The evacuation is part of deal that grants safe passage to insurgents from different rebel factions who have been fortified in Darrya for over four years when they took control of the city back in August 2012 and the Syrian army launched a wide-scale operation to force them out.
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The fighters and their families left the devastated town on buses accompanied by ambulances and Red Crescent vehicles, an AFP reporter at the scene said. In total, about 700 fighters and their families would be transfered to rebel-controlled Idlib and around 4,000 civilians would be taken to government reception centers.
Following the deal struck late Thursday, Daraya’s rebels began evacuating in government buses on Friday, a process expected to take several days.
The office of U.N. Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura issued a statement “calling for the protection of people being evacuated. and says their departure must be voluntary”.
Daraya is located just 15 minutes drive from Damascus and is even closer to the government’s Mazzeh air base. “It’s hard, but we have no choice”, he said. Since then, only one aid shipment has reached the area, according to the United Nations.
After a visit to the area in April, U.N. inspectors reported that children rarely played outside, for fear of barrel bombs dropped by the government helicopters.
The first bus with rebels and their families emerged from inside Daraya on Friday, surrounded by armed Syrian army troops.
According to the United Nations, almost 600,000 live under siege across Syria, most surrounded by government forces, although rebels and Islamists also use the tactic.
Other rebels who want to reconcile will hand over their weapons and settle their criminal records with the government.
Recently, Daraya returned under the spotlight when the people in Damascus started hearing the sounds of the renewed clashes and shelling echoing from that direction.
Daraya provided a stark example of the price of rebuffing truce overtures.
Diaa said for the last eight months Daraya has been pounded with hundreds of barrel bombs, as the government attempted to storm it.
Syria’s government denies deploying barrel bombs, but their use has been widely confirmed by outside monitors, including the United Nations, whose Security Council condemned the dropping of incendiary devices previous year.
The U.N.’s humanitarian chief Stephen O’Brien told the U.N. Security Council earlier this year that severe food shortages were forcing some people in Daraya to eat grass.
“The town is no longer inhabitable, it has been completely destroyed”, he said.
The Syrian opposition criticised the evacuation, saying that the global community had failed the people of Daraya.
In Geneva, US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met to discuss efforts to resume Syrian peace talks, with de Mistura later joining the talks.
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While Kerry said this week that technical teams from both sides were close to the end of their discussions, US officials indicated it was too early to say whether an agreement was likely.
