More patients allowed to evacuate besieged rebel suburbs in Syria

TWELVE MORE patients and their families have been evacuated from besieged rebel-held suburbs of the Syrian capital Damascus, the Red Cross has said.

The latest evacuations occurred late on Wednesday night in co-ordination with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent.

The government recently tightened its siege on eastern Ghouta, home to nearly 400,000 people, refusing to allow hundreds of critically ill to reach hospitals just minutes away, the UN said.

The Army of Islam, a prominent rebel group in eastern Ghouta, said the critically ill are being evacuated as part of a deal that was conditional on it releasing an equivalent number of captives.

State-run news agency SANA confirmed the evacuations, saying that rebels have also released several people, including two children.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks the conflict through activists and other sources inside Syria, said 17 patients have been evacuated since Tuesday.

It said the Army of Islam has released 26 people, including eight minors and four women.

The observatory said the war has killed about 39,000 people in 2017, of which it documented 33,425 by name.

The opposition-linked group, which monitors casualties on all sides of the complex war, said the dead included 10,507 civilians, 2,923 government troops and 7,494 jihadi fighters, mainly members of Islamic State and an al-Qaida-linked outfit.

Syria’s nearly seven-year civil war has killed some 400,000 people and created the worst refugee crisis since the Second World War, with some five million Syrians having fled the country.