Author: Théophile Niyitegeka

{Fighters and their families moving out of Al Waer and into rebel-held parts of Aleppo under arrangement with government.}

Rebel fighters and their families have begun leaving their last bastion in the Syrian city of Homs, state media and witnesses say, under an evacuation deal with the government expected to be among the largest of its kind.

The first few buses carrying rebels and their families drove out of Al Waer district on Saturday morning, heading for rebel-held areas northeast of Aleppo city.

Talal Barazi, the Homs governor, told Reuters news agency that about 1,500 people would depart for Aleppo’s countryside on Saturday, including at least 400 fighters.

Russian and Syrian forces were overseeing the evacuation, and the full departure of rebels from Al Waer would take about six weeks, he said.

“The preparations and the reality on the ground indicate that things will go well,” Barazi said.

President Bashar al-Assad’s government has increasingly tried to press besieged rebel areas to surrender and accept what it calls reconciliation agreements that involve fighters departing for northern Syria.

The Syrian government describes such deals as a good way of bringing the country closer to peace after six years of conflict. But the opposition describes them as a tactic of forcibly displacing people who oppose Assad after years of bombardment and siege.

“There is a delibrate strategy from the Syrian government in terms of retaking some of these areas is that they lay a siege on the area preventing all kinds of supplies from getting in, including food, medical supplies etc and then they indiscriminately attack these areas,” the deputy director of emergencies at Human Rights Watch, Ole Solvang, told Al Jazeera.

“Aleppo was perhaps the most egregious example of that but we’ve seen it in many other places as well, so one of the major concerns HRW has is about these deals and the way they come about.”

Under the Al Waer deal, between 10,000 and 15,000 people would evacuate in batches over the coming weeks, according to a Britain-based war monitor and the opposition Homs Media Center.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said the buses would go to the Jarablus area in the north, held by Turkey-backed rebels.

Once completed, it would mark the biggest evacuation during the war out of one Syrian district, which is home to about 40,000 civilians and more than 2,500 fighters, the SOHR said.

The deal follows other agreements that were never fully implemented between the government and rebel groups in Al Waer, which has been targeted heavily by air strikes in recent weeks.

Source:Al Jazeera

{After reports of dozens of civilians killed, Pentagon releases picture of the site of a US raid in Aleppo province.}

The US has denied hitting a mosque in Syria where activists say dozens of people, mostly civilians, were killed.

The Pentagon said the US targeted an “al-Qaeda gathering across the street from a mosque”, and released footage showing that a mosque next to a destroyed building remained standing. It said the photo was taken less than five minutes after the strike on Thursday.

Syrian opposition activists said at least 40 people were killed in the Omar Ibn al-Khattab Mosque in al-Jinah village in Aleppo province. They accused the US of carrying out the raid.

Friday prayers were cancelled across rebel-held parts of northern Syria after the raid.

Bahaa al-Halaby, an Aleppo-based opposition activist based, said the air raid hit as about 250 people had gathered at the mosque for prayers or to attend a religious lesson.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the air strike on the mosque killed 46 while the Local Coordination Committees, another monitoring group, said 40 were killed.

Resident Abu Muhammed told the AFP news agency that he “heard powerful explosions when the mosque was hit. It was right after prayers at a time when there are usually religious lessons for men in it.

“I saw 15 bodies and lots of body parts in the debris when I arrived. We couldn’t even recognise some of the bodies,” he said

Pentagon spokesman, Eric Pahon, said US surveillance of the target area indicated evening prayers already had concluded before the attack.

He said the building that was struck was a “partially constructed community meeting hall” that al-Qaeda leaders used to gather and “as a place to educate and indoctrinate al-Qaeda fighters”.

“Initial assessments based upon post-strike analysis do not indicate civilian casualties,” Pahon said. He said the Pentagon would investigate any credible allegations it received.

Al-Jinah lies in one of the main rebel-held parts of Syria, encompassing the western parts of Aleppo province and neighbouring Idlib.

Bilal Abdul Kareem, a documentary filmmaker, visited the mosque and posted footage online.

Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Observatory, which monitors the war via a network of contacts across Syria, said that most of those killed were civilians.

Activists posted pictures of bodies scattered on the floor near the mosque.

Teams with the White Helmets, or Syria Civil Defence, a volunteer rescue group that operates in rebel-held parts of Syria, shared images of people being pushed into ambulances and panic-stricken residents searching among the rubble for survivors.

Source:Al Jazeera

{Prime Minister Netanyahu says recent Israeli raids aimed at preventing attempts to transfer advanced arms to Hezbollah.}

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the recent air strikes by his country inside Syria targeted weapons bound for Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and the same would be done again if necessary.

Israeli warplanes struck several targets in Syria early on Friday, prompting retaliatory missile launches, in one of the most serious incidents between the two countries in recent years.

Syria’s military said it had downed an Israeli plane and hit another as they were carrying out pre-dawn strikes near the famed desert city of Palmyra which was recaptured from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) this month.

The Israeli army denied that any planes had been hit.

Netanyahu said in footage aired on Israeli television networks: “When we identify attempts to transfer advanced weapons to Hezbollah and we have intelligence and it is operationally feasible, we act to prevent it.”

“That’s how it was yesterday and that’s how we shall continue to act,” he added.

The Israeli air force said earlier that it had carried out several strikes on Syria overnight, but that none of the ground-to-air missiles fired by Syrian forces in response had hit Israeli aircraft.

It was an unusual confirmation by Israel of air raids inside Syria.

“Overnight … aircraft targeted several targets in Syria,” an Israeli army statement said on Friday.

“Several anti-aircraft missiles were launched from Syria following the mission and [army] aerial defence systems intercepted one of the missiles.”

The Syrian army described the attack as an act of aggression that aided the ISIL group, which is fighting against the Syrian government.

Rocket sirens sounded in Israeli settlements in the Jordan valley, the military said and two witnesses heard an explosion a few minutes later, Reuters news agency reported.

A Jordanian military source said shrapnel from one missile fell in the north of the kingdom without causing any casualties, according to AFP news agency.

Source:Al Jazeera

{Activist with ties to Basque community says separatist group ETA will officially hand in its weapons by April 8.}

Basque separatist group ETA will fully disarm by April 8, a French environmental activist with ties to the Basque community promised on Friday.

The group announced a permanent cease-fire in 2011, but the governments of Spain and France have so far refused to take part in its disarmament because ETA tied it to the future of its members, both in and out of jail.

The two countries have demanded that ETA lay down its weapons without conditions and disband.

Txetx Etcheverry, a prominent figure in the French Basque community who tried to arrange a disarmament in 2016, told AP news agency that the new initiative was agreed upon with the ETA and will be carried out whether French authorities agree to receive the weapons or not.

“If the French government doesn’t take responsibility, the Basque civil society will take a step forward. We can’t imagine five more years of inaction,” Etcheverry said, pledging that “ETA will be disarmed by midnight on April 8.”

ETA, which in Basque stands for “Basque Country and Freedom,” was founded in 1959 during the Spanish dictatorship of General Francisco Franco.

It has killed 829 people in its nearly four-decade campaign to create a Basque homeland in a region straddling northern Spain and southwest France.

The group was most violent in the 1980s, staging hundreds of shootings of police, politicians and businesspeople.

One year after its last deadly attack, the killing of a French police officer near Paris in March 2010, the ETA announced it was renouncing violence.

In recent years, police operations have weakened the ETA. If the disarmament was completed, would primarily be symbolic, given that the group’s reduced arsenal is believed to be obsolete.

ETA has linked its total dissolution to allowing imprisoned members to serve their sentences closer to home in northern Spain, among other demands.

But on Friday, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy rejected any concessions.

“ETA has chosen to disarm unilaterally. It should do it and should also disband,” Rajoy, who leads Spain’s conservative Popular Party, said at a party meeting.

“The government of Spain will do what it has always done – to apply the law, which is the same for everybody.”

Source:Al Jazeera