Damascus, Dec. 19: At least 3,500 people have left government-besieged areas in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo since the evacuation resumed Monday, a British war monitor said.
Some 500 others left Shiite towns besieged by rebels as part of the same deal, it said, Efe news reported.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) on Monday said 65 buses left the final pocket of rebel-held territory in Syria’s largest city, Aleppo.
To the west, in Idlib, some 500 people left Fua and Kefraya which were encircled by fighters from the Front for the Conquest of the Levant (formerly known as the al-Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda).
The evacuation operations were organised by opposition-aligned Turkey, alongside pro-Syrian government Russia and Iran.
The evacuation of Aleppo was suspended on Friday when the ceasefire collapsed.
On Saturday, a new agreement was reached that included the evacuation of Fua and Kefraya, a clause pursued from the onset of negotiations by the Iranian militias fighting on Syrian soil.
On Sunday, the evacuations were thwarted again when Islamist fighters from the Jund al-Asqa group (a Nusra Front offshoot) burned the buses that had arrived to evacuate the besieged Shiite settlements.
According to SOHR estimates, by the time operations were halted on Friday, around 8,500 had left eastern Aleppo.
A doctor who remained in east Aleppo told Efe that some 50,000 people remained in the embattled rebel-district. Aleppo was effectively divided in two, when it was drawn into the conflict in 2012.
For years opposition factions held on to the eastern districts, while Bashar al-Assad’s government was largely restricted to the west.
Since the launch of the November 15 military advance by Assad troops (backed by Russian airstrikes and foreign militias on the ground) the Damascus government has recaptured the overwhelming majority of the ancient city.
‘They Just Want To Escape’
Assad is backed in the war by Russian air power and Shi’ite militias including Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement and Iraq’s Harakat al-Nujaba. The mostly Sunni rebels include groups supported by Turkey, the U.S. and Gulf monarchies.
In the square in Aleppo’s Sukari district, organizers gave every family a number to give them access to buses.
“Everyone is waiting until they are evacuated. They just want to escape,” said Salah al Attar, a former teacher with his five children, wife and mother.
Thousands of people were evacuated on Thursday, the first to leave under the ceasefire deal that ends fighting in the city where violence erupted in 2012, a year after the start of conflict in other parts of Syria.
They were taken to rebel-held districts of the countryside west of Aleppo. Turkey has said Aleppo evacuees could also be housed in a camp to be constructed near the Turkish border to the north.
For four years the city was split between a rebel-held eastern sector and the government-held western districts. During the summer, the army and its allies managed to besiege the rebel sector before using intense bombardment and ground assaults to retake it in recent months.
