iStock/Thinkstock(ALEPPO, Syria) — Buses drove thousands of residents out of the last rebel-held enclave of eastern Aleppo Monday as the United Nations unanimously voted to monitor the Syrian evacuations.
About 5,000 people were bused out of the besieged, rebel-held part of the area to the western countryside, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the International Committee of the Red Cross in Syria. Close to 14,000 people, including more than 4,000 fighters, have now left rebel-held Aleppo since Thursday, according to the Observatory.
At the same time, convoys of 500 evacuees, including sick civilians and orphans, left Foua and Kefraya, two pro-government Shiite villages, surrounded by opposition forces, the Observatory and the ICRC said. More buses are expected to arrive in the two villages to continue evacuations throughout the day.
The evacuations are part of a deal between rebels and the Syrian government and its allies to allow thousands of civilians and fighters trapped in eastern Aleppo to leave the area under the condition that about 4,000 civilians, including the wounded in Foua and Kefraya, are also evacuated.
The U.N. Security Council met in New York Monday and voted unanimously for the immediate deployment of U.N. observers to former rebel-held eastern Aleppo, which France says is crucial to preventing “mass atrocities” by Syrian forces and militias.
Jan Egeland, chairman of the United Nations Humanitarian Access Task Force in Syria, confirmed that evacuations were “in full swing” Monday.
On Sunday, armed men set fire to buses en route to pick up civilians from Foua and Kefraya, according to Egeland and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The Observatory said it believed that members of the al-Qaida-affiliated Jabhat Fath al-Sham group, formerly al-Nusra Front, attacked the buses. A video shows burning buses near men shouting “God is greatest” and taking responsibility for the attacks.
In a statement in Arabic, the Free Syrian Army, an armed opposition group, condemned the attack on the buses, saying it was a crime against the Syrian revolution” that “endangers the lives of around 50,000 besieged people.”
Long-awaited evacuations from eastern Aleppo began Thursday, but the process broke down the next day as Syrian state TV accused rebels of firing on a convoy of evacuees at a checkpoint while anti-government activists said that pro-government militias had blocked the passage.
“I tried [to leave], but we got blocked by Iranian and sectarian militias who stopped us,” Monther Etaky, an eastern Aleppo anti-government activist, told ABC News Saturday after attempting to leave Friday. “They blocked the previous convoy and we were just waiting for a long time. In the end, we received an order to return because the agreement had been cancelled. We heard gunfire and then people started running and we went back.”
Civilians, including the wounded, have reportedly been waiting for days to be evacuated from eastern Aleppo. Activists say that some injured have died while waiting to be brought out of besieged part of the city.
Before the war, Aleppo was Syria’s largest city with a population of two million. The city had been divided into the rebel-held east and the government-held west since 2012.
In recent months, the Syrian government, with help from Russia, Iran and other allies, intensified its airstrikes on eastern Aleppo and tightened the siege in an attempt to gain full control of the area, which was rebel-held until recently. Gaining control of the eastern neighborhoods is a strategic victory for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
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