Syrians wait to be evacuated from the eastern part of Aleppo, that had been under siege by regime forces and its supporters, at a crossing point in Amiriyah district of Aleppo, yesterday.
Beirut: Thousands were evacuated from the last rebel-held enclave of the Aleppo yesterday after a deal was reached to allow people to leave two besieged pro-government villages in nearby Idlib province.
In bitter winter weather, convoys of buses from eastern Aleppo reached rebel-held areas to the west of the city, and more buses left the Shi’ite Muslim villages of al-Foua and Kefraya for government lines, according to a UN official and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group.
The United Nations Security Council agreed a resolution calling for UN officials and others to be allowed to monitor evacuations from east Aleppo and the safety of civilians still there.
The Syrian ambassador to the United Nations, Bashar Ja’afari, denounced the resolution as propaganda, saying the last of the rebels were leaving and Aleppo would be “clean” by Monday evening.
The recapture of Aleppo is Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s biggest victory so far in the nearly six-year-old war, but the fighting is not over with large parts of the country still controlled by insurgent and Islamist groups. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said 20,000 civilians had been evacuated from Aleppo so far.
Nearly 50 children, some critically injured, were rescued from eastern Aleppo, where they had been trapped in an orphanage, the United Nations said.
The evacuation of civilians from the two villages had been demanded by the Syrian army and its allies before they would allow fighters and civilians trapped in Aleppo to depart. The stand-off halted the Aleppo evacuation over the weekend.
“Complex evacuations from East Aleppo and Foua & Kefraya now in full swing. More than 900 buses needed to evacuate all. We must not fail,” Jan Egeland, who chairs the United Nations aid task force in Syria, tweeted.
Ahmad Al Dbis, a medical aid worker heading a team evacuating patients from Aleppo, said 89 buses had left the city. “Some evacuees told us that a few children died from the long wait and the intense cold while they were waiting to evacuate,” he said..
For those still in rebel-held Aleppo, conditions were grim, according to Aref Al Aref, a nurse and photographer there. “I’m still in Aleppo. I’m waiting for them to evacuate the children and women first. It’s very cold and there’s hunger. It’s a long wait,” he told Reuters. “People are burning wood and clothes to keep warm in the streets.”
Photographs of people evacuated from Aleppo showed large groups of people standing or crouching with their belongings or loading sacks onto trucks.
Children in winter clothes carried small backpacks or played with kittens. One older man, in traditional Arab robes and headdress, sat holding a stick. On Sunday, some of the buses sent to al-Foua and Kefraya to carry evacuees out were attacked and torched by armed men. That incident threatened to derail the evacuations, the result of intense negotiations between Russia - Assad’s main supporter - and Turkey, which backs some large rebel groups.
