Aleppo rebels claim new ceasefire to allow thousands to flee

A ceasefire in the last rebel-held pocket of eastern Aleppo was to take effect early on Thursday morning, opposition forces said, after a first failed attempt at a truce left tens of thousands trapped in the besieged area.

“An agreement has been reached and within the coming hours its implementation will begin,” Abdul Salam Abdul Razak, a military spokesman for the Nour al-Din al Zinki rebel group, told the news agency Reuters.

He said the deal included the evacuation of people from two villages besieged by rebels in Idlib province, a condition introduced by the government side for the truce deal to resume.

An official in the pro-Damascus military alliance confirmed the deal was on, and said some 15,000 people would be evacuated from the two villages in return for the evacuation from Aleppo of “militants and their families and whoever wants to leave among civilians”. He said they would head for Idlib province. An official in the Jabha Shamiya rebel group said implementation would begin about 6am on Thursday.

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The latest attempt at a deal that would allow for the evacuation of the area came as the United Nations said the intense bombardment of the last rebel strongholds in the city most likely amounted to a war crime.

A plan for the safe passage out of combatants and civilians had failed to materialise on Wednesday. Instead, Syrian government forces, supported by Russia and Iran-backed militias, continued air strikes and shelling of a small pocket of territory still controlled by the rebels.

Simultaneous safe passage

Iran, one of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's main backers, imposed new conditions on the initial ceasefire deal, saying it wanted simultaneous safe passage for the wounded from two villages besieged by rebel fighters, according to rebel and UN sources cited by Reuters.

The evacuation plan was the culmination of two weeks of rapid advances by the Syrian army and its allies that drove insurgents back into an ever-smaller pocket of the city under air strikes and artillery fire.

Tens of thousands had lived in the besieged sector in recent weeks even after medical and rescue services had collapsed and food supplies had run dangerously low. Buses that were supposed to bring some of the last holdouts in the destroyed neighbourhoods out of the area on Wednesday departed empty after waiting for hours, according to the Lebanese television station Al Manar, which is affiliated with Hezbollah, the Shiite group that backs Mr Assad.

The ceasefire brokered by Russia, Mr Assad's most powerful ally, and Turkey was intended to end years of fighting in the city, giving the Syrian leader his biggest victory in more than five years of war.

The UN high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein, said he was appalled that the initial deal appeared to have collapsed. “While the reasons for the breakdown in the ceasefire are disputed, the resumption of extremely heavy bombardment by the Syrian government forces and their allies on an area packed with civilians is almost certainly a violation of international law and most likely constitutes war crimes,” he added.

Joint effort

Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian leader Vladimir Putin agreed in a phone call to make a joint effort to start the process, but there was no sign of the conditions set by Iran being met. Insurgents fired shells at the two majority-Shiite villages from which Tehran wanted wounded to be evacuated, Foua and Kefraya, in Idlib province west of Aleppo, causing some casualties, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Despite the ongoing fighting, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov predicted that rebel resistance in Aleppo would last no more than two or three days. The defence ministry in Moscow said the rebels now controlled an enclave of only 2.5sq km.

At the UN on Tuesday, secretary general Ban Ki-moon said there had been “credible reports” of atrocities, including extrajudicial killings, while eastern Aleppo was retaken.

Mr Ban said the UN had been unable to verify the reports, however, because the Syrian government had repeatedly denied UN staff members the access required to monitor the evacuations and to aid civilians.

The rout of rebels in Aleppo over recent weeks sparked a mass flight of terrified civilians and insurgents in bitter weather, a crisis a UN official said was a “complete meltdown of humanity”. There were food and water shortages in rebel areas and all hospitals had closed.