(REUTERS/Khalil Ashawi)
A Free Syrian Army fighter of the 101 Division, takes a position behind sandbags near the town of Morek in the north of Hama province

The Syrian Civil War has reached a turning point.

Over the past two weeks, the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad seized several villages north of Aleppo, the country's largest city and one of the last remaining strongholds of Syria's non-jihadist rebels.

The advance cut off Aleppo's anti-regime groups from their last remaining supply lines into Turkey, and put Assad in a position to retake a fiercely contested city that had a pre-war population of over 2 million.

The regime's advances, backed through an infusion of Iranian manpower and heavy Russian airstrikes around the city, come as efforts to resolve the conflict through diplomatic means have stalled in Geneva. And a recent quote from an unnamed western diplomat shows how facile the current diplomacy really is.

"It'll be easy to get a ceasefire soon because the opposition will all be dead," Reuters quoted the diplomat as saying. "That's a very effective ceasefire."

It's an astonishing statement that speaks volumes on the current realities in Syria. In mid-2012, opposition forces were claiming high-level defections from the government's Syrian Arab Army, sweeping through major cities, and gaining ground in Damascus.

Now, they've been so decimated that representatives of western governments are comfortable publicly discussing the rebel movement's extermination.

(Reuters)
Territorial control of Syria as of November 20th, 2012

The quote also reflects a shift in official western perceptions of the rebel movements' capabilities.

President Barack Obama famously dismissed the Syrian rebels as "former farmers or teachers or pharmacists" in 2014, in spite of groups like the Free Syrian Army's success in holding strategic territory and counterbalancing the influence of jihadist groups in the country.

Western policy decisions told a more complex story.

Suspected CIA assistance for the Syrian rebels, matched with occasionally strong US rhetoric on the need for Assad's removal, suggested that the US and its partners wanted to support anti-Assad groups enough to keep the rebellion from collapsing entirely — and enough to sustain a viable non-Assad, non-jihadist alternative in case an opening for a negotiated solution to the conflict ever emerged.

The diplomat's quote all but declares that policy a failure.

In the diplomat's view, the key to peace isn't sustaining the rebel movement. It's letting Assad and his partners win.