Tag Archives: medical evacuation

Sick and injured start leaving Syria’s Ghouta

Children look through a bus window during evacuation from the besieged town of Douma, Eastern Ghouta, in Damascus, Syria March 13, 2018. REUTERS/Bassam Khabieh

By Ellen Francis

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Sick and injured civilians left a rebel enclave in Syria’s eastern Ghouta on Tuesday under the first medical evacuation since a massive assault began nearly a month ago.

Women carrying infants, men hobbling on crutches and an old man in a wheelchair waited at a school nearby, along with dozens who exited through the al-Wafideen crossing, a witness said.

During the army’s offensive, more than 1,100 civilians have died in the last big rebel bastion near the capital, the U.N. office of humanitarian affairs says.

Syrian government forces have captured swathes of eastern Ghouta, a pocket of satellite towns and farmland, splintering it into three separate zones in recent days.

Yasser Delwan, a political official with the Jaish al-Islam rebel faction, said the patients who left the town of Douma were the first of several batches.

The evacuees come from a list of nearly 1,000 people which U.N. officials have said need emergency treatment outside, he added. Jaish al-Islam said on Monday it had reached a medical evacuation deal with the Syrian government’s key ally, Russia, after indirect talks.

For months, the United Nations has pleaded with authorities to allow the evacuation of hundreds of patients, including children with cancer. The Ghouta enclave is home to nearly 400,000 people, under army siege since 2013 without enough food, water, or medicine, the world body says.

The government assault on eastern Ghouta has become one of the bloodiest offensives of the war, and is on course to deal rebels their biggest defeat since the battle of Aleppo in 2016.

Russia has offered rebels safe passage out with their families if they surrender the territory, echoing deals that saw Damascus take control of major cities across western Syria.

The two main Ghouta factions have vowed to stay and fight, and have denied government allegations that they have blocked residents from leaving.

CIVILIAN EVACUEES

Hamza Birqdar, Jaish al-Islam’s military spokesman, said in a video online that the fighters would continue to defend their territory until the end.

With the Ghouta now split into different parts, Delwan said his rebel faction was in charge only of evacuations from Douma, and not from other towns. If the deal proceeds, hundreds “will all be evacuated in batches for treatment, some in Damascus and some outside of Syria,” he told Reuters.

State media said others followed the first group which included about 35 people. They would go to a shelter nearby on the outskirts of the Syrian capital Damascus.

State TV accompanied some of the evacuees and broadcast interviews in which they said insurgents had prevented them from leaving. “We weren’t able to come out,” one man said. “They are not allowing anyone at all, they attack them and sent them back.”

Moscow and Damascus say their forces only target armed militants and seek to stop mortar salvoes by Islamist insurgents that killed dozens of people in the capital. They accuse the rebels of using civilians as human shields, which the fighters deny.

Troops pressed on with the assault on Tuesday and took some farmland around the town of Jisreen, said a military media unit run by Iran-backed Lebanese Shi’ite group Hezbollah, which fights alongside the Syrian army.

The Civil Defence in Ghouta, a rescue service in rebel territory, said air strikes pounded Jisreen, Zamalka, and Irbeen – part of a zone further south separated from Douma.

Families are sleeping in the open in the streets in Douma, with no more room in the basements to shelter from the bombs, local authorities have said.

(Writing by Ellen Francis; Editing by Paul Tait, Raissa Kasolowsky and Peter Graff)

Syrian, Russian jets bomb residential areas in eastern Ghouta: witnesses, monitor

People are seen during shelling in the town of Hamoria, eastern Ghouta in Damascus, Syria, December 3,

By Suleiman Al-Khalidi

AMMAN (Reuters) – Jets believed to be Syrian and Russian struck heavily crowded residential areas in a besieged rebel enclave near Damascus, killing at least 27 people and injuring dozens in the third week of a stepped-up assault, residents, aid workers and a war monitor said on Monday.

Civil defense workers said at least 17 were killed in the town of Hamoriya in an aerial strike on a marketplace and nearby residential area after over nearly 30 strikes in the past 24 hours that struck several towns in the densely populated rural area east of Damascus known as the Eastern Ghouta.

Four other civilians were killed in the town of Arbin, while the rest came from strikes on Misraba and Harasta, the civil defense workers said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict, said the casualties on Sunday were the biggest daily death toll since the stepped-up strikes began 20 days ago. The monitor said nearly 200 civilians were killed in strikes and shelling, including many women and children, during that period.

The Eastern Ghouta has been besieged by army troops since 2013 in an attempt to force the rebel enclave to submission.

The government has in recent months tightened the siege in what residents and aid workers have said is a deliberate use of starvation as a weapon of war, a charge the government denies.

The United Nations says about 400,00 civilians besieged in the region face “complete catastrophe” because aid deliveries by the Syrian government were blocked and hundreds of people who need urgent medical evacuation have not been allowed outside the enclave.

Eastern Ghouta is the last remaining large swathe of rebel-held area around Damascus that has not reached an evacuation deal to surrender weapons in return for allowing fighters to go to other rebel-held areas farther north.

“They are targeting civilians … a jet hit us there, no rebels or checkpoints,” Sadeq Ibrahim, a trader, said by phone in Hamoriya.

“May God take his revenge on the regime and Russia,” said Abdullah Khalil, another resident, who said he lost members of his family in the air strike on Arbin and was searching for survivors among the rubble.

A boy is seen during shelling in the town of Hamoria, eastern Ghouta in Damascus, Syria, December 3,

A boy is seen during shelling in the town of Hamoria, eastern Ghouta in Damascus, Syria, December 3, 2017. REUTERS/Bassam Khabieh

The intensified bombardment of Eastern Ghouta follows a rebel attack last month on an army complex in the heart of the region that the army had used to bomb nearby rebel-held areas.

Residents said, however, that the failure of the army to dislodge rebels from the complex had prompted what they believe were retaliatory indiscriminate attacks on civilians in the Eastern Ghouta.

Government advances since last year have forced people to flee deeper into its increasingly overcrowded towns. The loss of farmland is increasing pressure on scarce food supplies.

The Eastern Ghouta is part of several de-escalation zones that Russia has brokered with rebels across Syria that has freed the army to redeploy in areas where it can regain ground.

Rebels accuse the Syrian government and Russia of violating the zones and say they were meant as a charade to divert attention from the heavy daily bombing of civilian areas. The Syrian government and Russia deny their jets bomb civilians and insist they only strike militant hideouts.

 

 

(Reporting by Suleiman Al-Khalidi; Editing by Peter Cooney)