Opposition fighters are due to be given safe passage to the rebel-held city of Idlib, while civilians will go to government shelters in Damascus.
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Since January 2014, when the Assad regime began attacking opposition held areas with barrel bombs-old barrels filled with shrapnel and explosives-its helicopters dropped 8,940 on Daraya, according to city statistics.
As NPR’s Alice Fordham tells our Newscast unit, some civilians “say they’ll flee with the fighters, because they fear the regime”.
Daraya was the location of some of the first protests against Assad during the 2011 Arab Spring and was brutally punished ensuing crackdown that sparked the Syrian civil war as people took up arms against the regime. She said residents, already the victims of “countless war crimes”, should have the choice of staying their homes.
In June, activists said the Syrian regime pounded the besieged city with barrel bombs just hours after food aid was delivered to the area for the first time in nearly four years.
Rebels agreed to give up their positions under a deal unveiled late Thursday, yielding to the years-long pressure.
“We are being forced to leave, but our condition has deteriorated to the point of being unbearable”, he told The Associated Press from the town Thursday night, ahead of the evacuations.
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.
Syria’s army has surrounded rebels in Daraya since 2012.
Daraya was essentially cut off from normal food and water supplies in 2012 as the government tried to regain control of the opposition stronghold.
Earlier this year conditions there were so bad that, amid reports of the army burning local wheat fields, some people were reduced to eating grass and sending their children out to beg, the UN’s World Food Programme said.
Residents of the long-besieged Damascus suburb of Daraya prepared to evacuate on Friday as part of a deal seen as a major symbolic victory for the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
The evacuation is reportedly set to begin on Friday. Both the army and rebels blamed the other.
The suburb has been besieged and blockaded by government forces, with only one food delivery by the United Nations allowed to reach the district during this time.
The special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, called for assurances of protection and said any departures must be voluntary. It is the latest area to surrender to government troops following years of siege.
Meanwhile, in Geneva, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said he and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, had “achieved clarity” on a path toward restoring a truce in Syria, but details remained to be worked out. Last week Daraya’s only hospital was hit, rebels and aid workers said.
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Hamam al Sukri, a resident who had been living in a basement with his six-member family, told Reuters he found it hard to describe his feelings about the evacuation.
