REPORT: Thousands evacuated from Aleppo after deal over besieged villages

 
In bitter winter weather, convoys of buses from eastern Aleppo reached rebel-held areas to the west of the city, and more buses left the Shi'ite Muslim villages of al-Foua and Kefraya for government lines, according to a U.N. official and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group.
 
The foreign and defence ministers of Russia, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's main supporter, Iran and Turkey, which backs some large rebel groups, will meet in Moscow on Tuesday. The talks, aimed at giving fresh impetus for a solution in Aleppo, will go ahead despite an attack by a gunman on Russia's ambassador to Ankara on Monday.
 
The United Nations Security Council agreed a resolution calling for U.N. officials and others to be allowed to monitor evacuations from east Aleppo and the safety of civilians still there.
 
The Syrian ambassador to the United Nations, Bashar Ja'afari, denounced the resolution as propaganda, saying the last of the rebels were leaving and Aleppo would be "clean" by Monday evening.
 
The recapture of Aleppo is Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's biggest victory so far in the nearly six-year-old war,  but the fighting is not over with large parts of the country still controlled by insurgent and Islamist groups.
 
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said 20,000 civilians had been evacuated from Aleppo so far, but there were wide variations in estimates of how many people still sought to be taken out, from a few thousand up to tens of thousands.
 
Senior rebel official Zakaria Malahifji of the Aleppo-based Fastaqim group said around 7000 people were evacuated on Monday.
 
"The process is supposed to continue" throughout the night barring any unforseen obstacles, he said, speaking to Reuters from Turkey.
 
Nearly 50 children, some critically injured, were rescued from eastern Aleppo, where they had been trapped in an orphanage, the United Nations said.
 
The evacuation of civilians from the two villages had been demanded by the Syrian army and its allies before they would allow fighters and civilians trapped in Aleppo to depart. The stand-off halted the Aleppo evacuation over the weekend.
 
"Complex evacuations from East Aleppo and Foua & Kefraya now in full swing. More than 900 buses needed to evacuate all. We must not fail," Jan Egeland, who chairs the United Nations aid task force in Syria, tweeted.    
 
INTENSE COLD, LONG WAIT
 
Ahmad al-Dbis, a medical aid worker heading a team evacuating patients from Aleppo, said more than 100 buses had left the city. "Some evacuees told us that a few children died from the long wait and the intense cold while they were waiting to evacuate," he told Reuters.
 
For those still in rebel-held Aleppo, conditions were grim, according to Aref al-Aref, a nurse and photographer there.
 
"I'm still in Aleppo. I'm waiting for them to evacuate the children and women first. It's very cold and there's hunger. It's a long wait," he told Reuters. "People are burning wood and clothes to keep warm in the streets."
 
Photographs of people evacuated from Aleppo showed large groups of people standing or crouching with their belongings or loading sacks onto trucks.
 
Children in winter clothes carried small backpacks or played with kittens. One older man, in traditional Arab robes and headdress, sat holding a stick.
        

 

 

 REUTERS