The Syrian government on Friday suspended an operation to evacuate civilians and fighters from the last rebel-held parts of Aleppo, accusing the opposition of violating the deal, a security source said.
An AFP correspondent heard gunfire and explosions in Ramussa, the government-held neighbourhood that evacuees had been passing through.
“The evacuation operation has been suspended because the militants failed to respect the conditions of the agreement,” the security source told Agence France-Presse.
A regime source close to the negotiations said the deal had been suspended because rebels were “leaving Aleppo with hostages.”
In Ramussa, buses and ambulances that had been waiting to evacuate more people left the area after the gunfire and explosions, the AFP correspondent said.
The delicate operation to evacuate remaining civilians and fighters from east Aleppo began on Thursday afternoon and continued through the night.
Rebel-held territory
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor, said around 8,500 people had left the city, going to rebel-held territory in the west of the province.
The army began an operation to recapture all of Aleppo in mid-November, and had overrun more than 90 percent of the former rebel bastion in the east of the city before the evacuation began.
The World Health Organization’s top representative in Syria says she hopes the suspension of evacuations of civilians and rebels from eastern Aleppo is only temporary and that the process would resume soon.
Elizabeth Hoff says WHO staffers at the Ramouseh crossing point with the rebel enclave who were assisting in the operation were told “without explanation” to leave the area.
Hoff spoke to reporters at UN offices in Geneva by phone from western, government-controlled part of the city of Aleppo.
She says many women and children in eastern Aleppo had gathered to wait for buses and ambulances to return and take them out on Friday, but were now compelled to go back home.
Hoff says that “this is a great concern to us because we know that they are desperate to get out.”
The International Committee of the Red Cross says about 4,000 civilians were taken out on Thursday. The Syrian state news agency says 2,300 opposition fighters and their families left Aleppo the previous night.
According to Reuters, Staffan de Mistura, the U.N. special envoy for Syria, said about 50,000 people remained in rebel-held Aleppo
Source: AFP
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