Gwynne Dyer: Where are all those people?

QUIET: The besieged Syrian city of Aleppo seems to be missing the 250,000 civilians said to be trapped there by the fighting. PHOTO/AP

DID it cross your mind occasionally, in the past week, to wonder where all of the "250,000 civilians trapped in eastern Aleppo" have gone?

As the area of the city under rebel control dwindled, by Wednesday morning the Syrian regime's troops had recaptured three-quarters of it, did you see columns of fleeing civilians, or mounds of civilian dead?

If several hundred thousand people were on the move, you would expect to be seeing video images of it. If they were fleeing into the enclave the rebels still hold (to escape the evil Syrian army), you would expect the rebels to give us dramatic images of that. They certainly gave us footage of every civilian killed by Russian bombing in the past three months.

If hundreds of thousands or even just tens of thousands of civilians were fleeing for safety into government-held territory, you would expect the regime's propagandists to be making equally striking images available.

Or maybe the civilians are all dead. Stephen O'Brien, the UN's Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, warned just a week ago that if President Bashar al-Assad's forces went on advancing, then "the besieged parts of eastern Aleppo" would become "one giant graveyard".

So where are those quarter-million bodies? Or even a few thousand bodies? That's kind of hard to hide.

Here's a radical thought: have most of those people suddenly become invisible because they were never really there in the first place?

All the reporting out of eastern Aleppo for the past three months has been what the rebel groups wanted us to see. To them, the presence of large numbers of "defenceless civilians", the more the better, was their best protection against a full-scale onslaught.

So they gave us video of every civilian killed by a bomb, and greatly exaggerated the number of civilians in their part of the city, and almost never showed their own fighters.

There's no crime in this. It's the way propaganda works. The real question is this: why did the international media fall for it?

The United States, Saudi Arabia and Turkey were all determined to see the overthrow of Assad's regime, even if it did take six years of civil war. And even though they didn't agree on what they wanted to replace it with.

Washington pursued the dream of a democratic, secular Syria. Riyadh and Ankara wanted a decisive victory by the Sunni Arab majority (about 60 to 65 per cent of the population) and an authoritarian Islamic state.

But they all agreed on the need to overthrow Assad.

Syrians from the start were much more ambivalent. Few loved the Assad regime, which was repressive and brutal. But many Syrians, including many Sunni Muslims, saw the regime as their only protection against the triumph of an even nastier Islamist dictatorship.

There was never a mass uprising in Aleppo. Various rebel groups from the overwhelmingly Sunni rural areas around Aleppo stormed into the city in 2012 and won control over the eastern half, but it was never clear that the local residents were glad to see them.

On the other hand, it was not a good idea to look too unhappy about it, so over the next four years a great many people left the rebel-held part of the city, whose population dwindled to - well, we don't know but it was certainly not a quarter-million or anywhere near it.

It would appear that when the Syrian army retook most of eastern Aleppo in the past week, most of those people just stayed in their homes and waited to be "liberated".

Some of them will be terrified of being arrested and tortured, especially if they collaborated with the rebels even under duress. Others will be relieved that it's over.