Evacuation from Aleppo resumes after delays

Volunteer leader says 1,500 people left on 20 buses

ALEPPO // Evacuations from the last rebel-held pocket of east Aleppo resumed yesterday despite heavy snowfall, clearing a path for Syria’s army to take full control of the city.

The evacuations – in which thousands of rebels and civilians left the east of the city – faced delays earlier in the day, leaving hundreds hungry and cold waiting to escape.

But Syrian state television reported that after a 24-hour delay, 20 buses with “armed men and their families” had left for rebel territory west of the city. Ahmad Al Dbis, who heads a team of doctors and volunteers coordinating evacuations, said a convoy of 20 buses had taken 1,500 people out of the city, including 20 wounded.

The news came as four Turkish soldiers were killed and 15 wounded in clashes with ISIL fighters as the Turkish military faced increasing resistance in the battle to take a key town, said Turkey’s state-run Anadolu news agency.

The ISIL-held town of Al Bab, 25 kilometres from the Turkish border, has become the main target of the Turkish army’s more than three-month campaign inside Syria in support of pro-Ankara Syrian rebels. The ISIL-linked Amaq news agency said a suicide attack was carried out against the Syrian rebels and Turkish troops west of Al Bab, without giving further details.

The Turkish air force struck 47 ISIL targets around Al Bab, killing more than 45 extremists, Anadolu reported.

Meanwhile, a US- backed Arab- Kurdish alliance advanced yesterday to several kilometres from the largest prison held by ISIL in Syria’s northern province of Raqqa, an opposition monitoring group said. Members of the Syrian Democratic Forces were 8km from the jail near the country’s largest dam at Tabqa on the Euphrates River, according to the British Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. On December 10, the SDF announced “phase two” of its campaign against Raqqa, ISIL’s de facto Syrian capital, which lies about 50km east of Tabqa in the same province.

The alliance has since captured dozens of villages and hamlets, the Observatory said, after taking 700sqm from the extremists in a first phase of the assault launched in November.

The group is believed to have held western hostages at the jail near the town of Taqba, where senior ISIL leaders live, the Observatory said.

The SDF is backed by air strikes from a US-led coalition fighting the extremists as well as by some US forces on the ground.

In Aleppo, evacuations were on the verge of completion, according to Ahmad Qarra Ali of the powerful – and hardline – Ahrar Al Sham rebel group.

At least 25,000 people have left rebel- held districts of Aleppo since opposition fighters agreed last week to withdraw after years of fighting, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.