The rebels who controlled Daraya belonged to two rebel groups: Ajnad al-Sham and the Martyrs of Islam, groups allied with the Army of Conquest.
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Daraya’s rebels struck the deal late on Thursday, after four years of grueling bombardment and a crippling siege by government forces that left the sprawling suburb southwest of the capital in ruins.
The suburb has been blockaded by government forces, with only one food delivery by the United Nations allowed to reach the district during the siege.
Darayya, once home to 78,000 people and thought to be the site where Paul the Apostle had his conversion on the road to Damascus, was one of the first areas near the capital to join anti-government uprisings and became a byword of the opposition to the rule of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad.
A military source, speaking on condition of anonymity, announced, “The Syrian army completely controls Daraya and has entered all of the town”.
Under the terms of the agreement, the rebel fighters were allowed to leave after giving up their heavy weapons.
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.
“A terrorist center” remains in those areas of Syria and “no one can deal with it because so-called moderate opposition groups are there”, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Maria Zakharova said in an interview the day before the talks.
Syrian Opposition and regime forces had agreed to a truce on Thursday as to evacuate the town, which the pro-regime army has besieged since 2012.
More than 3,000 people were evacuated from Syria’s Damascus suburb of Daraya Saturday, following a deal to end a four-year siege, according to a human rights group, NBC News reported.
Daraya’s local council said in an online statement that civilians will be initially taken to the town of Herjalleh in the Western Ghouta suburbs of Damascus and “will move later to places they choose”.
The deal was made between the rebels and the government, which didn’t make the United Nations happy, since they like to be the ones brokering such deals.
“The world is watching”, he said.
As NPR’s Alice Fordham tells our Newscast unit, some civilians “say they’ll flee with the fighters, because they fear the regime”. For years, government helicopters conducted a brutal aerial campaign, pounding the suburb with barrel bombs large containers packed with fuel, explosives and scraps of metal.
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Reporting from Geneva, Al Jazeera’s diplomatic editor James Bays said the Syrian government’s “starvation of surrender policy has actually worked because they have now managed to close down Daraya and remove everyone from Daraya”. It also highlights concerns over the forced displacement of members of the Sunni majority, seen by some as a government policy to strengthen its base and create a corridor made up of its minority supporters. A quarter-million people lived in the suburb before the Syrian conflict broke out in 2011.
