Sick and injured start leaving Syria’s Ghouta
Medical to exit another pocket evacuation agreed with Russia Assad troops allow insurgents to exit another pocket
BEIRUT (Reuters) – Sick and injured civilians left a rebel enclave in Syria’s eastern Ghouta on Tuesday under the first medical evacuation since a massive assault began nearly a month ago.
Women carrying infants, men hobbling on crutches and an old man in a wheelchair waited at a school nearby, along with dozens who exited through the al-Wafideen crossing, a witness said.
During the army’s offensive, more than 1,100 civilians have died in the last big rebel bastion near the capital, the UN office of humanitarian affairs says.
Syrian government forces have captured swaths of eastern Ghouta, a pocket of satellite towns and farmland, splintering it into three zones in recent days.
Yasser Delwan, a political official with the Jaish al-Islam rebel faction, said the patients who left the town of Douma were the first of several batches.
The evacuees come from a list of nearly 1,000 people who UN officials have said need emergency treatment outside, he added. Jaish al-Islam said on Monday it had reached a medical evacuation deal with the Syrian government’s key ally, Russia, after indirect talks.
For months, the United Nations has pleaded with authorities to allow the evacuation of hundreds of patients, including children with cancer. The Ghouta enclave is home to nearly 400,000 people, under army siege since 2013 without enough food, water, or medicine, the world body says.
The government assault on eastern Ghouta has become one of the bloodiest offensives of the war, and is on course to deal rebels their biggest defeat since the battle of Aleppo in 2016.
Russia has offered rebels safe passage out with their families if they surrender the territory, echoing deals that saw Damascus take control of major cities across western Syria.
The two main Ghouta factions have vowed to stay and fight, and have denied government allegations that they have blocked residents from leaving.
Hamza Birqdar, Jaish al-Islam’s military spokesman, said in a video online that the fighters would continue to defend their territory until the end.
WITH GHOUTA now split into different parts, Delwan said his rebel faction was in charge only of evacuations from Douma, and not from other towns. If the deal proceeds, hundreds “will all be evacuated in batches for treatment, some in Damascus and some outside of Syria,” he told Reuters.
State media said others followed the first group which included about 35 people. They would go to a shelter nearby on the outskirts of the Syrian capital Damascus.
State TV accompanied some of the evacuees and broadcast interviews in which they said insurgents had prevented them from leaving. “We weren’t able to come out,” one man said. “They are not allowing anyone at all, they attack them and sent them back.”
Moscow and Damascus say their forces only target armed terrorists and seek to stop mortar salvos by Islamist insurgents that killed dozens of people in the capital. They accuse the rebels of using civilians as human shields, which the fighters deny. Troops pressed on with the assault on Tuesday and took some farmland around the town of Jisreen, said a military media unit run by Iran-backed Lebanese Shi’ite group Hezbollah, which fights alongside the Syrian Army.
The Civil Defense in Ghouta, a rescue service in rebel territory, said air strikes pounded Jisreen, Zamalka and Irbeen – part of a zone further south separated from Douma.
Families are sleeping in the open in the streets in Douma, with no more room in the basements to shelter from the bombs, local authorities have said.
Meanwhile, the Syrian military evacuated hundreds of rebel fighters and their families from a small opposition-held pocket south of Damascus on Tuesday, a war monitor and a news outlet run by Hezbollah said.
The evacuation of the al-Qadam neighborhood, reported by the Hezbollah-controlled Military Media, was yet another step in the government’s campaign to eliminate all opposition-held areas near the capital.
The area is not connected to eastern Ghouta, the main rebel enclave near the capital.
Military Media said buses had transported around 300 fighters from the Ajnad al-Sham group and their families from al-Qadam to Idlib province, a rebel-held area in the north, fulfilling an earlier agreement between the army and the rebels.
The transfer follows a pattern employed across Syria, under which the government and its Russian allies have laid siege to territory, carried out air and ground assaults and provided safe passage out to rebel fighters who agree to withdraw.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor said hundreds of fighters had left on buses over the past 24 hours.
Al-Qadam is surrounded by government-held territory on one side and Islamic State-controlled neighborhoods on the other.
The Britain-based Observatory said there was fighting between Syrian government forces and Islamic State fighters in that area, with air strikes carried out against ISIS.