Evacuation of IS group fighters from Damascus delayed, says monitor
Text by FRANCE 24
Latest update : 2015-12-26
A UN-sponsored deal to evacuate more than 2,000 Islamic State (IS) group fighters and other militants from rebel-held parts of south Damascus has been delayed, a body that monitors the war said on Saturday, a day after a rebel leader was killed.
Buses were due to transport the fighters to Raqqa, the de facto capital of the IS group in northern Syria, Lebanese Hezbollah’s Manar TV station said.
But the deal fell through after the Jaysh al Islam rebel group’s leader Zahran Alloush, through whose territory the convoy had been granted safe passage, was killed in an air strike on Friday, the broadcaster said.
The arrangement was the first of its kind between the Syrian authorities and the IS group.
It would have marked a significant show of strength by the government of President Bashar al-Assad, increasing its chances of reasserting control over a strategic area four kilometres south of the centre of the capital.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an independent British-based monitoring group that tracks violence across Syria, said the evacuation had been expected to take place early Saturday but was delayed as there was now no secure territory for the militants to pass through.
Manar TV said buses arrived on Friday to pick up the fighters and at least 1,500 family members but had turned back.
The broadcaster is the official mouthpiece of Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shiite group which is a major ally of Assad and has sent its forces to fight alongside government troops.
Local hostilities grow toward IS group
The IS group has a large presence in several southern neighbourhoods of Damascus, including the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk.
Local hostility towards the Jihadist group - which controls large swathes of territory in Syria and Iraq - has grown.
"We have had enough with their presence and the fighting that goes and the siege that has caused a lot of hardship," said Yousef, a resident of the nearby neighbourhood of Hajar al Aswad, who declined to give his full name for security reasons.
A years-long government siege of parts of Damascus controlled by a patchwork of rebel groups - of which Jaysh al Islam is the largest - has impeded the flow of food and humanitarian aid, starving many people to death in what rights group Amnesty International has described as a war crime.
US-backed alliance seizes IS group-held dam
Meanwhile, a spokesman for the US-backed alliance of Syrian Kurds and Arab rebel groups on Saturday said the bloc had seized a dam from IS group fighters, cutting a main supply route for them.
Colonel Talal Selo said the seizure of the dam helps isolate the militants’ strongholds in northern Aleppo from their territories east of the Euphrates river, where Raqqa city, their de facto capital, is located.
The United Nations and foreign governments have stepped up efforts to broker local ceasefires and safe-passage agreements towards a wider goal of ending Syria’s civil war, in which more than 250,000 people have been killed in nearly five years of fighting.
In a statement on Saturday, Staffan de Mistura, the UN special envoy for Syria, said he hoped to convene peace talks between the government and the opposition on January 25.
On December 18, the UN Security Council unanimously approved a resolution endorsing an international road map for a Syrian peace process, a rare show of consensus among major powers.
In contrast to other non-Jihadist rebels, the IS group has been totally opposed to any deal with the Assad government.
(FRANCE 24 with REUTERS)
http://www.france24.com/en/20151226-syria-yarmouk-evacuation-rebels-islamic-state-group-damascus-delayed-regime-monitor-assad
