BEIRUT (AP) — A Syrian war monitoring group says at least 400 people in the contested city of Aleppo have fled opposition-held districts to areas under government control.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says the evacuees sought refuge in the Masaken Hanano neighborhood in eastern Aleppo, which was taken by pro-government forces on Saturday.

An estimated quarter-million people are trapped in wretched conditions in rebel-held eastern Aleppo since the government sealed its siege of the enclave in late August. Food supplies are running perilously low, the U.N. warned Thursday, and hospitals have come under relentless attack by the government.

The Observatory said another 30 families fled the city’s rebel-held eastern areas to the Sheikh Maqsoud neighborhood, under Kurdish control.

Syrian state media said “hundreds” of people were evacuated Saturday. </s> 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> (CNN) Hours after a planned evacuation of people from bombarded areas of eastern Aleppo, no one has left, according to a monitoring group.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said in a statement that several buses remained idle in neighborhoods of the stricken city, over two hours after the evacuation was due to commence.

The first group of civilians scheduled to leave is supposed to consist of 70 injured people and family members -- a total of 150 people.

Rebel fighters were also offered safe passage out of the devastated city under a ceasefire deal brokered largely by Turkey.

Morning from #Aleppo - still waiting for this rebel evacuation to happen pic.twitter.com/oBtkbqv0f8

CNN affiliate ITN, who has a reporter on the ground, has also posted on social media that no buses have left.

An ICRC official in Aleppo told CNN that the organization "is ready to help the parties to this agreement in overseeing the evacuation of civilians."

He added that they are "on standby" in case a request is made to support in the evacuation.

'Are you truly incapable of shame?'

Activists said anyone with links to the rebels who seized control of neighborhoods in 2012 was being hunted down.

"Every hour, butcheries are carried out," the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Monday.

Speaking at a UN Security Council Emergency Briefing on Syria, US ambassador Samantha Power had some scathing words for her Syrian, Iranian and Russian counterparts.

"You bear responsibility for these atrocities," she said of the plight of eastern Aleppo residents amid reports of widespread summary executions, including of women and children, by Syrian forces in formerly rebel-held areas.

"When one day there is a full accounting of the horrors committed in this assault of Aleppo -- and that day will come, sooner or later -- you will not be able to say you did not know what was happening."

The Syrian government did not comment on the killings in state-run media. CNN has not been able to verify the execution reports.

She said the actions of the three players "should shame" them.

"Three Member States of the UN contributing to a noose around civilians. It should shame you. Instead, by all appearances, it is emboldening you... Are you truly incapable of shame?"

Ban: No way to verify numbers

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said reports suggested that thousands of people remain in the city. However, he added the Syrian government had denied the UN access to independently verify the numbers.

"However, this does not mean that the reports that we are receiving are not credible," he said.

Ban said that the Russian Defense Ministry had reported that it had helped as many as 100,000 civilians to leave eastern Aleppo neighborhoods, including 40,484 children.

The ministry also claimed that it had supplied 78 tons of humanitarian assistance to displaced people, he said.

After the meeting, Staffan de Mistura, UN special envoy to Syria, said he was informed by the Russian ambassador that an agreement on Aleppo was reached, but that the UN still needs to verify the deal.

"(The agreement) is imminent, if not already taking place," he said. "It's not clear to me yet as whether they are allowed to withdraw with their light weapons, which was one of the issues which had been discussed, or without weapons."

Vitaly Churkin, Russia's ambassador to the United Nations, told the UN Security Council Tuesday that the Syrian government has established control over eastern Aleppo.

"Over the last hour we've received information that the military activities in east Aleppo have stopped," Churkin said.

Aleppo Media Center posted to its Facebook page on Tuesday that a ceasefire had been announced in the city "in preparation for the evacuation of civilians from besieged areas through safe passages."

The ceasefire and evacuation agreement was reached with "Turkish mediation," a commander in the Islamist rebel group Ahrar al-Sham told CNN.

Hospital director: People can't even bury the dead

Al-Quds Hospital Director Dr. Hamza al-Khatib told CNN's Christiane Amanpour that the regime has committed "a lot of executions." Even children get slaughtered, he said -- especially if they come from families that have opposed Assad's government.

"People are scared to go out in the street. Dead bodies haven't been taken to the graveyard to be buried," he said.

"A lot of people are scared to go to graveyards to bury their own family members. A lot of dead bodies are in front of the hospital. And no one can come here to take them to get buried."

He said that for some, even death is more welcome than life under Assad rule.

"A lot of neighborhoods have fallen down, and now it's under the regime control," he said Tuesday. "Now we only have left six neighborhoods. We are very afraid that all of us may be arrested or killed. Actually, most of the people wish that they may be killed (by) shelling rather than being arrested and captured and Assad (is) president."

The Turkish Foreign Affairs Ministry confirmed that talks between rebels in eastern Aleppo and the Russian military led to the ceasefire deal. Under the agreement, civilians and then opposition fighters will evacuate to nearby Idlib, the ministry said.

There has been no confirmation of a cessation of hostilities or an evacuation agreement by Syrian state media.

The UN Security Council held an emergency meeting Tuesday to address the situation.

Rebel groups held eastern Aleppo for more than four years after the Arab Spring uprising and a Syrian regime siege on the area had essentially cut it off from the outside world, sparking a humanitarian crisis there.

Thousands were fleeing Monday as bombs continued to fall on the remaining rebel-held areas of the city.

The Assad regime was already in control of western Aleppo and in just over two weeks has taken most if not all of the east. Seizing the whole of Aleppo would put the government in control of Syria's five major cities, marking a turning point in the war. </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 — As Syrian forces poised for the final sweep to take the last rebel holdouts in eastern Aleppo on Tuesday, world leaders and aid agencies issued dramatic appeals that the lives of thousands of civilians who have "nowhere safe to run" be spared and that government troops fighting to capture what's left of the rebel enclave refrain from atrocities.

The U.N.'s human rights office said it has received reports of pro-government forces killing at least 82 civilians in four neighborhoods of the increasingly-shrinking rebel enclave, including 11 women and 13 children.

Spokesman Rupert Colville said the reports recount pro-government forces entering homes and killing some civilians "on the spot" in the former rebel enclave. Speaking to reporters in Geneva, he said the reports came in late the previous evening and that he doesn't know exactly when the killings took place.

The reports, which could not be independently confirmed, reinforce concerns of mass casualties in eastern Aleppo in the final hours of the battle for the city, which has been split into a rebel and government-held part since 2012.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said in a statement late Monday that he is alarmed over reports of "atrocities" against a large number of civilians, including women and children, in the past hours in Aleppo. While stressing that the United Nations is not able to independently verify these reports, the U.N. chief said he conveyed his grave concern to the relevant parties.

Several residents and opposition activists have told The Associated Press that government forces were carrying out summary killings of rebels in the streets in neighborhoods captured on Monday, but the Syrian military flatly denied the claims, saying such allegations were "a desperate attempt" to try gain international sympathy.

Mohammed Abu Rajab, the administrator of the last remaining clinic in rebel-held parts of the city, said people killed and wounded are left on the streets.

Rami Abdurrahman of the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said hundreds of bodies are still under the rubble.

A press release by the U.N. human rights office in Geneva said that multiple sources have reports that tens of civilians were shot dead on Monday in al-Ahrar Square in Kallaseh neighborhood, and also in Bustan al-Qasr, by government forces and their allies, including allegedly the Iraqi Shiite militia known as al-Nujabaa.

The dramatic appeals for sparing civilian lives came a day after the Syrian military announced it now holds 99 percent of the former rebel neighborhoods of Aleppo, signaling an impending end to the rebels' four-year hold over parts of the city.

Retaking Aleppo would be President Bashar Assad's biggest victory yet in the country's civil war. Aleppo has long been regarded as a major gateway between Turkey and Syria.

But a government win in Aleppo does not end the conflict — significant parts of Syria are still outside government control and huge swaths of the country are a devastated waste-land. More than a quarter of a million people have been killed.

The International Committee of the Red Cross also on Tuesday urged all fighting in Aleppo to spare civilian lives. It said that thousands of people in eastern Aleppo with no part in the violence "have literally nowhere safe to run."

"In order for this to happen, we appeal to the parties to put humanity ahead of military objectives", said ICRC's head of delegation in Syria, Marianne Gasser, who is currently in Aleppo. "We stand ready to oversee the implementation of any mutual agreement that puts civilians first. We cannot urge this strongly enough: this must happen."

In Moscow, which has been Assad's major ally in the war, the Defense Ministry said Tuesday that rebels are holding out a neighborhood roughly the size of 3 square kilometers (1.16 square miles).

Turkey's Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus' called for an immediate cease-fire and if that is too late, he called on the international community, European countries, regional countries and Turkey to organize an international aid convoy to people in need in Aleppo.

French President Francois Hollande pressed for Russia to facilitate humanitarian aid to civilians trapped in rebel-held parts of the city, saying the Aleppo "humanitarian situation ... is unacceptable."

The French leader said 120,000 people were being "held hostage, there is no other word for it — who are victims of bombing, who are victims of repression" in Aleppo and that everything must be done to allow the population's evacuation.

"Without the Russians, there is no Syrian regime that can carry out operations" on the scale of what is happening in Aleppo, Hollande added, saying that the Russians "will be responsible for a situation that they helped create if they do nothing to allow access for humanitarian aid." </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> Up to 20,000 people have fled eastern Aleppo over the past 72 hours as Syrian government forces continued to advance in the rebel-held part of the city, according to the Red Cross.

Terrified civilians have fled empty-handed into remaining rebel-held territory, or crossed into government-controlled western Aleppo or Kurdish-held districts.

The 20,000 figure is an estimate and could increase as "people are fleeing in different directions", International Committee of the Red Cross spokesperson Krista Armstrong told the AFP news agency.

United Nations humanitarian chief Stephen O'Brien had earlier put the number of displaced people from eastern Aleppo at 16,000.

The city, which was Syria's biggest before the start of a civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people, has been divided between the government-held west and rebel-held east, where UN officials say at least 250,000 people remain under siege.

The Syrian government offensive to recapture the rebel-held parts of Aleppo has sparked international alarm as it intensified this week.

A voluntary rescue group known as the White Helmets reported at least 51 civilians killed in east Aleppo and more than 150 injured during the government assault.

Syrian government forces dropped "more than 150 air strikes from war planes and helicopters and [fired] more than 1,200 artillery shells", the group wrote on its Facebook page.

The attacks hit the neighbourhoods of Bab al-Nairab, al-Mayser and al-Salheen, among others.

SANA, the official Syrian state media arm, reported that Syrian government forces and allies on Monday took control of several areas in the city's northeast, including al-Haidariya, al-Sakhour, al-Inzarat, al-Sheikh Khedr, Jabal Badro, and al-Halk.



France called for an immediate UN Security Council session on the fighting, which has seen the army capture a third of opposition-controlled east Aleppo in recent days.

The UN Security Council will hold an emergency meeting on Wednesday on the dire humanitarian crisis unfolding in Aleppo, diplomats said.

The 15 ambassadors of the UN Security Council will get a video-conference briefing on the situation in Aleppo by a UN official in charge of humanitarian operation and the UN mediator in Syria, Staffan de Mistura.

"France and its partners cannot remain silent in the face of what could be one of the biggest massacres of civilian population since World War II," said France's UN ambassador Francois Delattre on Tuesday.

He and his British counterpart Matthew Rycroft earlier in the day pushed for the emergency council meeting on providing humanitarian relief to the besieged Syrian city.

Eastern Aleppo has been under government siege for more than four months, with international aid stocks exhausted and food supplies running low.

Rycroft said the council would discuss plans for the UN to deliver much-needed food and medicine into Aleppo and evacuate the sick and wounded.

"Russia complained that the opposition had not agreed to this plan. Now they have, so I call on Russia to make sure the Syrian regime agrees," Rycroft said.

"The future of Aleppo is in the hands of the regime and Russia, and we urge the regime and Russia to stop the bombing and let the aid go through."

The Syrian conflict started as a largely unarmed uprising against President Bashar al-Assad's rule in March 2011. It has since morphed into a full-on civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands.

The UN refugee agency has registered more than 4.8 million Syrian refugees who have fled the fighting, while another 6.1 million people are internally displaced within the country's borders. </s> “What is happening today is the writing of a history written by every Syrian citizen.” 



Over 3000 people have been evacuated in buses and ambulances from the rebel-held war-torn city of Aleppo in Syria following a ceasefire deal that will end almost six years of fighting in the city and marks a major victory for Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad.

The evacuation is a result of the desperate pleas from Aleppo residents and reports of the abuse and atrocities they have been suffering, as well as days of intense bombing of houses and apartment buildings, killing so many that it was impossible to determine the death toll.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), who is overseeing the evacuation, says the full evacuation of civilians and rebels is likely to take several days. The head of the ICRC painted a devastating picture of the situation before the evacuation.

“A crane was used to remove some of the debris from the street so the ambulances and buses could get through. There were burnt cars. Smoke rising from nearby buildings. There was a lot of fear and uncertainty,” she explained.

“When we arrived, the scene was heart-breaking. People are faced with impossible choices. You see their eyes filled with sadness.”

While people are happy to be leaving the city and be safe, there is a lot of sadness around leaving their homes behind. An journalist reported seeing the words “one day we will return” written on the dusty window of one of the evacuation buses.

United Nations special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, said around 50,000 people remain in Aleppo, and 10,000 of those will be evacuated to the nearby province of Idlib, and the rest will be moved to other government-held districts.

In a video message, President Assad said history was being made.

“What is happening today is the writing of a history written by every Syrian citizen. The writing did not start today, it started six years ago when the crisis and war started against Syria.”

The ceasefire comes after a week of assaults from the Syrian government and its ally, Russia. Journalist Zouhir Al Shimale, who is in east Aleppo, said hundreds of families gathered at the departure point for the buses.

“Civilians are given the choice to stay or leave. If they stay, they’ll be under regime control. Most of the people want to go because they are afraid of potential massacres by the regime,” Shimale said.

“In recent days, people are desperate to get to somewhere where we have the supplies – food, medicine, fuel – like we used to have in the days before the siege. Even if they are in refugee camps, people still want to leave the besieged area.”

The ceasefire does not signify an end to the war in Syria, and despite losing ground in Aleppo, the rebels still control large areas of Syria, and so does the Islamic State.

Comment: What is your opinion on the Syrian war? </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.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claims that nearly ten thousand civilians have fled Aleppo in the past day.