Thousands of
civilians poured out of Eastern Ghouta on Thursday as the capture of a key town
brought Syria’s government even closer to retaking the devastated rebel
enclave
outside Damascus.
Defying
expectations and calls to step down, Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad was
strengthening his grip on power Thursday as the conflict entered its eighth
year.
His troops
gained new ground in their ferocious assault against Eastern Ghouta, once the
opposition’s main bastion on the outskirts of the capital.
Regime
forces now control 70 percent of the area, a war monitor said, and have split
the remaining rebel territory into three shrinking pockets.
After a
fierce air and ground assault, regime forces on Thursday captured Hammuriyeh, a
town in an isolated southern zone of Ghouta.
The Syrian
Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitor, said Hammuriyeh fell to
regime forces after fighters from the Faylaq al-Rahman rebel faction withdrew.
The regime’s
advance into Hammuriyeh overnight had opened up a corridor through the town
into government-controlled territory.
Streams of
women and children escaped through that corridor on Thursday, 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.
‘Largest
displacement’
The
Observatory said more than 12,000 people fled the enclave on Thursday in “the
largest displacement since the beginning of the assault on Ghouta.”
The Russian
military, which has backed the offensive on the rebel enclave, said as many as
13,000 people could leave Ghouta by the end of the day.
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 Thursday,
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.
ICRC
President Peter Maurer was present with the convoy, the first time he had
accompanied such an operation.
Twenty-five
trucks were delivering food parcels and flour bags to hunger-stricken residents
in Douma when mortar rounds hit nearby.
Aid workers
were sent scrambling for cover, an AFP correspondent said, but were able to
resume delivery shortly afterwards.
Divide-and-conquer
Thursday’s
aid operation came after two consecutive days of medical evacuations from
Douma, which saw dozens of civilians bussed out to receive treatment in
Damascus.
Eastern
Ghouta was designated in May 2017 as a “de-escalation zone” — an area where
violence is supposed to be reduced to pave the way for humanitarian assistance
and a nationwide truce.
But since
February 18, Russian-backed government troops have pressed a ferocious air and
ground campaign in Ghouta that has brought most of the one-time opposition
bastion under government control.
The
remaining parts have been cut off from each other, in what analyst Nawar Oliver
said was part of a divide-and-conquer strategy.
“The summary
is that the regime cut up Ghouta into three zones, to comfortably work on
securing three different agreements,” said Oliver of the Turkey-based Omran
Institute.
Assad is
determined to retake Ghouta in order to secure the capital, which is regularly
battered by rockets and mortars fired from the adjacent rebel enclave.
Dozens in
Damascus have been killed in rebel fire in recent weeks, including one person
who died on Thursday, according to state news agency SANA.
The assault
on Ghouta, meanwhile, has left nearly 1,250 civilians dead, around a fifth of
them children.
The United
Nations has made repeated demands for an immediate ceasefire in Eastern Ghouta,
but they have gone unheeded.
For the past
seven years, international efforts to bring an end to the violence raging
across Syria have consistently failed.
The conflict
has drawn in world powers, with Russia backing Assad and Turkey supporting an
array of rebels in Syria’s north against the regime, jihadists, and Kurds.
Ankara and
allied Syrian factions have since January 20 been waging a deadly ground and
air assault against the Kurdish-controlled enclave of Afrin in northwest Syria.
They have
seized more than 70 percent of that region, according to the Observatory, and
are on the verge of surrounding Afrin city.
The city is
home to around 350,000 people and defended by the Kurdish People’s Protection
Units (YPG).
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