Thousands flee Ghouta rebel enclave as Syria army advances

ADRA, Syria-Agence France-Presse

Thousands of civilians poured out of rebel-held Eastern Ghouta on March 15, bringing the Syrian regime closer to retaking the battered enclave outside Damascus as the brutal war entered its eighth year.

Defying calls to step down since 2011, Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad has maintained his grip on power and is now pursuing a ferocious assault against the last opposition bastion near the capital.

The onslaught has split Ghouta into three with desperate residents in one zone receiving food aid on March 15 as thousands fled another.

Streams of women and children escaped a southern pocket of Ghouta into government-controlled territory on March 15, AFP correspondents on both sides of the battlefront said.

Many were on foot, carrying plastic bags stuffed with clothes and pushing strollers piled high with suitcases and rugs.

They reached a regime-held checkpoint in the region of Adra, where ambulances and a group of large green buses were waiting to take them to temporary shelters.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said more than 12,000 people fled the enclave on March 15 in “the largest displacement since the beginning of the assault on Ghouta.”

The exodus came after regime forces advanced overnight, seizing the eastern half of the key town of Hammuriyeh, the Britain-based war monitor said.

Regime forces rained air strikes and barrel bombs down on Hammuriyeh, and eventually opened up a corridor through the town into government-controlled territory.

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

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

On March 15, 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 was carrying out the delivery alongside the Syrian Arab Red Crescent and the United Nations.