Aleppo Civilians Wait in Harsh Cold as Evacuation Busses Torched
A man on a motorcycle drives past burning buses while en route to evacuate ill and injured people from the besieged Syrian villages of al-Foua and Kefraya.
Cairo, 19 Rabiul Awwal 1438/19 december 2016 (MINA) – Would-be evacuees from Aleppo spent most of Sunday waiting in near-freezing temperatures after their departure was halted by an attack on buses due to evacuate injured people from two government-held villages.
Videos widely shared on social media showed a line of buses in flames. DPA quoted the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group, as saying they appeared to have been burned by supporters of the al-Qaeda-linked Fath al-Sham Front militant group.
A Syrian military official said late Sunday that the evacuation of eastern Aleppo residents and rebel fighters had been suspended until injured people were allowed to leave the government-held villages of Foua and Kefraya.
Activists inside the besieged Aleppo enclave said they had received messages from evacuees on buses that left in the early afternoon, saying they were trapped in a regime-held area in the south of the city without food or water as temperatures dropped to freezing.
“We are trapped inside the buses since 1:30 pm and we don’t know what is happening,” one east Aleppo activist wrote on Twitter.
The buses were heading back into eastern Aleppo and would be able to leave again once the situation in the villages was resolved, the military official, who asked not to be quoted by name, said.
The evacuations from the devastated enclave had been halted on Friday after elements on the government side insisted on a parallel evacuation of injured people, women and children from the two villages, which are besieged by hardline Islamist rebels.
They sabotage each other
Some 5,500 civilians and 3,000 fighters had left the enclave under the deal before it broke down on Friday, according to the Observatory.
On Sunday, it appeared to be the turn of opposition hardliners to sabotage the deal: six of the buses heading to Kefraya and Foua were torched. The Observatory pointed the finger at supporters of the Fath al-Sham Front.
A bus driver was killed in the attack, with the buses also coming under shelling, the head of the Aleppo public transport board said.
The “cowardly terrorist attack on civilian buses and killing [of a] driver must not end evacuations,” senior UN envoy Jan Egeland wrote on Twitter.
Eastern Aleppo’s remaining civilians and fighters, many of whom say they fear torture or death if they fall into government hands, were being bussed out under a deal brokered by Russia and Turkey after government forces broke the enclave’s defences in November.
The burning of the buses heading for Kefraya and Foua drew a furious reaction from Syrian opposition activists.
Eastern Aleppo “is a besieged area without any means of heating. There are children there and we’re afraid they’ll die of cold,” prominent media activist Hadi Abdullah said in a Facebook video.
“There are families waiting since the morning … By burning the convoy to Foua and Kefraya you’re burning the convoy to Aleppo,” he charged.
The latest hold-up came as the UN Security Council postponed a vote on the deployment of observers to Aleppo until Monday.
The council made the decision after Russia, a key backer of the Syrian government and one of the five countries with veto power on the council, opposed the measure.
“We cannot support it. We cannot allow it to pass because this is a disaster,” Vitaly Churkin, Russian ambassador to the UN, said ahead of a three-hour closed-door meeting Sunday.
Churkin said his country had no problem with observers, but said they must be better trained and the procedure for deploying them better organized.
Russia submitted its own resolution on Syria, several UN diplomats said after the meeting ended. (T/R07/R01)
Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA)
