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These Before-And-After Photos Of Aleppo Post Civil War Are Devastating

Diplomats said the Security Council vote would take place on Monday.

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Last week Syrian opposition forces in eastern Aleppo reached a cease-fire deal with President Bashar al-Assad’s forces to evacuate civilians from the city.

Foua and Kefraya, north of Idlib, have been besieged by rebels for years.

The latest evacuation came hours after 350 people was able to leave east Aleppo late on Sunday, a medical official said, though evacuations were officially postponed at that time.

But Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group fighting alongside Syria’s government, said the blaze started during fighting between the jihadist Fatah al-Sham and another Islamist rebel group that supported the evacuations.

“Now France comes in and says that they’re actually on top of it all and they’re showing the right way to do things on the ground”, he said.

Evacuations were suspend from eastern Aleppo Friday by the government in Damascus as rebel groups, worldwide organizations and the Assad regime traded accusations about who was to blame.

Earlier, a number of buses meant to evacuate the fighters and their families were sent to eastern Aleppo as part of the deal to evacuate people from the rebel-held sector, in return for the evacuation of people from Al-Fua and Kefraya, two Shia-majority villages in Idlib province.

But a convoy of buses heading to the villages on Sunday was attacked in rebel territory.

He said thousands of people had been evacuated from eastern Aleppo overnight with the help of United Nations agencies, the Red Cross and the Red Crescent, including 194 patients who were moved into hospitals in other parts of Syria and Turkey.

“In a first step, half of the people besieged in Aleppo will leave, in parallel with the evacuation of 1,250 people from Fuaa”, the rebel representative said on condition of anonymity.

The UN Security Council is expected to vote overnight on sending observers to Aleppo to monitor the evacuations.

Diplomats said Russian Federation had circulated a draft resolution to address the humanitarian crisis in Aleppo during a closed-door meeting on Sunday ahead of a planned vote on the French-proposed draft.

Diplomats of United States and France warned on Friday that if the idea of the resolution fails to find support in the UN Security Council they will call for holding an extraordinary special session of the UN General Assembly. “We can not allow it to pass because this is a disaster”. Dozens of vehicles were on standby at the Ramouseh crossing point near Aleppo on Sunday morning.

Iran’s official news agency IRNA said the foreign ministers of Russia, Turkey and Iran would meet Tuesday in Moscow to discuss the situation.

Many had spent the night sleeping in the streets in freezing temperatures. [We] are here without food, water or even going to the toilet.

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Aleppo has seen some of the worst violence of the almost six-year war that has killed more than 310,000 people.

A bus drives through the Syrian government-controlled crossing of Ramoussa on the southern outskirts of Aleppo on December 18 during an evacuation operation of rebel fighters and civilians from rebel-held areas