Syrian rebels to evacuate opposition-held town in Ghouta

BEIRUT — Hundreds of armed rebels and civilians will begin evacuating a besieged town in eastern Ghouta, a rebel spokesperson and Syrian government media reported Wednesday, in the first instance of fighters leaving the opposition stronghold east of the capital following a deal reached with the government.

Monther Fares, a spokesperson for the powerful Ahrar al-Sham group, said the deal involves the departure starting Thursday morning of opposition fighters from his group to northern Syria. He said the deal negotiated with the government gives security guarantees for those who decide to stay in the town after the government takes over.

The Syria-controlled Military Media Centre said 1,500 armed rebels and 6,000 civilians will evacuate Harasta Thursday to the northern province of Idlib as part of a negotiated deal. The Ahrar al-Sham group, headquartered in Harasta, is the smallest of the rebel groups that control eastern Ghouta.

It is the first such deal involving the evacuation of opposition fighters from eastern Ghouta, which has been under a ferocious government air and ground assault for a month.

Fares said rebels have agreed to leave because of “civilian pressure” resulting from intensive airstrikes, adding that residents of Harasta have spent the last three months inside shelters. He said Russia, a military backer of President Bashar Assad, was the guarantor of the deal.

In other parts of Syria, government forces have also pressed the rebels to enter into local ceasefire agreements under which the militants and their families would relocate to other parts of the country. The Syrian opposition has criticized such agreements, saying they reward the government’s siege tactics and legitimize the forced displacement of civilians from their homes.

Syrian government forces have chipped away at the sprawling rebel enclave of eastern Ghouta, seizing more than 70 per cent of the territory since Feb. 18. The assault has displaced 45,000 people, according to the United Nations. Before the latest offensive, it was estimated that 400,000 people were trapped in the besieged region.

Eastern Ghouta was one of the hubs of the civil uprising against Assad’s government in 2011, which was to be eclipsed by a violent crackdown by the security services and subsequent armed revolt. Rebels have hit back with rockets and mortar shells on the capital Damascus.

In one of the deadliest attacks in the Syrian capital in the country’s seven-year civil war, at least 44 people, most of them women and children, were killed when insurgents fired mortar shells at a busy market in Damascus on Tuesday evening, state media said Wednesday.

In another bloody scene, an airstrike killed 21 people in the rebel-held province of Idlib in northwestern Syria.

The Syrian Civil Defence said that since the latest offensive started a month ago, it documented 1,252 civilians killed in more than 2,990 airstrikes and hundreds of other shellings.