Breakthrough follows deal over besieged villages
BEIRUT/GENEVA: Nearly 50 children who were trapped in an orphanage in the opposition-held Syrian enclave of east Aleppo were evacuated on Monday, some critically injured or dehydrated, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said.
The Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) evacuated the orphans from eastern Aleppo, along with facility staff who have been caring for them, ICRC spokeswoman Krista Armstrong said.
“They were given priority and were the first to be evacuated by bus when the operation resumed,” Armstrong said, adding that she could not provide an exact figure yet.
Earlier, Geert Cappelaere, UNICEF regional director, said in a statement that all 47 children trapped in the orphanage were evacuated to safety, “with some in critical condition from injuries and dehydration.”
UNICEF and other agencies were also assisting in reunifying other children evacuated in the past few days with their families and giving them medical care and winter clothes, he said.
Thousands were evacuated after a deal was reached to allow people to leave two besieged pro-regime vil- lages in nearby Idlib province.
In bitter winter weather, convoys of buses from eastern Aleppo reached opposition-held areas to the west of the city, and more buses left the Shiite villages of Al-Foua and Kefraya for regime lines, according to a UN official and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group. The recapture of Aleppo is Syrian regime President’s Bashar Assad’s biggest victory so far in the nearly six-year-old war, but the fighting is not over with large parts of the country still controlled by insurgent and radical groups.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said 20,000 civilians had been evacuated from Aleppo so far.
The evacuation of civilians from the two villages had been demanded by the Syrian Army and its allies before they would allow fighters and civilians trapped in Aleppo to depart. The stand-off halted the Aleppo evacuation over the weekend.
“Complex evacuations from East Aleppo and Foua & Kefraya now in full swing. More than 900 buses needed to evacuate all. We must not