Under truce deal, Syrian rebels leaving holdout district in Homs
City will return to control of Assad government, which had run a three-year blockade
HOMS, SYRIA— Hundreds of Syrian civilians and rebels began pulling out of the last opposition-held neighbourhood of the city of Homs on Wednesday as part of a local deal with government forces that would return the entire central city to government control.
A few thousand insurgents have been holed up in Waer district, which government forces had blockaded for nearly three years, only sporadically allowing in food. The governor of Homs, Talal Barazzi, said 272 gunmen and 447 civilians left the district Wednesday.
Once the evacuation is completed, Homs, once dubbed “the capital of the revolution,” will fully return to government control.
The deal is similar to one struck in May 2014 in Homs’ Old City. There, the government assumed control of the quarter after about 2,000 rebels were granted safe passage to opposition areas north of Homs. The area was destroyed and thousands of civilians were killed or forced to flee, and rebels surrendered only after they were starved and outgunned.
Still, officials hope that such local deals can be replicated across Syria to create pockets of peace and a climate conducive to peace talks. The international community is making its most serious push yet for a ceasefire and negotiations to end the Syrian conflict that began in 2011.
In Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, Syrian opposition groups and rebel factions opened a meeting on Wednesday with the aim of forming a unified front before the proposed peace talks with representatives of Assad’s government.
A peace plan agreed to last month by 20 countries meeting in Vienna set a Jan. 1 deadline for the start of negotiations between Assad’s government and opposition groups.
UN and Red Crescent officials were on hand on the outskirts of Waer to oversee implementation of the deal, which saw the gunmen and some of their families transported to areas further north in Hama and Idlib province. The insurgents included members of the Nusra Front, which is the Al Qaeda branch in Syria, and an array of extremist and more moderate rebels fighting to topple President Bashar Assad.