of Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur in a long line of victims abandoned by the international community.

The nobleness of defeating IS should not be questioned, but the long term impact of how victory is attained must be carefully evaluated.

Neither side really wants a full-scale war, but unintended escalation is very much possible.

Devotees of more realpolitik oriented foreign policy persuasions claim they aren't under any illusions about the brutality of the regime of Syria's Bashar al-Assad. Nevertheless in their worldview limited cooperation with him against a threat like Islamic State (IS) is necessitated by the dire and unsavoury circumstances which exist today in Syria. And since neither the United States nor the United Kingdom are likely to insert ground forces to combat IS forces in Syria a temporary alliance or coordination of operations with Damascus solely in order to fight IS is the best option to feasibly confront this threat.

America’s commitment to the principle that one’s enemy’s enemy is one’s friend has come back to bite them on more than one occasion, and now Bashar Al-Assad is beginning to realise that even just leaving one’s enemies to fight it out can be problematic.

On Tuesday, the jihadist group ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham) launched a long-planned assault on Iraq, seizing control of Mosul, the country’s second largest city, after taking large parts of the central city of Fallujah and nearby Ramadi in December 2013.

The fall of Mosul, allegedly to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), is not the military victory it has been made out to be. For a start, as the New York Times and Agence France-Presse report, ISIS gunmen (who faced an army outnumbering them fifty-to-one) were able to occupy strategic positions around the city only after Iraqi commanders ordered their troops to stand down and retreat.

The Arab Spring has turned into an Orwellian Winter for the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East. Persecution has reached unprecedented levels and throughout the region Christians are being killed, displaced, tortured, kidnapped, enslaved, and forced to convert.

Moscow, I have recently discovered, has a decent daily English-language newspaper, the Moscow Times. While its attitude to the Putin government tends to be a fairly balanced criticism rather than either cosying up it or vitriol against it, neither is it afraid to criticise, unlike a seemingly increasing number of other Russian media outlets.

When will we learn that, where Islamism is involved, we have to get involved early and not late? We may well look back in years to come and ask ourselves why it was that we managed to lose on two fronts; not only that we let thousands of civilians be massacred, but also created the ideal conditions for a new generation of terrorists to boot.