Buses enter rebel Aleppo to resume evacuations

Dozens of buses began entering the last rebel-held parts of Aleppo on Sunday to resume the evacuation of thousands of increasingly desperate trapped Syrian civilians and rebels.

The operation was suspended on Friday, a day after convoys of evacuees had begun leaving the rebel sector under a deal allowing the regime to take full control of the battleground city.

Buses started entering several neighbourhoods on Sunday under the supervision of the Red Crescent and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) “to bring the remaining terrorists and their families out,” state news agency SANA said, referring to the rebels.

A military source confirmed that a new evacuation deal had been reached. State television said 100 buses would take people out of Aleppo. The main obstacle to a resumption had been a disagreement over the number of people to be evacuated in parallel from two Shiite villages, Fuaa and Kafraya, under rebel siege in northwestern Syria.

A rebel representative said that a new agreement had been reached under which evacuations would take place in two phases from Aleppo, Fuaa and Kafraya as well as Zabadani and Madaya, two rebel towns besieged by the regime in Damascus province. In New York, the UN Security Council was set to meet at 1600 GMT onn Sunday to vote on French proposals to dispatch monitors to Aleppo to oversee evacuations and report on the protection of civilians.

The draft text said the council was “alarmed” by the worsening humanitarian crisis and by the fact that “tens of thousands of besieged Aleppo inhabitants” are in need of aid and evacuation. “Our goal through this resolution is to avoid another Srebrenica in this phase immediately following the military operations,” French Ambassador Francois Delattre said, referring to a 1995 Bosnian war massacre. But the proposals face resistance from veto-wielding Russia, a key backer of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Families have been sheltering during the night in freezing temperatures in bombed out apartment blocks in Aleppo’s Al-Amiriyah district, the departure point for evacuations before they were halted.

Dozens of trucks with humanitarian aid crossed the Turkish border Saturday into Syria, piling supplies in a buffer zone.