{"id":31130,"date":"2016-12-16T04:15:49","date_gmt":"2016-12-16T04:15:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/thousands-trapped-as-aleppo-evacuation-moves\/"},"modified":"2016-12-16T04:15:11","modified_gmt":"2016-12-16T04:15:11","slug":"thousands-trapped-as-aleppo-evacuation-moves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/thousands-trapped-as-aleppo-evacuation-moves\/","title":{"rendered":"Thousands trapped as Aleppo evacuation moves slowly"},"content":{"rendered":"

{Tens of thousands of Syrians still waiting to leave from east Aleppo as part of rebels’ deal with government.}<\/p>\n

Thousands of civilians and rebels are still waiting to leave the last remaining rebel-held pockets of eastern Aleppo under an evacuation deal that will allow Syria’s government to take full control of the city after years of fighting.<\/p>\n

The operation launched on Thursday and is expected to take several days.<\/p>\n

Inside Story – Evacuation of rebel-held areas under way
\nZouhir Al Shimale, a journalist in eastern Aleppo, said the evacuation was moving at a snail’s pace.<\/p>\n

“It’s supposed to finish today or tomorrow, but it’s moving very slow,” he told Al Jazeera on Friday morning.<\/p>\n

“People were outside in the street overnight,” he said, adding that the temperature had dipped below zero degrees celsius in the city. <\/p>\n

“Thousands are still waiting out here.”<\/p>\n

US Secretary of State John Kerry has warned that action is needed to prevent a potential massacre.<\/p>\n

The first convoys left Aleppo carrying wounded civilians, fighters and their families, with civilians mostly leaving on buses and ambulances.<\/p>\n

The Russian defence ministry said on Friday morning that more than 6,000 people, including 3,000 rebels, had left east Aleppo in the last 24 hours.<\/p>\n

The withdrawal began a month to the day after Syrian government forces launched a major offensive to retake all of Aleppo, and will hand the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad his biggest victory in more than five years of civil war.<\/p>\n

The city, Syria’s second largest city and once a key cultural and economic hub, has been divided between government forces and rebels since 2012.<\/p>\n

In a video message to Syrians, Assad said the “liberation” of Aleppo was “history in the making”.<\/p>\n

{{Still trapped}}<\/p>\n

Kerry said what had already happened in the city was “unconscionable” but warned over the fate of “tens of thousands of lives that are now concentrated into a very small area of Aleppo”.<\/p>\n

“And the last thing anybody wants to see … is that that small area turns into another Srebrenica,” he said, referring to the 1995 Bosnian war massacre.<\/p>\n

UN envoy Staffan de Mistura said on Thursday that around 50,000 people were still trapped, including 40,000 civilians.<\/p>\n

The evacuations were announced on Thursday, after an initial plan for civilians and fighters to leave rebel-held parts of the city collapsed the previous day amid renewed clashes.<\/p>\n

They began with a convoy of ambulances and buses crossing into a government-held district in southern Aleppo in the afternoon.<\/p>\n

A first evacuation attempt on Wednesday fell apart, with artillery exchanges and resumed air strikes rocking the city until the early hours of Thursday.<\/p>\n

But the agreement, brokered by Assad’s ally Russia and opposition supporter Turkey, was revived following fresh talks.<\/p>\n

{{‘Mass depopulation’}}<\/p>\n

The defence ministry in Moscow said Syrian authorities had guaranteed the safety of the rebels leaving the city.<\/p>\n

The head of the UN-backed humanitarian taskforce for Syria, Jan Egeland, said in Geneva that most of those evacuated from Aleppo would head to opposition stronghold Idlib, in Syria’s northwest.<\/p>\n

De Mistura however warned that “Idlib will become the next Aleppo” if a ceasefire and political agreement for Syria is not found.<\/p>\n

AlHakam Shaar, a research fellow at the Budapest-based Aleppo Project, an initiative that tracks the destruction in the historic city, described the deal as the final phase of a “mass depopulation”.<\/p>\n

“Any sustainable peace agreement in Syria will have to guarantee free return for the displaced, females and males, along with their civil society formations,” he told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

“A return to centralised, authoritarian governance under the Syrian government is likely to again sideline the population that was very marginalised before 2011.”<\/p>\n

\"Civilians<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

{Tens of thousands of Syrians still waiting to leave from east Aleppo as part of rebels’ deal with government.} Thousands of civilians and rebels are still waiting to leave the last remaining rebel-held pockets of eastern Aleppo under an evacuation deal that will allow Syria’s government to take full control of the city after years […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[101],"byline":[2474],"hashtag":[],"class_list":["post-31130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-internationl","byline-al-jazeera"],"bylines":[{"id":2474,"name":"AL JAZEERA","slug":"al-jazeera","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":null}],"contributors":[{"id":2474,"name":"AL JAZEERA","slug":"al-jazeera","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":null}],"featured_image":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31130\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31130"},{"taxonomy":"byline","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/byline?post=31130"},{"taxonomy":"hashtag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtag?post=31130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}