47 orphans among thousands evacuated from Aleppo

BEIRUT/GENEVA: Nearly 50 children who were trapped in an orphanage in the opposition-held Syrian enclave of east Aleppo were evacuated on Monday, some critically injured or dehydrated, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said.
The Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) evacuated the orphans from eastern Aleppo, along with facility staff who have been caring for them, ICRC spokeswoman Krista Armstrong said.
“They were given priority and were the first to be evacuated by bus when the operation resumed,” Armstrong said, adding that she could not provide an exact figure yet.
Earlier, Geert Cappelaere, UNICEF regional director, said in a statement that all 47 children trapped in the orphanage were evacuated to safety, “with some in critical condition from injuries and dehydration.”
UNICEF and other agencies were also assisting in reunifying other children evacuated in the past few days with their families and giving them medical care and winter clothes, he said.
Thousands were evacuated after a deal was reached to allow people to leave two besieged pro-regime villages in nearby Idlib province.
In bitter winter weather, convoys of buses from eastern Aleppo reached opposition-held areas to the west of the city, and more buses left the Shiite villages of Al-Foua and Kefraya for regime lines, according to a UN official and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group. The recapture of Aleppo is Syrian regime President’s Bashar Assad’s biggest victory so far in the nearly six-year-old war, but the fighting is not over with large parts of the country still controlled by insurgent and radical groups.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said 20,000 civilians had been evacuated from Aleppo so far.
The evacuation of civilians from the two villages had been demanded by the Syrian Army and its allies before they would allow fighters and civilians trapped in Aleppo to depart. The stand-off halted the Aleppo evacuation over the weekend.
“Complex evacuations from East Aleppo and Foua & Kefraya now in full swing. More than 900 buses needed to evacuate all. We must not fail,” Jan Egeland, who chairs the United Nations aid task force in Syria, tweeted. Ahmad Al-Dbis, a medical aid worker heading a team evacuating patients from Aleppo, said 89 buses had left the city. “Some evacuees told us that a few children died from the long wait and the intense cold while they were waiting to evacuate,” he told Reuters.
For those still in opposition-held Aleppo, conditions were grim, according to Aref Al-Aref, a nurse and photographer there.
“I’m still in Aleppo. I’m waiting for them to evacuate the children and women first. It’s very cold and there’s hunger. It’s a long wait,” he told Reuters. “People are burning wood and clothes to keep warm in the streets.”
Photographs of people evacuated from Aleppo showed large groups of people standing or crouching with their belongings or loading sacks onto trucks. Children in winter clothes carried small backpacks or played with kittens. One older man, in traditional Arab robes and headdress, sat holding a stick.
On Sunday, some of the buses sent to Al-Foua and Kefraya to carry evacuees out were attacked and torched by armed men.
That incident threatened to derail the evacuations, the result of intense negotiations between Russia — Assad’s main supporter — and Turkey, which backs some large opposition groups.
The foreign and defense ministers of Russia, Iran and Turkey will hold talks in Moscow on Tuesday aimed at giving fresh impetus for a solution in Aleppo.
At stake is the fate of thousands of people still stuck in the last opposition bastion in Aleppo after a series of sudden advances by the regime 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 cease-fire and evacuation deal was agreed late last Tuesday, but have been prevented from doing so during days of hold-ups.
In the square in Aleppo’s Sukari district, organizers gave every family a number to allow them access to buses.
“Everyone is waiting until they are evacuated. They just want to escape,” said Salah Al-Attar, a former teacher with his five children, wife and mother.
A Reuters reporter who visited recaptured districts of Aleppo in recent days saw large swathes reduced to ruins, with rubble everywhere and sections of the famous Old City all but destroyed.
Traders began to return to their stores in the Old City to see if they could be fixed up.
One merchant, Jamal Deeb, said: “We are all here to see what the situation is like, and to consider reconstructing the stores. We do not want to leave things as they are, hand in hand we want to rebuild everything once again.”