Aleppo Evacuation Back on Track as UN Set to Vote on International Monitors

By Louisa Loveluck, The Washington Post

19 December 16

 

housands more people were evacuated from what remained of the smashed rebel enclaves in the Syrian city of Aleppo on Monday, as the U.N. Security Council called for international monitors to keep watch over the escape routes.

The paths out of Aleppo have been periodically blocked by fighting and disputes between rival factions since a deal last week — brokered by Russia and Turkey — to dispatch convoys to take away civilians and rebels fighters.

The plan amounted to a surrender in Aleppo by forces opposing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the country’s tragic conflict that has raged since 2011. For Assad’s government and its allies, including Russia, it marked a major victory to reclaim full control of Syria’s most important northern city.

Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, said around 4,500 people had left the area since early Monday, bringing the total of evacuees to about 12,000.

Most had spent the night trapped on their buses — freezing, and without food, water or bathroom access — after Islamist rebels scuttled an exit deal by torching vehicles sent to rescue the wounded from a government-held area in a neighboring province.

It was just the latest flare-up that forced a temporary breakdown in the evacuations.

The area has seen some of the fiercest fighting of Syria’s war. For much of it, Aleppo’s eastern districts had been the armed opposition’s most important stronghold. Pro-government forces now have them pinned into a sliver of territory as international powers negotiate the terms under which they leave.

In the meantime, thousands of civilians remain camped out in what is left of the enclave — its streets now shattered beyond recognition by shelling.

Photographs from the area Sunday night showed fires on the street as residents tried to keep warm. Temperatures drop below freezing at night and many people are sleeping across sidewalks and abandoned buildings.

Ahmad Dbis, a doctor coordinating a team welcoming the evacuees at the staging ground west of the city, said earlier Monday that around 25 buses had arrived. As residents disembarked, many were wrapped in several coats.

“We have been living a really hard 24 hours,” said Rami Zein, a journalist from east Aleppo who had been among those trapped on the buses. “There were a lot of tensions with all the soldiers around and we were really scared that something bad would happen. But thank God we have made it.”

Some laughed and posed for pictures, finally freed from an enclave described by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon as akin to “hell.”

Among them was Bana al-Abded, a 7-year-old girl whose plight has been documented on a family-run Twitter account. In an image posted Monday morning, the child was seen in the arms of an aid worker, beaming out from below a thick woolly hat.

The U.N. children’s agency said Monday that another 47 children had also arrived safely from an orphanage, some of them in a critical condition because of injuries or dehydration.

“The evacuation of these orphans, along with thousands of other children from east Aleppo in the past days is a glimmer of hope amid a grim reality for the children of Syria. Their safe departure is a testimony to the relentless efforts of humanitarians on the ground, working around the clock for children and their families,” Unicef’s regional director, Geert Cappelaere, in a statement.

As an addendum to the Aleppo evacuation deal, 10 buses carried civilians away from two Shiite villages long besieged by rebels — Fouaa and Kefraya — on Monday morning, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the pan-Arab Mayadeen television station.

At the United Nations, the 15-member Security Council voted unanimously for all sides in Aleppo to permit U.N. officials and others to monitor the evacuations. France — which drafted the text, along with Russia — has warned of possible “mass atrocities” by Syrian forces and allied pro-government militias as they assume control of all of the rebel enclave.

Abuses have already been reported, including house-to-house executions, and the holding-up of a bus packed with evacuees Friday during which eyewitnesses say some men were stripped, robbed and even killed.

The Syrian government and its Iranian and Russian allies have overseen what it describes as reconciliation deals for rebel fighters across the country, ending in the withdrawal of armed militants, usually to the northwestern province of Idlib. This has often been preceded by a combination of bombardment and crippling sieges to force the area’s surrender.