23 hours ago ... BEIRUT, Lebanon — After four years of siege and bombardment, residents of the rebel-held Syrian town of Daraya struck a deal Thursday with ..
Besieged Town of Daraya Agrees to Surrender to Syrian Government
Photo
A bombing killed 14 on
Thursday in Aleppo, Syria. To the south, a four-year siege ended in
rebel-held Daraya as the town struck a deal with the government.Credit
Ameer Alhalbi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
BEIRUT, Lebanon — After four years of siege and bombardment, residents of the rebel-held Syrian town of Daraya struck a deal Thursday with the Syrian government that amounted to a surrender of territory deeply symbolic to both sides.
Under
the agreement, the government will evacuate Daraya’s remaining
residents — about 8,000 people — in exchange for control of the town,
which is less than two miles from the center of the capital, Damascus.
Daraya, one of the first areas to stage peaceful protests against President Bashar al-Assad
in 2011 and to face a violent response, is a rare example of a
community where even now, after more than five years of war, rebel
groups accept the authority of a civilian local council.
Hussam
Zyadeh, who fled Daraya in 2013, summed up the ambivalence of ending
the fight amid a feeling that the world had stopped caring and had
provided no help. “No more barrels on #Daraya,” he wrote on Twitter,
referring to barrel bombs. “No more death no more fight no more
revolution no more dignity no more #humanity as the whole world left it
alone.”
Word of the agreement — a week after incendiary bombs
left the town’s only remaining hospital out of commission — came as a
single airstrike by the government or its Russian allies killed 14
people, 11 of them children and the others women, in the northern city
of Aleppo, doctors there said.
The
deaths in Aleppo served as a stark illustration of the relentless
bombing that had pressed Daraya to make a deal after holding out for
four years, the harsh underbelly of great-power politics in Syria. Russia,
the government’s most powerful ally, has tacitly backed and sometimes
taken part in Mr. Assad’s scorched-earth attacks even as it calls, in
diplomatic venues, for a political solution. And American officials have
continued to express hope that Russia is sincere, and to support some
rebel groups just enough to keep the war going but not enough for them
to win or even shift the balance of power.
Photo
Two of the Aleppo bombing victims with their brother. In Daraya, the 8,000 remaining residents will be moved out.Credit
Abdalrhman Ismail/Reuters
Pictures of the carnage in Aleppo showed two young brothers,
one wearing glasses and coated with gray dust, hugging each other and
wailing as they mourned a third brother; an infant’s pale, gray,
disfigured body; and the head and torso of an apparently lifeless girl,
the rest of her body submerged in rubble.
“There
are about four houses on the ground,” Abdulkafi al-Hamdo, an
antigovernment activist in Aleppo, said by text message after visiting
the scene. “As reported by the neighbors, one of the families were
having a late breakfast. They were buried with their food.”
This summer has been one of the deadliest periods yet in Aleppo, once Syria’s largest city and commercial capital, divided since 2012 between rebel and government territory.
Over
the past several years, the government’s superior firepower has created
greater devastation on the rebel side. Some rebel groups have stepped
up attacks in recent months with powerful homemade rockets. In July,
according to one monitoring group, 50 children were killed on the
government side by rebel mortars, and 100 were killed on the rebel side
by government strikes.
United
Nations officials said Russia had agreed in principle to a 48-hour
cease-fire to deliver aid to both sides of Aleppo and to make repairs to
restore water service. Rebels had yet to agree, saying aid coming from
Turkey should travel through rebel territory, not on a
government-controlled road as planned, to avoid giving the government a
veto on deliveries.
The
deal in Daraya was portrayed by the Syrian state media as a magnanimous
victory and by government opponents as a bitter but necessary
surrender. The town was surrounded and besieged in 2012, not long after
residents described a knife massacre
by pro-government militias that killed hundreds of people. Since then,
the government has allowed just two United Nations aid deliveries, both
in June, taking in mosquito nets and shampoo when some people were ill because of lack of food.
SYRIA
2 Miles
Presidential
Palace
Eastern Ghouta
Damascus
Mezze Air Base
Daraya
“People
got tired after years of siege which drained the town and people,”
Amjad Abbar, a member of the local council, said via an internet call,
adding that many rebels wanted to keep fighting, “but it is not in the
interest of the people.”
One
rebel said in a voice message that a representative of the president’s
office had told negotiators that it was their last chance: “If we don’t
leave, they will kill them all, the civilians.”
In
the coming days, fighters will be bused to insurgent-held territory in
Idlib province in northern Syria, and several thousand civilians to
government-held Damascus suburbs, according to copies of the deal shared
by both sides — an acknowledgment from the government that a
significant civilian population remained, something that officials had
long denied.
On
Thursday, residents shared photographs of themselves paying a last
visit to the crowded graveyard where friends and relatives killed in the
war were buried.
Some
Damascus suburbs had struck cease-fire deals before, but this agreement
was the first in the Damascus area to envision a complete emptying of a
town. For people in nearby holdout suburbs, it was ominous.
“We might have the same scenario here,” Hassan Tabajo, of the rebel-held suburb of Douma, said in a text message after posting an online farewell to Daraya’s residents.
“Don’t
be sad, you’ve done what you can,” he wrote. “Wishing you all the
safety, asking you for forgiveness, because we were powerless.”
A version of this article appears in print on August 26, 2016, on page A3 of the New York edition with the headline: Besieged Town to Be Evacuated and Surrender to Syrian Rule. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe
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