As thousands of people fled from one town in Syria’s besieged Eastern Ghouta area into the capital on Thursday, civilians in another part of the enclave were prevented from escaping by rebel forces, an official on the ground told CNN.
Eastern Ghouta, a suburb on the edge of the capital Damascus, is one of the last major rebel-held areas in Syria. A brutal military onslaught there has left more than 1,000 dead since mid-February.
At least 10,000 people flooded out of the town of Hamoriya on Thursday and into government-controlled parts of Damascus, one of the largest single-day exoduses of the war, which entered its eighth year on Thursday.
Images on state TV showed hundreds of people carrying their belongings out the enclave on foot and in the back of pickup trucks. Soldiers were seen in the footage, but there were no signs of local or international aid groups. The Red Cross told CNN they were not involved in the exodus.
But some residents in Douma, the largest town in Eastern Ghouta, were barred from leaving by rebels despite begging international aid groups for help, an official who was on the ground in Douma on Thursday told CNN.
“What I can tell you also from [Thursday] … is many people want to go out,” said the official, who spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity.
The source witnessed first-hand an encounter between a woman slated to be medically evacuated with her family, members of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent tasked with escorting the family out of Douma, and rebel fighters.
Members of the rebel group ordered the woman’s 16-year-old son to stay behind.
“I saw the discussion between the group inside and SARC (the Syrian Arab Red Crescent) and the woman who was begging to get her little son out of the area. They didn’t accept that,” the source said.
“She was completely desperate and she wanted to take her son out, but they didn’t let her go, and SARC couldn’t do anything about it … they have to get approval of the groups who are inside,” the source added.
The entire family, which included a blind girl and an ill older man, were to be escorted by the SARC out of the enclave. SARC medical evacuations are meant to include not only the sick and wounded, but also their immediate family members.
SARC did not immediately respond to CNN’s request for comment.
Russia, one of Syria’s key allies, ordered the opening of a humanitarian corridor in Douma last month to allow civilians to leave rebel-held parts of Eastern Ghouta. But the official who spoke to CNN says no one would “dare to leave” through that corridor — which is separate from the route thousands took out of Hamoriya yesterday — without a humanitarian escort.
The Syrian regime and rebel fighters have accused each other of shelling the roughly five-kilometer-long passage leading from Eastern Ghouta to relative safety in government-held areas of the capital.
Given the dangers of using the corridor without an escort, the only hope for residents is to be put on a medical evacuation list — which already has more than 1,000 names — and to be accompanied out by the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, the source and an analyst said.
“Some of the armed groups do actively prevent people leaving from Eastern Ghouta,” Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, told CNN.
“The fighters who are obviously holed up in a corner are using all means at their disposal, including preventing civilians from leaving them to defend their position. You could argue that it’s a form of human shields.”
Doyle, who says he regularly speaks to residents in Eastern Ghouta, said rebel groups and government forces were both to blame for the suffering of the people there.
“The civilians in Ghouta are very much trapped between two sides,” Doyle said.
Eastern Ghouta has been under siege since 2012, but the Syrian military has advanced steadily through the area over the past month, starting with villages and towns in the east before splitting the rebel-held areas of the suburb into three parts last week.
The offensive has been carried out with the support of Russia and in defiance of a United Nations call for a ceasefire.
Observers say it is now only a matter of time before the regime takes control of the entire enclave.