The evacuation of the last opposition-held areas of the Syrian city of Aleppo was suspended on Friday after pro-government militias demanded that wounded people should also be brought out of two Shi'ite villages being besieged by rebel fighters.
The second day of the operation to take fighters and civilians out of Aleppo's rebel enclave came to a grinding halt amid recriminations of human rights violations after a morning that had seen the pace of the operation pick up.
“Aleppo is now a synonym for hell,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told reporters. “I very much regret that we had to stop this operation.”
Aleppo had been divided between government and rebel areas in the nearly six-year civil war, but a lightning advance by the Syrian army and its allies that began in mid-November deprived the insurgents of most of their territory in a matter of weeks.
Rebel sources accused the pro-government Shi'ite militias of opening fire on a convoy carrying evacuees from east Aleppo and robbing them. A Syrian military source denied the accusations but said the convoy was turned back.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitoring group, said a group of ambulances and cars containing hundreds of civilians and fighters were stopped by pro-government gunmen at a checkpoint south-west of Aleppo. They later returned to the enclave. It said a total of 8,000 people, including some 3,000 fighters and more than 300 wounded, had left the city in convoys of buses and ambulances since the evacuation began on Thursday morning.
Rebels in eastern Aleppo went on high alert after pro-government forces prevented civilians from leaving and deployed heavy weaponry on the road out of the area, a Syrian rebel commander in the city said.
A Syrian official source said the evacuation was halted because rebels had sought to take out people they had abducted with them, and they had also tried to take weapons hidden in bags. This claim was denied by Aleppo-based rebel groups.
The chaos surrounding the Aleppo evacuation reflects the complexity of the war with an array of groups and foreign interests involved on each side.
Though both Russia and Iran back Assad, rebels have blamed Tehran and the Shi'ite groups it backs in Syria for obstructing Moscow's efforts to broker the evacuation of eastern Aleppo.
The Syrian White Helmets civil defence group and other rights organisations accused Russia of committing or being complicit in war crimes in Syria, saying Russian air strikes in the Aleppo region had killed 1,207 civilians, including 380 children.
Aid agencies involved in the Aleppo evacuation had been told to leave the area without explanation after the operation was aborted, the World Health Organization said.
Elizabeth Hoff, WHO representative in Syria, speaking from west Aleppo, told a news briefing in Geneva: “I assume the message (to abort the operation) came from the Russians who are monitoring the area”. Her team of nine staff in east Aleppo had no contact with Syrian authorities at the Ramouseh transit site.
UNICEF said more than 2,700 children had been evacuated in the past 24 hours from east Aleppo but hundreds more remained trapped.
Photos sent by an activist waiting to leave the rebel-held sector of east Aleppo showed crowds of people in thick coats in a street lined with flattened buildings in the cold winter air.
Private cars and minibuses with bundles strapped to their roofs filled the street, as people sat on rubble or stood next to bags of their belongings.
In a message sent to journalists, the activist said children were "hungry and crying" and people were "exhausted", not knowing if buses would arrive to take them out.
Even with victory for Assad in Aleppo, the war will still be far from over. Insurgents retain their rural stronghold of Idlib province, and the jihadist Islamic State group holds swathes of the east and recaptured the ancient city of Palmyra this week.
(With inputs from Reuters)
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