TRUCE IN SOUTH SYRIA LETS THE DISPLACED HEAD HOME
Some of the 60,000 on Jordanian border remain too fearful of regime reprisals to return
Thousands of displaced Syrians began heading home yesterday after rebels and the government reached a ceasefire deal in the south following more than two weeks of deadly bombardment.
Some however remained distrustful of the truce, including Umm Abdul Salam, who fled to the border with Jordan with her husband, son and daughter when their village of Hirak in Deraa province was bombed.
“For God’s sake, let us in. We don’t want food or water, we just want safety,” the 40-year-old woman clad in an abaya pleaded to Jordanian border troops.
Despite the ceasefire agreement announced on Friday after talks between rebels and regime ally Russia, she is afraid to return home.
“There is no word of what happened to the people who returned yesterday,” she told The
National. “Many families who returned to their areas have been killed by the regime and the militias even after four or five months.”
Umm Abdul Salam is among the roughly 60,000 displaced Syrians in Deraa who fled to the Jordanian border. The UN says more than 320,00 civilians fled their homes after the government launched its offensive against rebels in the province on June 19.
Jordan has provided assistance to the Syrians along its border, but refused to allow them into the country because it cannot cope with more refugees.
Jordanian army and civilian medical workers on the border reported a sharp drop in the number of cases they received after the truce was announced.
Lt Col Mohammad Al Jaiusi, an army medical officer, said 65 cases were seen in the previous 24 hours compared with “hundreds in previous days”.
“Severe cases received treatment at the health ministry hospitals, Lt Col Al Jaiusi said. “These included concussions, spinal injuries, as well as injuries caused by shrapnel.”
The number of cases were higher as government and Russian bombings intensified.
Mutasem Al Hussein, a medical supervisor at an International Medical Corps mobile clinic set up at an army border post, said: “At one point we had 500 cases in a day.”
The Deraa region was calm yesterday as the two sides finalised the truce deal, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group.
“People have started to return to their homes since yesterday” from the Jordanian border, Observatory chief Rami Abdel Rahman said.
“More than 20,000 people have set off for home so far, heading to areas for which an accord has been reached in the south-eastern Deraa countryside,” he said.
But others “are scared to return to regime-controlled areas, fearing their children will be arrested”, he said.
Osama Al Homsi, 26, who sought shelter from the bombardment in a field to the south of Deraa city, said he was hesitant to return to his hometown of Jeeza.
“Of course I support the agreement to stop the fighting and bloodshed,” Mr Al Homsi told Agence France-Presse.
“But what is frightening is that it comes with no UN guarantees … The Russian and the Syrian regime offer no safety.”
Only when it is clear the ceasefire has really been implemented and “if we are guaranteed that no one will pursue us, will we want to return”, he said.
More than 150 civilians have
been killed in government bombing since June 19, the Observatory said.
Under the ceasefire agreement, opposition fighters will hand over territory in Deraa, as well as their heavy weapons. Rebels who reject the agreement will be transported with their families to opposition-held areas in the north of the country, state media said.
An ISIS affiliate, which holds a small pocket in the south-west of Deraa, is excluded from the deal.
Government forces will also take over “all observation posts along the Syrian-Jordanian border”, state media said on Friday, hours after the regime regained control of the Naseeb border crossing with Jordan.
The agreement is expected to be implemented in three stages, rebel spokesman Hussein Abazeed said, first for eastern Deraa, next the provincial capital and then the west of the province.
Friday’s accord follows similar deals with rebels for other areas of Syria, which have allowed the government to retake more than 60 per cent of the country, according to the Observatory.
The deal caps a series of government victories nationwide since Russia intervened in 2015 on President Bashar Al Assad’s side, including the former rebel bastion of Eastern Ghouta outside Damascus earlier this year.
Deraa is the cradle of the uprising that sparked Syria’s seven-year war, and the government retaking full control would be a symbolic victory for Mr Al Assad.
Syrian army forces and Russian military police manned the crossing yesterday after more than three years under opposition control.
The province lies in a wider southern region that Mr Al Assad aims to retake, including the neighbouring province of Quneitra to the west, which borders the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.
More than 350,000 people have been killed and millions displaced since Syria’s war started in 2011 with a crackdown on anti-government protests.
Jordan is home to about 1.3 million Syrians, with at least 650,000 of those UN-registered refugees.
Despite the government’s insistence that it would admit civilians fleeing the Deraa offensive, there have been public campaigns to let them in and to mobilise aid for them.