U.N. humanitarian affairs chief Valerie Amos on Monday welcomed agreement by the Syrian government and opposition to extend a humanitarian pause for a besieged rebel-held district of Homs after aid workers came under fire there over the weekend. "I welcome the news that the parties to the conflict have agreed to extend the humanitarian pause in Old Homs City, for a further three days," Amos said in a statement. She added that "U.N. and Syrian Arab Red Crescent aid workers were deliberately targeted" over the weekend while trying to help people in Homs. "I hope this (extension) will allow us to evacuate yet more civilians and deliver much needed additional supplies," she said. This comes after three hundred people were evacuated from the Old City of Homs, the Syrian Red Crescent said, as humanitarian operations in the besieged rebel-held area continued into a fourth day. Monday's evacuation means that around 1,000 people have now left the Old City, where rebels fighting to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad have been surrounded for more than a year by his forces. On another note, an al Qaeda splinter group has withdrawn its forces from Syria's oil-rich eastern province of Deir al-Zor, activists and rebels said earlier on Monday, following days of heavy fighting with rivals.
Rebel groups, including al Qaeda's Syrian affiliate the Nusra Front, have been battling the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) for control of towns and oilfields in the area. Activists said ISIL forces had pulled back to the eastern provinces of Raqqa and Hassaka.
On Sunday, Islamist fighters battling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces seized control of an Alawite village in the central province of Hama, part of an offensive to try to cut off supply routes from Damascus to the north of the country. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said the Islamists killed at least 40 people in the village of Maan, mainly from a pro-Assad National Defense Force militia. But the government said the dead were mainly women and children and accused the fighters of committing a massacre on the eve of the resumption of peace talks in Geneva. Residents of Maan, around 5 miles (8 km) east of Syria's main north-south highway, are from the same Alawite minority as the Assad family which has ruled Syria for the last four decades. Rebels fighting to overthrow Assad are overwhelmingly from the country's Sunni Muslim majority, backed by Islamist and jihadi fighters from across the Islamic world. Video footage released on Sunday showed a rebel fighter performing Muslim prayers on top of a municipal building after the seizure of Maan, one of several sites in Hama targeted by the rebels in recent days. Another video showed the dead body of a pro-Assad fighter. The Observatory said most women and children had been evacuated from the village before it was taken over. More than 130,000 people, including civilians, rebel fighters and Assad's forces, have been killed in nearly three years of conflict. OPCW: A third shipment of chemical weapons materials left Syria on Monday, and some other chemical substances have been destroyed inside the country, the joint mission of the United Nations and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said. It did not detail the quantity of material shipped out or destroyed but called on Syrian authorities to "expedite systematic, predictable and high-volume movements to complete the safe removal of chemical materials". Syria failed to meet an OPCW target of Feb. 5 to move its declared chemical substances and precursors out of the country. But the UN-OPCW mission head said last week she did not believe the government was intentionally delaying the process. REUTERS To watch Rima Assaf's report, please click on the VIDEO above