Syria announces Yarmouk camp evacuation agreement


READ MORE

The Syrian government has reached an evacuation deal with fighters from Hay’et Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) to leave the Yarmouk refugee camp in southern Damascus.


The official SANA news agency announced on Monday that the fighters and their families, numbering about 5,000, would be evacuated in two stages, the first of which would see 1,500 people transported to the rebel-controlled Idlib province in northwestern Syria.


The deal is part of a wider agreement between HTS, formerly Al-Nusra Front, al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria, and President Bashar al-Assad’s government to surrender heavy and medium military hardware.


Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr, reporting from Beirut, said the rebel group had to concede to government demands of releasing prisoners and allowing thousands of Syrians from the besieged loyalist towns of Kefraya and Fouaa to head for government-controlled territory.



“Pro-government forces have long wanted to fully evacuate the predominately Shia towns because that would deny the rebels the ability to pressure Damascus by threatening to target them,” she said.


SANA reported that these include 85 prisoners, “mostly women, children and elderly”, from the rebel-controlled town of Eshtabraq.


Buses to transport the rebels and their relatives have already begun gathering around the southern Damascus camp at around midnight, local news media reported.


Winning streak


Kadr said this was the fourth such agreement in recent weeks and constituted another important win for government forces and their allies.


“Rebels have already surrendered Eastern Ghouta, which was their main stronghold close to the capital, and a pocket of territory in the Qalamoun region, northeast of Damascus,” she said.


“In a few days, rebel factions linked to the Free Syrian Army are expected to hand over the districts of Babbila, Beit Sahm and Yalda in southern Damascus in order to stave off a military operation”.


This nevertheless falls short of securing the entirety of southern Damascus, with a few pockets of territory still under control of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group.


Government forces have been involved in a two-week-long offensive to recapture the territory, but ISIL units have put up fierce resistance in areas where heavy weapons have proven to be of limited use.


Article source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/gmo-apple-canada-1.3943058?cmp=rss


Best Wordpress Plugin development company in India     Best Web development company in India

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Canadian expected to be aboard Russia's 1st manned space mission since rocket failure

READ MORE The first manned mission to the International Space Station since a Russian rocket failed to launch successfully earlier this month may take off on Dec. 3, space agency Roscosmos said on Wednesday. And the crew is expected to include Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques, Agence France-Press reported. A Russian cosmonaut and U.S. astronaut were forced to abort their mission on Oct. 11 and perform an emergency landing after a launch accident that Roscomos said was caused by a faulty sensor. The accident was the first serious launch problem experienced by a manned Soyuz space mission since 1983, when a crew narrowly escaped before a launch pad explosion. Sergei Krikalyov, a senior Roscosmos official, was quoted by state news agency Tass as saying the next manned launch had been planned for mid-December, but that Russia was trying to bring the date forward so that the ISS is not briefly left without a crew. “The industry is making significant efforts to move the launch t...
Read more

Getting the dope on pot stocks is becoming easier as media groups invest in content: Don Pittis

Image
READ MORE “What’s the buzz? Tell me what’s happening,” goes the ’70s rock anthem. Part of the catchiness of the lyric — from the rock musical Jesus Christ Superstar  — was that in that era the term “buzz” had developed a second spicy meaning. It described the high that people got from smoking cannabis. In the 1970s, the magazine High Times was a brand new title keeping an eye on the illegal but growing business of marijuana pricing and sales. It ran centrefolds of glistening pot plants and of an apartment filled to the windows with what the magazine insisted was an entire ton of cannabis. Now some of Canada’s most staid media voices are looking for ways to go toe to toe with High Times and its U.S. competitors, hoping to profit from Canada’s global head start in legal recreational cannabis. But when it comes to making a killing from spreading the buzz on the cannabis biz, to q...
Read more

Toronto man denies conspiring with Marvel CEO in alleged hate mail scheme

Image
READ MORE A Toronto man accused of conspiring with the head of Marvel Entertainment in a bizarre hate mail campaign against his wealthy former employer has denied any role in the alleged scheme. David Smith, along with Marvel CEO Isaac (Ike) Perlmutter, is the target of a slander lawsuit launched earlier this year by Canadian businessman Harold Peerenboom. Now Smith — a former employee of Peerenboom’s Toronto-based executive search firm, Mandrake Management — has filed a motion to dismiss the U.S. civil suit. It’s the latest development in the years-long legal battle between Peerenboom and Perlmutter, a notoriously reclusive American billionaire and personal friend of U.S. President Donald Trump. The hate mail campaign, which ran   between 2012 to 2015, saw anonymous letters falsely accusing Peerenboom of being a child molester, murderer and anti-Semite...
Read more