Sick and injured begin to leave besieged Syrian enclave in Ghouta
BEIRUT: Sick and injured civilians were shown on Syrian state television leaving a besieged rebel enclave in eastern Ghouta yesterday in what insurgents and the United Nations said was a medical evacuation.
Women carrying small children, men hobbling on crutches and an old man in a wheelchair were shown walking among a group of Syrian soldiers near the al-Wafideen crossing point out of the enclave.
The army’s near month- old campaign of air and artillery strikes in the last big rebel bastion near the capital has killed more than 1,100 civilians, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says.
Syrian government forces have captured more than half of eastern Ghouta, a pocket of satellite towns and densely populated farmland where the United Nations says 400,000 civilians have lived under siege since 2013. Advances in recent days have cut off the major towns Douma and Harasta from each other and neighbouring areas, splitting eastern Ghouta into separate enclaves.
Yasser Delwan, a political official with the Jaish al-Islam rebel faction, said the people who left Douma were the first of several batches of patients expected to be evacuated for treatment outside.
The group had said on Monday it had reached an agreement, through the United Nations, with the government’s key ally, Russia, to evacuate wounded people.
State television said the first group comprised about 35 people and they would go to a shelter on the outskirts of the nearby Syrian capital Damascus.
Families are sleeping in the open in the streets in Douma with no more room in basements to shelter from the bombs, local authorities have said.