Tense Aleppo Evacuations Resume Before U.N. Vote

Convoys of evacuees traveled from a rebel-held area of Aleppo and two Shiite villages besieged by terrorists on Monday, a war monitor and rebels said, as a deal enabling evacuations held after a tense, days-long stand-off and before a U.N. vote.

About 10 buses left the Shiite Muslim villages of al-Foua and Kefraya, north of Idlib, toward the government lines in Aleppo, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitor, reported.

The evacuation of civilians, including wounded people, from the two villages which have been besieged by rebels for years, is a condition for the Syrian army and its allies to allow thousands of fighters and civilians trapped in Aleppo to depart.

“First limited evacuations, finally, tonight from east Aleppo and Foua and Kefraya. Many thousands more are waiting to be evacuated soon,” Jan Egeland, who chairs the United Nations aid task force in Syria, tweeted late on Sunday night.

Later on Monday, the U.N. Security Council will vote in New York on a resolution to allow the international body’s staff to monitor the evacuations. The draft resolution was the result of a compromise between Russia and France, and the United States said it was expected to pass unanimously.

On Sunday, some of the buses sent to al-Foua and Kefraya to carry evacuees out were attacked and torched by armed men, who shouted “G-d is greatest” and brandished their weapons in front of the burning vehicles, according to a video posted online.

That incident threatened to derail the evacuations, the result of intense negotiations between Russia – the main supporter of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad – and Turkey, which backs some large rebel groups.

At stake is the fate of thousands of people still stuck in the last rebel bastion in Aleppo after a series of sudden advances by the Syrian army and allied Shiite militias under an intense bombardment that pulverized large sections of the city.

They have been waiting for the chance to leave Aleppo since the ceasefire and evacuation deal was agreed late last Tuesday, but have struggled to do so during days of hold-ups. The weather in Aleppo has been wet and very cold and there is little shelter and few services in the tiny rebel zone.

Assad is backed in the war by Russian air power and Shiite militias, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement and Iraq’s Harakat al-Nujaba. The mostly Sunni rebels include groups supported by Turkey, the U.S. and Gulf monarchies.

Thousands of people were evacuated on Thursday, the first to leave under the ceasefire deal that ends fighting in the city where violence erupted in 2012, a year after the start of conflict in other parts of Syria.

They were taken to rebel-held districts of the countryside west of Aleppo. Turkey has said Aleppo evacuees could also be housed in a camp to be constructed near the Turkish border to the north.

For four years the city was split between a rebel-held eastern sector and the government-held western districts. During the summer, the army and its allies managed to besiege the rebel sector before using intense bombardment and ground assaults to retake it in recent months.

A Reuters reporter who visited recaptured districts of Aleppo in recent days saw large swaths reduced to ruins, with rubble and other debris clogging the streets and sections of the famous Old City all but destroyed.