Civilians pay price in Syria
Thousands flee from relentless bombardment
THOUSANDS of civilians poured out of Eastern Ghouta on Thursday after a month-long bombardment brought the Syrian regime closer to recapturing 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 as the conflict entered its eighth year.
His troops advanced in a ferocious assault on Ghouta, once the opposition’s main bastion on the outskirts of the capital.
A war monitor said regime forces now control 70% of the area, splitting the remaining rebel territory into three shrinking pockets.
After a fierce air and ground assault, regime forces on Thursday captured Hammuriyeh town, in an isolated southern part of Ghouta.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor, said rebels later launched a counter-attack and regained parts of the town, killing 14 regime fighters.
Elsewhere, however, it said the regime overran Al-Rihan town in an assault led by Russian officers and advisers.
The regime’s advance into Hammuriyeh had punched a corridor through the town into government-controlled territory.
The Observatory said nearly 20 000 people fled the enclave in 24 hours before the flow stopped on Thursday evening.
Eastern Ghouta had been the main rebel bastion on the outskirts of Damascus since 2012 and came under a 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.
International Committee of the Red Cross president Peter Maurer went 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 Douma residents when mortar rounds hit nearby.
Ghouta was in May 2017 designated a “de-escalation zone” – an area where violence is supposed to ease, paving the way for humanitarian assistance and a nationwide truce.
But since February 18, Russian-backed government troops have pressed a ferocious air and ground assault that has brought most of Ghouta under government control.
Assad is determined to retake Ghouta in order to secure the capital, which is regularly battered by rockets and mortars fired from the adjacent rebel enclave.
The assault on Ghouta has left nearly 1 250 civilians dead, a fifth of them children.
Yesterday the foreign ministers of Russia, Turkey and Iran met in Kazakhstan’s capital Astana for a fresh round of talks aimed at ending the violence.
Previous discussions in Astana last year paved the way for the de-escalation zones, which were credited with reducing government-rebel hostilities.
In a separate front of the complex war, Ankara and allied Syrian factions on January 20 launched a sweeping ground and air assault against the Kurdish-controlled enclave of Afrin in northwestern Syria.
The city is home to around 350 000 people and is defended by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units.