BEIRUT – Islamist fighters burned buses sent to evacuate hundreds of wounded people from two Shiite government-held villages in northern Syria on Sunday in what a U.N. official described as a “cowardly terrorist attack.”
Video footage from the northwestern province of Idlib showed smoke and fire billowing from a convoy of repurposed school buses as militants shouted sectarian slurs.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group based in Britain, said the vehicles had been traveling to Fouaa and Kefraya, two besieged government-held villages that have taken on great symbolic importance to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his Iranian backers.
“You pigs are here to help Shiites. You won’t leave alive,” a man is heard saying off camera in one of the video clips. Although the identity of the attackers was not clear, reports suggested that they had the backing of Jabhat Fatah al-Sham, an al-Qaida-linked Sunni group with significant influence in Idlib.
Tehran has demanded that the area be evacuated as part of a broader deal that will allow thousands of people to leave what remains of the rebel-held eastern neighborhoods of the city of Aleppo, where conditions are so desperate that aid workers said they had seen nothing comparable in all their years of humanitarian efforts.
“Cowardly terrorist attack on civilian busses & killing driver must not end evacuations,” Jan Egeland, a humanitarian adviser to the United Nations, said Sunday in a tweet.
In eastern Aleppo, civilians are awaiting evacuation in near-freezing temperatures. The rebels’ territory has been reduced to a pinprick after government forces swept in this month, backed by heavy bombing raids.
As the U.N. Security Council prepared to meet Sunday, Assad ally Russia said it would veto a resolution demanding immediate and unconditional access for international observers to ensure that residents remain safe as they flee.
“We cannot allow it to pass because this is a disaster,” said Vitaly Churkin, Moscow’s ambassador to the United Nations.
France’s envoy, François Delattre, said the resolution had been tabled to avoid “mass atrocities” by pro-government forces.
Without the presence of international observers, many residents of eastern Aleppo say, they fear leaving as much as staying. On Friday, a bus carrying hundreds of evacuees was held up by pro-government militia fighters who were later accused of ordering dozens of people off the bus and then stripping, robbing and reportedly even killing several among the group.
“Tell me, what do we do, what choices do we have?” said Ahmed al-Mashadi, an engineer in east Aleppo. “If we leave, we risk death or humiliation in front of the people we love. But if we stay here? That is death, too.”
![[REUTERS]](https://breaking911.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/proxy-3.jpg)
When rebels seized eastern Aleppo in 2012, they had hoped to create a seat of power to rival the Syrian capital, Damascus. Four years on, its recapture by government forces has accelerated the demise of the armed opposition, which will be boxed inside Idlib without any strategic urban centers under its control.
(c) 2016, The Washington Post · Louisa Loveluck
