Govt forces on offensive in Hama

Syria bus bombing tragic end to tragic deal

BEIRUT, April 17, (Agencies): Government forces and their allies advanced Monday in the central province of Hama under the cover of intense airstrikes, approaching the outskirts of a rebel-held town a day after capturing a strategic town from opposition fighters and militants, Syria’s state media and opposition activists said.

The push toward the town of Tibet al-Imam came a day after troops and pro-government militiamen captured the town of Soran, a month after Soran was lost in a rebel offensive. The government appears to be aiming to secure areas north of the city of Hama, the country’s fourth largest.

Insurgents, including members of al-Qaeda-linked Levant Liberation Committee, launched a wide offensive on parts of Hama province last month capturing several villages and towns. The government launched a wide counteroffensive under the cover of Russian and Syrian airstrikes regaining control of the whole area lost and pushing ahead toward other villages.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Syrian air force jets had conducted nearly 25 airstrikes on Tibet al-Imam and nearby villages since midnight.

Syrian state news agency SANA quoted an unnamed military official as saying that troops are now at the eastern entrance of Tibet al-Imam after capturing nearby hills under the cover of intense bombardment.

Earlier ON Monday, the Observatory and Syrian-based opposition activist Taher al-Omar said that members of the Levant Liberation Committee captured several army checkpoints near the central town of Salamiyeh. The Observatory and state media said government forces regained control of the checkpoints hours later.

Mothers Noha, a Shi’ite, and Samira, a Sunni, were besieged for nearly two years on each side of Syria’s civil war. At the weekend they finally escaped the suffocating blockades under an evacuation agreement — but their ordeal was not over.

As they waited at two transit points miles apart outside Aleppo, a bomb attack hit Noha’s bus convoy, killing more than 120 people including dozens of children. After ambulances rushed off the wounded, new buses arrived and the two convoys eventually reached their destinations - one in government territory and the other in rebel territory.

In the hours leading up to Saturday’s attacks, the two women spoke to Reuters about what they had left behind, their families being split up, and the likelihood they would never return home.

Reuters was not allowed back past security to try to find Noha after the blast, and lost contact with Samira after speaking to her earlier on another evacuee’s phone.

“We’ve lost everything. We hope to go back one day, but I don’t expect we will,” said Noha, 45, asking not to be identified by her last name.

Noha left al-Foua, one of two Shi’ite villages besieged by Syrian insurgents in Idlib province with her two youngest children and 5,000 other people under a deal between the Syrian government and armed opposition.

In exchange, 2,000 Sunni residents and rebel fighters from the government-besieged town of Madaya near Damascus — Samira’s hometown — were given safe passage out, and bussed to Idlib province, a rebel stronghold, via Aleppo.

Thousands of Syrians have been evacuated from besieged areas in recent months under deals between President Bashar al-Assad’s government and rebels fighting for six years to unseat him.

The deals have mostly affected Sunni Muslims living in rebel-held areas surrounded by government forces and their allies. Damascus calls them reconciliation deals and says it allows services to be restored in the wrecked towns.

Rebels say it amounts to forced displacement of Assad’s opponents from Syria’s main urban centres in the west of the country, and engenders demographic change because most of the opposition, and Syria’s population, are Sunni.

But backed militarily by Russia and Shi’ite regional allies, Assad, a member of Syria’s Alawite minority, has negotiated the deals from a position of strength.

“There was little choice. We had to leave, we were scared,” said Samira, 55, who was travelling with her five adult sons.

She had feared her sons would be arrested or forced to join the Syrian military and fight once troops and officials of the Damascus government moved into the town.

Like Noha, Samira was relieved to have escaped a crushing siege which had caused widespread hunger — and in the case of Madaya, starvation — but had left everything behind, including family.

“We owned three houses, farmland and three shops in Madaya town. Now, we don’t have a single Syrian pound,” she said.

Her daughter, pregnant with a third child, had stayed in Madaya because her husband had vowed to “live and die” there, she said.

Samira has not heard from her own husband for nearly four years after he was arrested by Syrian authorities.