Rebel town that started Syrian protests surrenders to Assad

● Daraa was first to revolt in 2011 ● 400,000 lives lost in civil war

Syrian rebels have agreed to surrender the southern city of Daraa, the first to revolt against President Bashar Assad in Arab Spring-inspired protests earlier this decade, activists said yesterday.

Protests in Daraa in 2011 against the government’s mistreatment of teenage detainees ignited a national revolt against decades of authoritarian rule. Syria eventually descended into a full-blown civil war that has claimed the lives of some 400,000 people and displaced more than five million as refugees.

Ahmad Masalmeh, a media activist formerly based in Daraa, said fighters had accepted an offer of amnesty from the government, and let back in the state institutions and symbols of Assad’s rule.

Rebels refusing to accept the deal will be exiled with their families to other rebel-held parts of the country.

The agreement follows a template imposed by the government and its Russian and Iranian backers that has forced hundreds of thousands of Syrians, including media activists, army defectors, and draft dodgers and their family members to give up their homes to lift the sieges against their cities.

Human rights monitors say the arrangements amount to a programme of political and demographic engineering in Syria to secure Assad’s rule. Government forces launched an offensive to recapture south-west Syria and the areas neighbouring Jordan and Israel on 19 June. They surrounded Daraa’s rebel-held quarters on Monday. Dozens have been killed in the campaign, including 162 civilians, according to Rami Abdurrahman, director of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights – among them women and children.

Daraa governor Mohamad al-hanous said government

0 Russian forces in the town of Bosra in south-west Syria

forces were in control of 80 per cent of the city, according to the government-linked Central Military Media outlet, while Syrian state media reported on Wednesday that rebels in Daraa had agreed to surrender their heavy and medium weapons.

Underthetermsoftheagreement, Russia will deploy military police to maintain order in Daraa and facilitate the transition back to government rule, said a media activist inside who asked for anonymity out of concern for his safety.

Russian mediators are warning fighters and civilians against leaving Daraa for Idlib, the north-west Syrian province where over a million displaced Syrians are living in dire conditions and exposed to government airstrikes and the possibility of a future offensive.

“Idlib is a crematory,” the activist said Russian mediators had warned him.

Humanitarian groups say more than 300,000 people have been displaced by the government’s southern offen- sive, moving toward the Jordanian border and to Quneitra, a province that borders Israel.

Israel and Jordan’s borders are closed to refugees, and the aid group Oxfam said on Thursday it was unable to deliver enough aid across the Jordan border to meet the needs of the internally displaced residents.

The circumstances are especially perilous for journalists and media activists, who say they fear for their lives if they are captured by government troops.

The Committee to Protect Journalists said on Wednesday that at least 70 journalists were trapped in south-west Syria and required protection.

Syria is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists, according to CPJ.

At least 120 journalists have been killed in the country in relation to their work since the conflict began in 2011, according to CPJ research.

At the time of CPJ’S most recent prison census, at least seven journalists were in Syrian state prisons while many others are missing.