TRAINING ISIS FIGHTERS IN SYRIA

Beirut, Dec. 27: Critically ill patients are being evacuated from the besieged Syrian rebel- held enclave of eastern Ghouta, but the fate of hundreds of others with life- threatening conditions remains unresolved, reported the Guardian on Wednesday.

The International Committee of the Red Cross ( ICRC) in Syria said its staff, along with those of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent ( Sarc), had “begun the evacuation of critical medical cases from eastern Ghouta to central Damascus” on Wednesday.

The Syrian American Medical Society ( Sams) said four patients had been taken to hospitals in Damascus, the first of 29 critical cases approved for medical evacuation, and the remainder would be evacuated over the coming days. They include 18 children and four women with heart disease, cancer, kidney failure and blood diseases.

The news was confirmed by the official Syrian government news agency, and appears to follow local negotiations as well as several humanitarian appeals from high- profile figures including King Abdullah of Jordan, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s president, and Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister.

The Sams advocacy manager, Mohamad Katoub, tweeted that five people had been approved for the first group of evacuations. It was not clear why only four of the five left.

Almost 400,000 residents of eastern Ghouta, one of Moscow, Dec. 27: The chief of the Russian General Staff has accused the United States of training former Islamic State fighters in Syria to try to destabilise the country.

General Valery Gerasimov’s allegations, made in a newspaper interview, center on a US military base at Tanf, a strategic Syrian highway border crossing with Iraq in the south of the country.

Islamic State has this year lost almost all the territory it held in Syria and Iraq. Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday the main part of the battle

the last remaining rebel strongholds in Syria, have been caught in a regime siege for the last five years, and some have been in urgent need of medical attention for months.

Although the area is designated by Russia, Iran and Turkey as a de- escalation zone, the Syrian government has until now refused to lift the siege, claiming the area is held by opposition rebels bent on attacking the capital, Damascus. A near total blockade has been in force for almost eight months, pushing up the price of food and medicines.

Eastern Ghouta has been subjected to ceaseless bombardment and was targeted in a sarin gas attack by Assad’s with Islamic State in Syria was over, according to the state- run RIA news agency.

The United States says the Tanf facility is a temporary base used to train partner forces to fight Islamic State. It has rejected similar Russian allegations in the past, saying Washington remains committed to killing off Islamic State and denying it safe havens.

But Gerasimov told the daily Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper on Wednesday that the United States was training up fighters who were former Islamic State militants. forces in 2013, which, despite international condemnation, did not lead to direct reprisals from the

The evacuations are part of a complex exchange of detainees between Assad’s government and the rebel group Jaysh al- Islam, an opposition faction formed by a merger of Islamist groups in 2013 that was initially funded by Saudi Arabia. Sarc said the evacuations were the result of “long negotiations”. An ICRC spokeswoman declined to give more details, citing the sensitivity of the operation and the risk that the deal might yet collapse. Free Syrian Army re- bels launched an attack on the capital from its suburb of Ghouta in July 2012.