Air strikes delay evacuation of rebel fighters in south Syria
beirut — Regime forces bombarded southern Syria on Sunday, as the evacuation of rebel fighters under a ceasefire deal for the region was postponed, a monitor and an opposition official said.
Opposition fighters in the southern province of Daraa announced a ceasefire deal late on Friday with regime ally Russia to end more than two weeks of deadly regime bombardment.
Under that deal, rebels who wished to do so were to leave areas in the strategic southern province to be retaken by President Bashar Al Assad’s regime.
But on Sunday morning, government forces air strikes killed four civilians, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Syrian warplanes pounded Um Al Mayazeen just five kilometres north of the Jordanian border, killing three civilians, said the Britainbased monitor. “Regime forces
launched an assault on the village,” Observatory director Rami Abdel Rahman said, two days after they retook control of the key border crossing of Nassib to the south.
Earlier, rebel fire on a regime convoy on the highway near Um Al Mayazeen had killed several soldiers, Abdel Rahman said, without providing a toll.
A regime air strike on the rebelheld half of the provincial capital of Daraa also killed one civilian, he said. A rebel official said the evacuation of opposition fighters and their families to rebel-held areas in northern Syria was temporarily put on hold.
“A hundred buses were supposed to arrive but (the operation) has been postponed to a later date, in around two days,” the official said. “There was an exchange of fire between both sides and the first (wave) has been postponed,”the official added. —