The town of Srebrenica in 1993 during the Bosnian War

When Bosnian men and boys were taken away by Serb forces and executed in the thousands in Srebrenica in 1995, the international community vowed "never again".

But in Aleppo it is happening again. In the last few days scores of civilians have suffered the same fate as Srebrenica's men.

The UN says 82 men, women and children have been taken out of their homes and shot on the spot as one of the last rebel-held enclaves fell to the regime.

But, equally disturbing, hundreds, possibly thousands of men are missing in Aleppo, suffering the same fate as countless others who have disappeared wherever the regime's tactics have prevailed.

:: Aleppo civilians trapped as heavy fighting resumes


The method is tried and tested. Regime forces surround and besiege an area, starving it into submission. Then fighters are allowed to leave.

UN: Aleppo civilians paying 'brutal price'

Men with guns can escape to fight and be killed another day.

They are bussed to Idlib province. It is dominated by Islamist groups regarded as extremists or terrorists by the west, some with links to al Qaeda.

:: Aleppo under siege: A timeline

That means the world will be less critical of the regime when it comes round to launching an offensive to annihilate them there.

It has been one of the cruel ironies of this civil war that armed rebels are allowed safe passage while men without guns have often been rounded up and processed. Those suspected of opposing the regime in any way have often disappeared.

Image: Aleppo then and now: Umayyad Mosque, 2013... Image: ... and the Umayyad Mosque in 2010 Image: The Old City seen from Aleppo's historic citadel, 2009 Image: An image taken with a drone shows the Old City of Aleppo and the citadel, 2016 Image: An antique shop in al Jdeideh neighbourhood, 2009 Image: Men salvage belongings from their damaged shops that were hit by airstrikes, 2016 Image: The Shahba Mall, one of the largest commercial shopping centres in Syria, 2009 Image: The mall after airstrikes by forces loyal to Assad in 2014. Continue through for more pictures of Aleppo before and after the destruction /

And this is the important point. The regime's narrative has always been that it is only fighting Islamists and terrorist extremists. It has treated anyone undermining that false narrative as a threat.

That has meant university professors, teachers, doctors who dared speak out against the regime went missing early on in the revolution because they represented the truth - that Syrians of all levels of society had had enough of the Assad regime.

So when we read of activists going missing now, they are not the fighters, not the armed rebels, extremist or not.

They can be anybody from volunteer medics, White Helmet search-and-rescue workers to doctors doing heroic work in the hospitals that have been repeatedly and deliberately targeted by the Russian and Syrian warplanes.

Or they can simply be people who have spoken out against the regime at some point in this revolution.

They are all fair game in the minds of the regime and its allied militias as they sweep Aleppo and scour it clean of opposition.

'Have you no shame?': US condemns Russia over Aleppo

Bashar al Assad and his Iranian and Russian backers are applying scorched earth tactics in Aleppo. They are creating a desert and calling it peace, said the head of Britain's MI6 last week.

They will not allow the green shoots of revolution to sprout again in that wasteland.

We will see fewer heartbreaking pictures out of Aleppo now - of children trapped in the rubble, volunteers racing to help them, black plumes of smoke rising from explosions caused by barrel bombs dropped on densely populated residential areas and the desperate scenes in its dwindling number of hospitals.

But its people still face a chilling future as the regime consolidates its grip and purges Syria of any opposition.