SAVE THE CHILDREN
Heartbreaking scenes as youngsters leave Syrian rebel enclave
FOR all of her three years, little Heba has known nothing but the violence and fear of civil war.
In the early hours of yesterday, however, hope finally arrived.
Sitting cross-legged in the back of an ambulance as paramedics tended to her brother, she was one of a handful evacuated from Syria’s only remaining rebel stronghold near the capital, Damascus.
Heba’s one-year-old brother Mohammed was among four critically ill patients allowed to leave the besieged suburb of eastern Ghouta after a delicate deal involving the release of prisoners was struck between rebels and president Bashar al-Assad’s government.
Assad has held the region’s 400,000 population in a stranglehold since 2013 and has been accused of trying to starve the population to force the Jaish alIslam rebel group to surrender.
But a deadlock over allowing sick patients to leave the town was broken on Tuesday as rebels agreed to release 29 prisoners in return for the evacuation of 29 of the most critical cases.
However 494 people, including about 170 women and children, were listed as needing urgent evacuation and medical care by the UN – with the list shrinking only because people were dying, those on the ground say.
Red Cross and Syrian Red Crescent workers were finally able to evacuate three children and a man in the early hours of yesterday.
They were a girl with haemophilia, a baby with the autoimmune disorder Guillain-Barre, a child with leukaemia, and a man in need of an urgent kidney transplant.
Photographer Amer Almohibany said Heba and her critically ill brother were accompanied by their mother and Red Crescent workers from the evacuation point in Douma past the government lines into Damascus. The remainder of the 29 critical cases should leave over the next few days, relief organisation the Syrian American Medical Society said.
A Red Cross spokesman said: ‘The operation is a positive step which will bring some respite to the people of eastern Ghouta. We hope these medical evacuations are only the beginning.’
At least 16 people, including a baby, have died since November while waiting for evacuation from Ghouta because of the government’s blockade, UN humanitarian co-ordinator Jan Egeland said.
‘The 494 number is going down, not because we are evacuating people, but because they are dying,’ he said. ‘We have confirmation of 16 having died on these lists since they were resubmitted in November, and it is probably higher. We have tried now every single week for many months to get medical evacuations out, and food and other supplies in.’
Syria has been engaged in a civil war for six years as different groups try to seize control. More than 340,000 people have been killed and millions driven from their homes. The chaos caused by fighting between Assad’s soldiers and rebels allowed Islamic State to seize land in eastern Syria, taking control of Raqqa in 2014 until the city was taken back in October. IS has lost control of most of the land it seized but various groups of rebels remain in a stalemate with the government.
Eastern Ghouta was one of the first districts to rise up against Assad in 2011 and has been subjected to ceaseless bombardments. In August 2013 it was hit by the conflict’s deadliest chemical attack when sarin gas rockets killed 1,000. The region’s population, which includes 130,000 children, has seen the worst malnutrition of the six-year conflict, with starvation affecting one in eight.
The enclave is one of four ‘deescalation’ zones agreed in May in a deal brokered by Assad-backers Russia and Iran and rebel supporter Turkey. But the government maintained its blockade and renewed its bombardment last month.