Evacuees describe horror of Syria blast
Car bomb detonated amid buses, killing more than 120 people
ALEPPO, SYRIA— She had already lost her eldest son, Jamal, a Syrian soldier killed in action three years ago. He was 25.
Her family endured two years of shortages of food, water, medicine and other essentials — along with frequent shelling — in her hometown of Foua, which has been the target of a long rebel siege.
All that misery was supposed to end for Hanan Hussein on Saturday. She was among thousands of people who boarded buses promising an evacuation from Foua and Kefraya, pro-government bastions in Syria’s Idlib province that had been under steady attack by rebels seeking to overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad.
The trip offered a safe new beginning. Instead, it ended violently and tragically when a car bomb detonated amid the buses, killing more than 120 people — including 80 children — according to government and opposition accounts.
Among the many missing and unaccounted for as of late Sunday were Hussein’s husband, Mohammed Hussein, and the couple’s 13-year-old daughter, Zahara. Both are feared lost.
“We thought we were going to a better life,” a shaken Hussein, a tiny woman in a long woollen coat, said Sunday between bouts of tears at a makeshift Syrian government shelter in a factory complex on the eastern outskirts of war-battered Aleppo. “We were tired of the shortages, the shelling. But now this.”
The attack, apparently by a suicide bomber, occurred in the rebel-held Rashidin area outside Aleppo. The blast site raised suspicions that an opposition faction was behind the bombing. As of late Sunday, no group had claimed responsibility publicly. But victims from the two towns were overwhelmingly Shiite Muslims, who, like other minorities in Syria, tend to support Assad’s government.
The hardcore Sunni Islamist groups that dominate Syria’s armed opposition frequently target Shiites and other Muslim minorities as apostates.
The evacuation of the two communities was part of a complex plan hammered out over months by three countries: Iran, Qatar and Turkey. It involved moving more than 7,000 people from four besieged towns — the pro-government en- claves of Foua and Kefraya; and the opposition strongholds of Madaya and Zabadani, outside Damascus.
The idea was to provide safe passage and fresh starts for residents who had endured years of food shortages, shelling and other hardships.
Distraught survivors from Foua and Kefraya gathered at the factory complex in Jibreen, southeast of Aleppo. They were provided with food, shelter and medical care. Overhead, Syrian fighter jets roared into the sky from a nearby airbase.
A sense of disbelief coursed through the hangar-like structures where the survivors gathered. Many feared that injured survivors still in rebel territory could become hostages. Others worried about how they would recover the bodies of loved ones from opposition-held terrain.
Many blamed the opposition for the attack. Evacuees said they had been treated roughly, and given little food and water, once they left Foua and Kefraya and entered rebel-held territory en route to government-controlled Aleppo. The convoy of some 75 to 100 buses carrying 5,000 evacuees from the two towns got stuck in rebel-held Rashidin for more than 24 hours for reasons that remained unclear.
Late Sunday, a number of the battered buses were parked outside the shelter. The drivers were shell-shocked, wandering aimlessly amid shrapnel-pocked buses with blown out windshields.
“It was something horrible — there was blood and body parts everywhere,” recalled a traumatized Mahmoud Bahloul, 32, driver of a bus that was part of the convoy evacuating people from the two Shiite-majority towns.
He provided a lamentable roster: 14 of the 79 people riding on his bus were killed, he said. Many were decapitated or had limbs severed by flying glass and shrapnel, he recalled, seeming to recoil at the memory. He survived with only scratches because he was sleeping in the baggage compartment below.
“All I could think of was my three children,” Bahloul said. “I’m alive. I’m a lucky one. But I think of those people.”
Further evacuations were postponed Sunday, opposition activists said.
The news came as shells fired by Daesh, also known as ISIS or ISIL, on government-held parts of the eastern city of Deir el-Zour wounded two members of a Russian media delegation visiting the area, according to state-run Syrian news agency SANA.