Thousands flee Ghouta enclave as Syrian army advances
DISPLACED: Over 12,000 people flee the enclave in ‘the largest displacement’
ADRA, Syria: Thousands of civilians poured out of Eastern Ghouta on Thursday as the capture of a key town brought Syria’s government even closer to retaking the devastated rebel enclave outside Damascus.
Defying expectations and calls to step down, Syria’s President Bashar al Assad was strengthening his grip on power on Thursday as the conflict entered its eighth year.
His troops gained new ground in their ferocious assault against Eastern Ghouta, once the opposition’s main bastion on the outskirts of the capital.
Regime forces now control 70 per cent of the area, a war monitor said, and have split the remaining rebel territory into three shrinking pockets.
After a fierce air and ground assault, regime forces on Thursday captured Hammuriyeh, a town in an isolated southern zone of Ghouta.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor, said Hammuriyeh fell to regime forces after fighters from the Faylaq al Rahman rebel faction withdrew.
The regime’s advance into Hammuriyeh overnight had opened up a corridor through the town into government-controlled territory.
Streams of women and children escaped through that corridor on Thursday, carrying plastic bags stuffed with clothes and pushing strollers piled high with suitcases and rugs.
They reached a regime-held checkpoint in the region of Adra, where ambulances and a group of large green buses were waiting to take them to temporary shelters.
The Observatory said more than 12,000 people fled the enclave on Thursday in “the largest displacement since the beginning of the assault on Ghouta.”
The Russian military, which has backed the offensive on the rebel enclave, said as many as 13,000 people could leave Ghouta by the end of the day.
Eastern Ghouta had been the main rebel bastion on the outskirts of Damascus since 2012 and came under a devastating regime siege the following year.
That left the area’s roughly 400,000 residents struggling to secure food and hospitals crippled by shortages of medicine and equipment.
On Thursday, a joint convoy of food supplies for some 26,000 people entered Douma, the largest town in Ghouta and part of a separate rebel-controlled pocket.
“This is just a little of what these families need,” said the International Committee of the Red Cross, which was carrying out the delivery alongside the Syrian Arab Red Crescent and the United Nations.
ICRC President Peter Maurer was present with the convoy, the first time he had accompanied such an operation.
Twenty-five trucks were delivering food parcels and flour bags to hunger-stricken residents in Douma when mortar rounds hit nearby.
ASSAULT ON AFRIN: Meanwhile, a Turkish-led offensive to capture the Kurdish-majority enclave of Afrin in northern Syria has forced 30,000 civilians from its main city in 24 hours, a monitor said on Thursday.
“More than 30,000 people were displaced since yesterday (Wednesday) as a result of Turkish bombardment against the city,” the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
“They went to areas controlled by the Syrian regime and to the outskirts of the city” under the control of Kurdish militia, the monitoring group said.
On January 20, Turkey launched a major ground and air offensive on the Afrin enclave, with the support of Syrian Arab rebel proxies.
It claims to have now almost completely encircled the region’s main city of Afrin.
A correspondent inside the city saw hundreds of families cramming into the back of pick-up trucks and onto tractor-drawn carts as they prepared to leave the city via the only remaining exit.
Turkish-led offensive to capture the Kurdish-majority enclave of Afrin in northern Syria has forced 30,000 civilians from its main city in 24 hours