Thousands flee Syria rebel enclave after month-long bombardment

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Thousands of civilians poured out of Eastern Ghouta on Thursday after a month-long bombardment brought the Syrian forces closer to recapturing the devastated rebel enclave outside Damascus.

Defying expectations and calls to step down, Syria's President Bashar al-Assad was strengthening his grip on power as the conflict entered its eighth year.

His troops advanced in a ferocious assault on Ghouta, once the opposition's main bastion on the outskirts of the capital.

A war monitor said Syrian forces now control 70 percent of the area, splitting the remaining rebel territory into three shrinking pockets.

After a fierce air and ground assault, Syrian forces on Thursday captured Hammuriyeh town, in an isolated southern part of Ghouta.

Syrians children evacuated from the Eastern Ghouta enclave pause as other civilians approach them while they walk through the Syrian-controlled corridor opened by government forces in Hawsh al-Ashaari, east of the enclave town of Hamouria on the outskirts of the capital Damascus on March 15, 2018. /VCG Photo

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor, said rebels later launched a counter-attack and regained parts of the town, killing 14 fighters.

Elsewhere, however, it said Syrian forcees overran Al-Rihan town in an assault led by Russian officers and advisers.

The Syrian force's advance into Hammuriyeh had punched a corridor through the town into government-controlled territory.

Streams of women and children escaped through that corridor on Thursday, carrying plastic bags stuffed with clothes and pushing strollers piled high with suitcases and rugs.

They reached a checkpoint in Adra district, where ambulances and large green buses waited to take them to temporary shelters.

Syrian civilians and children sit while awaiting to be evacuated from the Eastern Ghouta enclave through the corridor opened by government forces in Hawsh al-Ashaari, east of the Eastern Ghouta enclave town of Hamouria on the outskirts of the capital Damascus on March 15, 2018. . /VCG Photo

The Observatory said nearly 20,000 people fled the enclave within 24 hours before the flow stopped on Thursday evening.

It's called the exodus "the largest displacement since the beginning of the assault on Ghouta."

The United Nations said it was trying to determine how many people have left the enclave.

"The UN has not observed the evacuations, but is visiting collective shelters where some of the evacuees are arriving," a UN spokesman said.

Eastern Ghouta had been the main rebel bastion on the outskirts of Damascus since 2012 and came under a devastating siege the following year.

The siege left the area's roughly 400,000 residents struggling to secure food and hospitals crippled by shortages of medicine and equipment.

On Thursday, a joint convoy of food supplies for some 26,000 people entered Douma, the largest town in Ghouta and part of a separate rebel-controlled pocket.

"This is just a little of what these families need," said the International Committee of the Red Cross, which delivered the aid alongside the Syrian Arab Red Crescent and the UN.

Source(s): AFP