Some 25,000 people have been evacuated from the rebel-held enclave of Aleppo since Thursday, including 15,000 on Monday and 10,000 last Thursday, the International Committee of the Red Cross said on Tuesday.

Teams from the ICRC and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, who are leading the evacuation, were "working through the night" on Monday, ICRC spokeswoman Krista Armstrong told Reuters. </s> BEIRUT, MOSCOW: The Syrian army broadcast messages into the last rebel enclave of Aleppo on Tuesday, warning that it was poised to enter the area during the day and urging insurgents to speed up their evacuation of the city.

An operation to evacuate civilians and fighters from rebel-held eastern Aleppo has brought out 37,500 people since late last week and the goal is to complete the process by Wednesday, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said.

But it is hard to know if that goal is realistic, given the problems that have beset the evacuation plan so far, and the wide variation in estimates of how many had left and how many still remained. The International Committee of the Red Cross put the number evacuated since Thursday at only 25,000.

A rebel official in Turkey told Reuters that even after thousands had left on Monday, only about half of the civilians who wanted to leave had done so.

The insurgents would only leave once all the civilians who wanted to go had departed, the rebel said. The ceasefire and evacuation agreement allows them to carry personal weapons but not heavier arms.

Estimates of the number of people waiting for evacuation range from a few thousand to tens of thousands.

The United Nations said Syria had authorised the world body to send 20 more staff to east Aleppo who would monitor the evacuation.

A UN official said 750 people had been evacuated from the two besieged government villages of Foua and Kefraya, which government forces had insisted must be included in the deal to bring people out of Aleppo.

The evacuations are part of a ceasefire arrangement that ends four years of fighting in Aleppo, once Syria’s most populous city.

Conditions for those being evacuated are grim, with evacuees waiting for convoys of buses in freezing winter temperatures. An aid worker said that some evacuees had reported children had died during the long, cold wait.

In government-held parts of Aleppo, the mood was very different.

A large crowd thronged to a sports hall in the city, waving Syrian flags and dancing to patriotic music, a large portrait of President Bashar Al Assad hanging on one wall, in a celebration of the rebels’ defeat in the city that was broadcast live on state television.

The rebel withdrawal from Aleppo after a series of rapid advances by the army and allied Shiite militias including Hezbollah since late November has brought Al Assad his biggest victory of the nearly six-year-old war.

However, despite the capture of Aleppo and progress against insurgents near Damascus, the fighting is far from over, with large areas remaining in rebel control in the northwestern countryside and in the far south.

The jihadist Daesh also controls swathes of territory in the deserts and the Euphrates river basin in eastern Syria.

The foreign minister of Iran, one of Al Assad’s main backers, said he hoped an overall ceasefire agreement could be reached for Syria.

Speaking at a meeting with the foreign ministers of Russia and Turkey in Moscow to discuss the future of Syria, Mohammad Javad Zarif said there was no military solution for the Syrian conflict, only a political one. Russia and Iran back Al Assad while Turkey has backed some rebel groups.

The talks, aimed at giving fresh impetus for a solution in Aleppo, went ahead despite the killing of Russia’s ambassador to Ankara by a gunman on Monday.

UN Syria mediator Staffan de Mistura intends to convene peace talks in Geneva on February 8.

Al Assad is backed 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 United States and Gulf monarchies.

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 besieged the rebel sector before using intense bombardment and ground assaults to retake it in recent months. </s> BEIRUT (AP) — Delays hampered the last evacuations of Syrian rebels and civilians from what is left of the opposition’s enclave in Aleppo as its residents waited on Wednesday for the arrival of 20 U.N. observers meant to monitor the final exodus from the city.

Some 3,000 rebel fighters and civilians stood outside in harsh wintry conditions overnight, waiting in vain for to board what may be the last convoy out of the enclave. Activists circulated photos on social media of families huddled around fires amid the sleet and snow. By midday, temperatures in the city hovered around freezing.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the conflict through a network of activists on the ground, said 60 buses were waiting to leave eastern Aleppo on Wednesday with the last of the evacuees — the final step that surrenders the Syrian opposition foothold in the war-torn city to the government.

Rebels and the government traded blame for the delay.

Syrian state media said on Tuesday evening that “differences among terrorist groups” were holding up the evacuations from Aleppo and from two rebel-besieged Shiite villages in the country’s north, Foua and Kfarya. The government calls all armed opposition fighters terrorists.

The rebels are supposed to allow the evacuation of the sick and wounded from the two villages as part of a cease-fire deal reached last week to ensure the evacuation of eastern, rebel-held part of the city of Aleppo.

Ward Furati, spokesman for Aleppo’s Fastaqim rebel faction, said fighters in Aleppo “won’t leave until the security of all the civilians has been fully guaranteed.”

Opposition media activist Ahmad Primo said the government’s side was demanding to complete the evacuations from Foua and Kfarya before it would allow buses out of Aleppo.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, which is overseeing the operations, could not be reached for comment. On Tuesday, the ICRC said it has evacuated 25,000 people from the city since operations began last week, but the Observatory says the tally is closer to 17,000.

The Observatory also said 21 buses are still waiting to evacuate the sick and wounded from the rebel-besieged Shiite villages of Foua and Kfarya.

Also Tuesday, the U.N. humanitarian aid agency said Syria’s government authorized U.N. plans to send about 20 staffers to monitor evacuations from eastern Aleppo. It was not immediately unclear if the U.N. monitors would arrive on Tuesday.

Elsewhere in northern Syria, fighting between the Islamic State group on one side, and Turkish forces and Syrian opposition forces on the other, killed three Turkish soldiers, according to the state Anadolu Agency.

The report cited unnamed military sources as saying that 11 Turkish soldiers were also wounded in the fighting for the IS-held town of al-Bab on Wednesday, including one who was reported to be in critical condition. The agency reported intense clashes near a hospital in the town, saying the militants were using it as a shelter and to store arms and ammunition.

Turkey sent ground troops into northern Syria in August to support Turkey-backed Syrian opposition forces in clearing a border area of Islamic State group militants and to curb Kurdish territorial expansion.

At least 24 Turkish soldiers have been killed so far in the operation, entitled Euphrates Shield.

Associated Press writer Suzan Fraser in Ankara contributed to this report. </s> An operation to evacuate civilians and fighters from rebel-held eastern Aleppo has brought out 37,500 people since late last week and the goal is to complete the process by Wednesday, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said.

But it is hard to know if that goal is realistic, given the problems that have beset the evacuation plan so far, and the wide variation in estimates of how many had left and how many still remained. The International Committee of the Red Cross put the number evacuated since Thursday at only 25,000.

A rebel official in Turkey told Reuters that even after thousands had left on Monday, only about half of the civilians who wanted to leave had done so.

The insurgents would only leave once all the civilians who wanted to go had departed, the rebel said. The ceasefire and evacuation agreement allows them to carry personal weapons but not heavier arms.

Estimates of the number of people waiting for evacuation range from a few thousand to tens of thousands.

The United Nations said Syria had authorized the world body to send 20 more staff to east Aleppo who would monitor the evacuation.

A U.N. official said 750 people had been evacuated from the two besieged government villages of Foua and Kefraya, which government forces had insisted must be included in the deal to bring people out of Aleppo.

The evacuations are part of a ceasefire arrangement that ends four years of fighting in Aleppo, once Syria's most populous city.

Conditions for those being evacuated are grim, with evacuees waiting for convoys of buses in freezing winter temperatures. An aid worker said that some evacuees had reported children had died during the long, cold wait.

In government-held parts of Aleppo, the mood was very different.

A large crowd thronged to a sports hall in the city, waving Syrian flags and dancing to patriotic music, a large portrait of President Bashar al-Assad hanging on one wall, in a celebration of the rebels' defeat in the city that was broadcast live on state television.

The rebel withdrawal from Aleppo after a series of rapid advances by the army and allied Shi'ite militias including Hezbollah since late November has brought Assad his biggest victory of the nearly six-year-old war.

However, despite the capture of Aleppo and progress against insurgents near Damascus, the fighting is far from over, with large areas remaining in rebel control in the northwestern countryside and in the far south.

The jihadist group Islamic State also controls swathes of territory in the deserts and Euphrates river basin in eastern Syria.

The foreign minister of Iran, one of Assad's main backers, said he hoped an overall ceasefire agreement could be reached for Syria.

Speaking at a meeting with the foreign ministers of Russia and Turkey in Moscow to discuss the future of Syria, Mohammad Javad Zarif said there was no military solution for the Syrian conflict, only a political one. Russia and Iran back Assad while Turkey has backed some rebel groups.

The talks, aimed at giving fresh impetus for a solution in Aleppo, went ahead despite the killing of Russia's ambassador to Ankara by a gunman on Monday.

U.N. Syria mediator Staffan de Mistura intends to convene peace talks in Geneva on Feb. 8.

Assad is backed by Russian air power and Shi'ite militias including Lebanon's Hezbollah movement and Iraq's Harakat al-Nujaba. The mostly Sunni rebels include groups supported by Turkey, the United States and Gulf monarchies.

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 besieged the rebel sector before using intense bombardment and ground assaults to retake it in recent months. </s> A rebel official based in Turkey told Reuters that only about half of the civilians who wanted to leave Aleppo had done so after the departure of thousands of people on Monday.

The insurgents would only leave once all the civilians who wanted to had done so, the rebel said. The ceasefire and evacuation agreement allows them to carry personal weapons but not heavier arms.

Late on Monday, Turkey said 20,000 people had left the rebel-held pocket in the south of Aleppo in evacuations on Thursday and Monday. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor, said 15,000 had gone.

Estimates of the number of people still waiting for evacuation on convoys of buses range from a few thousand to tens of thousands. The route out of Aleppo runs 5 km (3 miles) to the rebel-held district of al-Rashideen, just beyond the city's southwestern limit.

Civilians are also being evacuated from two mostly Shi'ite Muslim villages near Idlib that have been besieged by rebels for years and taken to Aleppo as part of the deal that allowed the departure of insurgents from the city.

The Hezbollah military media unit reported that eight more buses of evacuees from al-Foua and Kefraya departed at dawn on Tuesday.

The rebel withdrawal from Aleppo after a series of rapid advances by the army and allied Shi'ite militias including Hezbollah since late November has brought President Bashar al-Assad his biggest victory of the civil war.

However, despite the capture of Aleppo and progress against insurgents near Damascus, the fighting is still far from over, with large areas remaining in rebel control in the northwestern countryside and in the far south.

The jihadist group Islamic State also controls swathes of territory in the deserts and Euphrates river basin in eastern Syria. </s> Thousands of residents from two rebel-besieged loyalist towns in northwestern Syria have been evacuated to government-controlled territory as part of a deal that will see hundreds of detainees released from state-run prisons.

The last remaining residents of the predominantly Shia towns of al-Foua and Kefraya, estimated at 6,000, departed after more than a hundred buses arrived early on Thursday to transport them to government-held territory in Aleppo province.

On Wednesday, rebels from Hay’et Tahrir al-Sham - a group formerly linked to al-Qaeda - and Iran-backed forces reached an agreement to evacuate people in exchange for the release of more than 1,500 civilians and rebels held in state prisons.

Thursday's evacuation began with ambulances ferrying out the sick to a government checkpoint before 121 buses departed the villages, state-run al-Ikhbariya TV said.

The villages of northern Syria's Idlib province - the last major rebel stronghold in the country - had been under siege for more than three years.

A deal for the evacuation of residents from the two Shia-majority towns was first reached in April 2017 but had only partially materialised with only a group of people evacuated to government-held areas.

The April evacuation was halted after a blast killed 150 people, including 72 children.

Iran, which backs the government of President Bashar al-Assad against the mainly Sunni rebels and has expanded its military role in Syria, has long taken an interest in the fate of the Shia residents of the two towns.

In the past two years, thousands of people, mostly from rebel-held areas, have been forced to move to territories controlled by the rebels as part of evacuation deals.

The opposition has consistently maintained that such evacuation deals amount to forced demographic change and deliberate displacement of Sunni populations away from the country's urban centres.

They accuse Tehran of attempting to change the demographics in areas close to Damascus with the goal of partitioning the country.

Another opposition source said the resumption of talks was aimed at deterring a potential military campaign by pro-government forces on the two towns.

Idlib is part of a de-escalation deal - signed by Iran, Russia and Turkey - that calls for the cessations of hostilities between rebel groups and government forces.

The agreement, which initially included Eastern Ghouta in the northern Damascus countryside and Deraa province in the south, has already been broken with government forces, backed by Russian air support, in control of much of the territory. </s> BEIRUT — Syrian government forces threatened Tuesday to storm the last opposition holdout in Aleppo, potentially complicating an internationally supported effort to evacuate thousands of civilians still trapped in the city.

The media of the Lebanese Hezbollah militia, an ally of President Bashar Assad that is fighting in Aleppo, said Syrian troops have issued their last call for people to leave the sliver of territory in the city's eastern districts still in the hands of opposition forces.

As many as 25,000 people have been evacuated from the area since Thursday, Robert Mardini, regional director of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said on Twitter.

Evacuations have been taking place since last week as part of an agreement brokered by Russia and Turkey, but disruptions have complicated the effort as thousands are still waiting to be bussed to the rebel-held province to the west.

The deal — seen as the only way to avoid a bloodbath — has surrendered to Assad's government the eastern districts of the city that rebel fighters have held since 2012. That represents a major victory for the Syrian leader and his allies, including Russia and Iran.

Pro-government fighters, including militiamen from Hezbollah and Iran, temporarily halted the evacuations to demand that residents of two nearby Shiite villages under siege by rebels also be evacuated. Islamist rebels later burned those evacuation buses temporarily complicating the entire evacuation plan.

Opposition Syrians accuse government forces and allied militiamen of robbing and even executing a number of people as they have moved into the parts of eastern Aleppo once held by the rebels.

At the United Nations, the Security Council voted Monday to deploy international observers to monitor the evacuation routes in Aleppo, ending months of deadlock over the fate of the city as government forces closed in.

France's envoy to the Security Council said he hoped the resolution would prevent Aleppo from turning into another Srebrenica, where thousands of Bosnian men and boys were massacred in 1995 as the town fell to Serb forces. But the text of the resolution allowed five days for the observers to arrive, suggesting that the mission may not get off the ground until the evacuation is complete.

The city has seen some of the fiercest fighting of Syria's war. For much of it, Aleppo's eastern districts had been the rebels' most important stronghold.

Thousands of people remain camped out in what is left of the rebels' Aleppo enclave — its streets shattered beyond recognition by shelling.

Photographs from the area on Sunday night showed fires on the streets as residents tried to keep warm. Temperatures drop below freezing at night, and many people are sleeping on sidewalks and in abandoned buildings.

Several residents disembarking from the evacuation buses in the early hours of Monday were bundled up in coats. Many were exhausted, frustrated and in tears, said Ahmad Dbis, a doctor coordinating a team welcoming the evacuees.

"These people came out of hell, but they are indignant at their treatment," Dbis said. "They keep asking why people didn't help them in Aleppo."

The U.N. children's agency said Monday that 47 children had arrived safely from an orphanage, some of them in critical condition because of injuries or dehydration.

As an addendum to the Aleppo evacuation deal, 10 buses carried civilians away from two Shiite villages long besieged by rebels — Fouaa and Kefraya in Idlib - on Monday morning, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and the pan-Arab Mayadeen television station. </s> Residents in northwestern Syria evacuated two Shiite villages on Thursday morning after the Syrian government struck a deal to allow them to leave by pledging to release hundreds of rebel prisoners in exchange.

Some 120 buses carrying approximately 6,900 evacuees had left the towns of al-Foua and Kefraya, taking residents to nearby government-held territory in Aleppo province, a monitoring group said.

"The buses have left in the early hours of the morning and the two towns are completely empty now," Rami Abdel Rahman, head of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told news agency dpa.

The villages of al-Foua and Kefraya, located in Idlib province, had been under siege for several years by Sunni Islamist rebels operating in the area. The deal to completely evacuate the towns was brokered by Russia, the main ally of Syrian President Bashar Assad, and Turkey, who is backing the Syrian opposition.

Idlib province is home to more than two million people, including Syrian civilians and rebels who had relocated there from other opposition-held territory in other surrender deals.

The government has not provided details on the release of 1,500 rebels from government-run jails, but according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the deal would also spare Idlib from future military offensives by the regime.

After recently recovering territory from rebels in the southwest, Assad is hoping to recover all of Syria through agreements such as the evacuation deal in al-Foua and Kefraya.

But activists and rights groups warned that such large-scale transfers may amount to forced displacement. The International Committee of the Red Cross demanded that any movement of people must be voluntary.

"Any evacuations, in Syria, or elsewhere, must follow basic humanitarian rules: Civilians can choose to stay or leave. Civilians must be protected against attacks — at all times. Evacuations are temporary — civilians have the right to return," the ICRC wrote on Twitter.

The conflict in Syria broke out in March 2011 with protests against Assad and his government. Since then, the conflict has killed an estimated 500,000 people and driven some 11 million from their homes.

Each evening at 1830 UTC, DW's editors send out a selection of the day's hard news and quality feature journalism. You can sign up to receive it directly here. </s> Syrian rebel fighters are evacuated from Aleppo towards rebel-held territory in the west of Aleppo's province on December 22, 2016.

Damascus: The Syrian army announced on Thursday that the country’s second city Aleppo has been fully recaptured from rebel fighters, the government’s biggest victory in the nearly six-year civil war.

“Thanks to the blood of our martyrs and the sacrifices of our valiant armed forces as well as allied forces... the general command of the armed forces announces the return of security to Aleppo,” the army said in a statement.

The announcement came shortly after state television reported that the last convoy carrying rebels and civilians had left eastern Aleppo.

Ahmed Qorra Ali, an official with the rebel group Ahrar Al Sham, confirmed that “the last convoy has left the rebel-controlled area”.

Earlier, the Red Cross said that more than 4,000 fighters had left rebel-held areas of the city in the “last stages” of the evacuation.

The United Nations said it had deployed observers to monitor the final evacuations, under a Security Council resolution adopted on Monday.

Rebel forces, who seized control of east Aleppo in 2012, agreed to withdraw from the bastion after a month-long army offensive that drove them from more than 90 percent of their former territory.

The evacuation agreement was brokered by Russia, which launched air strikes in support of Assad’s regime last year, and Turkey, which has supported some rebel groups.
The International Committee of the Red Cross claims that 25,000 residents of the rebel-held territories have been evacuated from Aleppo as Hezbollah warns remaining residents in the former rebel enclave to leave "as quickly as possible".