Syrian army hails full recapture of Ghouta rebel enclave
DAMASCUS, Syria: The Syrian army has declared that all antiregime forces have left Eastern Ghouta, after a blistering two month offensive on the rebel enclave on the outskirts of the capital.
The announcement, which represents a key strategic victory for President Bashar al-Assad, came just hours after US-led strikes pounded Syrian government targets in response to a suspected chemical attack on the enclave’s main town of Douma.
“All terrorists have left Douma, the last of their holdouts in Eastern Ghouta,” state news agency SANA quoted an army spokesman as saying Saturday, using the regime’s usual term for rebels.
“Areas of Eastern Ghouta in rural Damascus have been fully cleansed of terrorism,” an army spokesman also said in a statement delivered on state television.
At the start of the year Eastern Ghouta was a sprawling semi-rural area just east of Damascus, home to almost 400,000 inhabitants, which had already endured several years under a government siege that slashed access to food, medicine and other goods.
The Syrian government and allied forces launched a massive assault on February 18 to retake the enclave, which had been out of regime control since 2012.
The intense bombardment killed some 1,700 civilians according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor, and pulverised the area, reducing many neighbourhoods to rubble.
Damascus has been accused of carrying out an April 7 chemical weapons attack on Douma, the final part of the enclave where rebels were balking at a Russianbrokered deal to evacuate them to northern Syria. — AFP