Hundreds evacuated from besieged Syria district
05:18AM Sun 2 Feb, 2014
Dubai: Aid agencies in Syria have evacuated hundreds of people from the rebel-held Damascus suburb of Yarmouk in a rare moment of coordination between the government and rebel forces, as military continued its offensive on rebel-held areas of Aleppo, killing 13 people on Saturday.
Granting relief groups access to an estimated 250,000 people trapped by fighting across Syria was one of the goals of the peace talks held last week in Switzerland, which recessed on Friday with no substantial results.
Despite lengthy discussions, the sides could not agree on passage for an aid convoy to reach 2,500 people trapped in the old city of Homs, Syria’s third-largest city, with no access to food or medicine.
Anwar Raja, a spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), which operates in Yarmouk, said the group had coordinated with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent on Friday and Saturday to extract “hundreds” of the suburb’s residents.
The evacuees were transported to several government-run hospitals and one operated by the Red Crescent, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group.
In Aleppo, military helicopters dropped barrels packed with explosives on rebel-held areas of the northern city of Aleppo killing at least 13 people including a family trapped in a car, as government forces inched closer to opposition-held areas.
The barrel bombs, as the crude weapons are known, wrecked three buildings in the Al Bab area of Aleppo, Hassoun Abu Faisal of the Aleppo Media Centre said via Skype. Another local activist and the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights corroborated the information.
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