BEIRUT: Mothers Noha and Samira were besieged for nearly two years on each side of Syria’s civil war.
At the weekend they finally escaped the suffocating blockades under an evacuation agreement — but their ordeal was not over. As they waited at two transit points miles apart outside Aleppo, a bomb attack hit Noha’s bus convoy, killing more than 120 people including dozens of children. After ambulances rushed off the wounded, new buses arrived and the two convoys eventually reached their destinations — one in government territory and the other in rebel territory. In the hours leading up to Saturday’s attacks, the two women spoke to Reuters about what they had left behind, their families being split up, and the likelihood they would never return home.
Reuters was not allowed back past security to try to find Noha after the blast, and lost contact with Samira after speaking to her earlier on another evacuee’s phone.
“We’ve lost everything. We hope to go back one day, but I don’t expect we will,” said Noha, 45, asking not to be identified by her last name.
Noha left al-Foua, one of two villages besieged by Syrian insurgents in Idlib province with her two youngest children and 5,000 other people under a deal between the Syrian government and armed opposition. In exchange, 2,000 residents and rebel fighters from the government-besieged town of Madaya near Damascus — Samira’s hometown — were given safe passage out, and bussed to Idlib province, a rebel stronghold, via Aleppo.
Thousands of Syrians have been evacuated from besieged areas in recent months under deals between President Bashar al Assad’s government and the rebels.
The deals have mostly affected those living in rebel-held areas surrounded by government forces and their allies. Damascus calls them reconciliation deals and says it allows services to be restored in the wrecked towns. Rebels say it amounts to forced displacement of Assad’s opponents from Syria’s main urban centres in the west of the country, and engenders demographic change.
But backed militarily by Russia and regional allies, Assad has negotiated the deals from a position of strength.
“There was little choice. We had to leave, we were scared,” said Samira, 55, who was travelling with her five adult sons.
She had feared her sons would be arrested or forced to join the Syrian military and fight once troops and officials of the Damascus government moved into the town.
Like Noha, Samira was relieved to have escaped a crushing siege which had caused widespread hunger - and in the case of Madaya, starvation - but had left everything behind, including family. — Reuters
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
