Syria Army retakes key Ghouta town as rebels withdraw
Thousands of civilians stream out of Eastern Ghouta after five years of siege
Beirut/ Douma, March 15: Syria’s Army captured the key town of Hammuriyeh in a southern pocket of Eastern Ghouta on Thursday, a monitor said, after rebels pulled back and thousands of residents fled.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Hammuriyeh fell to regime forces after Islamist rebels from Faylaq al- Rahman withdrew.
Weary, hunger- stricken families streamed out of Syria’s Eastern Ghouta on Thursday, finally escaping after five years of brutal siege but leaving trapped loved ones and destroyed homes behind.
“We spent so long in the cellar before we were able to escape. Thank God, we’re so happy to have left,” said Haniya Homs, 30.
She spoke to AFP from the back of a pick- up truck as she tried to nurse her infant daughter.
“I don’t have milk — I’m just trying to distract my daughter so she doesn’t cry,” she said.
Residents of Syria’s battered rebel- held Eastern Ghouta had lived under five years of crippling siege, without regular access to food, fuel, and medicine.
Defying expectations and calls to step down, Syria’s President Bashar al- Assad was strengthening his grip on power Thursday as the conflict entered its eighth year.
His troops gained new ground in their ferocious assault against Eastern Ghouta, once the opposition’s main bastion on the outskirts of the capital.
Regime forces now control 70 percent of the area, a war monitor said, and have split the remaining rebel territory into three shrinking pockets.
After a fierce air and ground assault, regime forces on Thursday captured Hammuriyeh, a town in an isolated southern zone of Ghouta.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain- based monitor, said Hammuriyeh fell to regime forces after fighters from the Faylaq alRahman rebel faction withdrew.
The regime’s advance into Hammuriyeh overnight had opened up a corridor through the town into government- controlled territory.
Streams of women and children escaped through that corridor on Thursday, carrying plastic bags stuffed with clothes and pushing strollers piled high with suitcases and rugs.
They reached a regimeheld checkpoint in the region of Adra, where ambulances and a group of large green buses were waiting to take them to temporary shelters.
The Observatory said more than 12,000 people fled the enclave on Thursday in “the largest displacement since the beginning of the assault on Ghouta.”
The Russian military, which has backed the offensive on the rebel enclave, said as many as 13,000 people could leave Ghouta by the end of the day.
Eastern Ghouta had been the main rebel bastion on the outskirts of Damascus since 2012 and came under a devastating regime siege the following year.