IS begins evacuating Damascus as part of deal with regime
Besieged militants, women and children will be given free passage to jihadi strongholds elsewhere in Syria
The first batch of an unspecified number of Islamic State fighters is set to be evacuated early Friday from rebel-held neighborhoods in the south of Damascus to IS strongholds elsewhere in the country, according to reports from the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The move comes as part of a UN-brokered deal between militants and the regime that will see injured IS fighters, women, children and later all IS fighters leave the neighborhoods of Al-Hajar Al-Aswad, Al-Qadam, and areas of the Yarmouk refugee camp.
The evacuees, according to SOHR, are to be transported by bus to Be’er Al-Qasab in the Damascus countryside, to the eastern Homs province and to IS “capital” Raqqa in several groups over the next several months. At the end of this period, the Syrian capital is expected to be completely free of all IS militants.
Syrian media reported on Thursday that efforts were ongoing to clear the roads to the neighborhoods in question to allow the entry of the buses that will be used in the evacuation.
The safe-passage agreement is the latest in a series of similar deals that have been made between the various factions in the Syrian civil war in the past few months.
On December 9, two-thousand Syrian rebels and their families evacuated Homs, Syria’s third largest city, and were assured safe-passage to to other opposition-held areas. This came after an almost three-year siege that saw their stronghold, the Waer district, heavily shelled and completely razed to the ground.
The southern Damascus neighborhood of Al-Hajar Al-Aswad has been a stronghold of IS since a local jihadi group pledged allegiance to IS leader Abu Bakr il-Baghdadi in 2014. The neighborhood was used by the group to launch a foray into the neighboring Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp. Home to 160,000 people, both Palestinian and Syrian, before the outbreak of the Syrian conflict in 2011, the neighborhood was devastated by ensuing months of fighting which left many militants and civilians dead.