Thread: At least 100 killed after car bomb explodes near buses carrying Syrian evacuees

April 15, 2017, 1:20 PM

At least 100 killed after car bomb explodes near buses carrying Syrian evacuees

This frame grab from video provided by the Thiqa News Agency, shows rebel gunmen at the site of a blast that damaged several buses carrying evacuees, at the Rashideen area, a rebel-controlled district outside Aleppo city, Syria, Saturday, April. 15, 2017.

AP

Last Updated Apr 15, 2017 2:14 PM EDT

BEIRUT -- The Syrian opposition rescue service said at least 100 people were killed Saturday in an explosion that hit near buses carrying people evacuated from a besieged area controlled by government loyalists.

The explosion was caused by a car bomb in the area controlled by opposition fighters outside the city of Aleppo.

In footage aired on Syrian TV, bodies, including fighters, were seen lying alongside buses, some of which were charred and others gutted from the blast. Personal belongings could be seen dangling out of the windows. The state TV channel said the car was carrying food aid but a rebel spokesman said the car had been parked in the area and abandoned.

This image released by the Thiqa News Agency, shows charred and damaged cars at the scene of an explosion in the Rashideen area, a rebel-controlled district outside Aleppo city, Syria, Saturday, April. 15, 2017.
UNCREDITED, AP

The explosion hit the Rashideen area, a rebel-controlled district outside Aleppo city where evacuation buses carrying nearly 5,000 people from the northern rebel-besieged villages of Foua and Kfraya were stuck, causing a huge plume of black smoke. Residents from the two villages had been evacuated Friday, along with more than 2,000 from Madaya, an opposition-held town outside of Damascus besieged by government forces.

A senior rebel leader said 20 fighters who guarded the buses were killed as well as dozens of passengers. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

Yasser Abdellatif, a member of the powerful Ahrar al-Sham group which negotiated the deal, said at least 30 rebels were killed in the explosion.

The explosion came as frustration was already mounting over the stalling evacuation process. Thousands of evacuees from the pro-government and opposition areas were stuck on opposite sides of the edge of Aleppo city as rebels and government officials bickered over the terms for evacuating fighters.

Prior to the blast, Syrian Red Crescent teams had distributed meals to the restless evacuees, caught in limbo after having left their homes over 30 hours earlier. Many were already voicing their dissatisfaction with the wait.

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“The people are restless and the situation is disastrous,” said Ahmed Afandar, a resident evacuated from his the opposition area near Madaya. “All these thousands of people are stuck in less than half a kilometer (500 yards).” He said the area was walled off from all sides and there were no restrooms.

Afandar said people were not allowed to leave the buses for a while before they were let out. Food was distributed after several hours and by early afternoon the evacuees from rebel-held areas were “pressured” to sit back on their buses, Afandar said.

“We are not moving forward or backward,” he said. The evacuees from Madaya were expected to head to rebel-held Idlib, west of Aleppo.

Syrian state TV blamed the rebels for obstructing the deal, causing thousands of evacuees to be stuck in bus depots overnight.

Salloum Salloum, a lawmaker speaking on the pro-government al-Ikhbariya TV channel, said efforts were underway to resolve the problem, accusing the rebels of adding new conditions to the deal.

An opposition representative, Ali Diab, told the pan-Arab Al-Arabiya TV that fewer armed men than agreed to were evacuated from the pro-government areas, violating the terms of the agreement.

A resident of Zabadani, another rebel-held town to be evacuated, Amer Burhan says no evacuation had even taken place from there.

The population transfer deal has been criticized by opponents as forced displacement and was not overseen by the United Nations.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/dozens-k...rian-evacuees/

assad is absolutely worthless, even with his russian backing. Same goes for the afghanistan rouse. Seems to be another ongoing agenda to kill off their overpopulation & spread inbred & violent muslims to the civilized west, have us pay for their existence and cont'd overbreeding due "to ongoing wars". One man, 24 children with inbred genes & low IQs. Do we need to think that over?

Send them all back to their homelands and let them figure it all out for themselves as they have done for centuries. If none are here, or traveling back & forth, brought in as "refugees" to supply cheap labor &/or living on our $$$$, we would not have the worries of backpack bombers, run away vans, etc. We would be happy to have advise available, even some funding to help their nations BUT keep us separate & out of their wars. You cannot change people of other nations - don't even try.

The UN needs to be disbanded as a covert operation to spread islam @ the world thru a "so called refugee" mandate program..

"The population transfer deal has been criticized by opponents as forced displacement and was not overseen by the United Nations"

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Well...do NOT displace them or FORCE them on the United States. We do not want any of them. Their men need to go back and fight and take back their own country.

Syria population transfer begins with exchange of prisoners

Published April 12, 2017 Associated Press

• This photo provided by the government-controlled Syrian Central Military Media, shows buses gathered before a planned evacuation of residents in Madaya and Zabadani, two opposition-held areas near Damascus, Syria, Wednesday, April.12, 2017. As part of the planned evacuation deal of the besieged areas in different parts of the country, Syria's government and rebels exchanged some 30 prisoners and nine bodies, activists and officials said Wednesday. (Syrian Central Military Media, via AP) (The Associated Press)
  

BEIRUT – A Syrian official and an opposition monitoring group say the government and rebels have exchanged 30 prisoners and nine bodies, part of an agreement to evacuate four besieged areas in different parts of the country.

Hakim Baghdad, a member of the relief committee for two rebel-besieged villages in northwestern Syria, said Wednesday the overnight release was overseen by the Syrian Arab Red Crescent. The Red Crescent had no immediate comment.

Military-run media said rebels released eight women, four children and eight bodies. Pro-government militias freed 19 gunmen and released one body.

The exchange came as part of a deal to evacuate over 10,000 residents from two opposition-held areas near Damascus and the two villages in northern Syria, an agreement that critics say amounts to forced displacement.

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/04...prisoners.html

Syrian Arab Red Crescent -

sarc.sy/
The Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) is a neutral humanitarian organization that always respects the Geneva Conventions, and is concerned with humans and their needs. It is tasked with humanitarian basic requirements and its functions increase in times of crises, wars and disasters, when needs are multifold.‎
Be a Volunteer · ‎The Movement 7 Principles · ‎Careers · ‎Aleppo

Death toll from Syrian bus bombing rises to 126; includes 68 children

The death toll in a bombing of a bus convoy carrying evacuees from Syrian government-held territory has risen, said a monitor. The transfers are part of a massive relocation of people along political and sectarian lines.

Watch video00:29

Death toll rises in Syria evacuee bombing

The death toll from Saturday's bus bombing in Syria has risen to 126, and includes 68 children.

The attack struck a bus convoy carrying residents from the northern towns of Fuaa and Kafraya as they waited at a transit point in rebel-held Rashidin, west of Aleppo.

At least 109 of the dead were evacuees, according to the British-based monitoring group, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Watch video01:51

Syria explosion kills scores of civilians

The evacuations are part of a broader relocation agreement between the Syrian regime and rebel forces involving thousands of people. The large numbers and ethnic make-up of those being relocated appears to represent a new phase of the six-year old civil war that has claimed nearly 350,000 lives.

Critics of the latest relocations say the string of evacuations, which could see some 30,000 people moved across battle lines over the next two months, amounts to forced displacement along political and sectarian lines.

On Sunday, a day after the gruesome bus attack, body parts and the belongings of evacuees - including clothes, dishes and even televisions - remained strewn about the scene of the attack.

The shattered buses were nearby as was the shell of a pick-up truck that was apparently used to carry out the bombing.

No claim of responsibility

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack and the key Ahrar al-Sham rebel group denied any involvement. The government blamed "terrorists" - a term it uses generally to refer to all of its opponents.

Watch video01:46

Pope urges end to Syria 'horror' in Easter message

The Observatory, which relies on a network of sources inside Syria to monitor the conflict, said hundreds more people were wounded in the blast.

It said a petrol station at the transit point was consumed in the explosion, adding to the number of victims.

The Syrian Red Crescent said three of its workers were among the wounded.

Maysa al-Aswad, a 30-year-old evacuee from Kafraya, told news agency AFP that she was sitting on one bus with her six-month-old son Hadi and 10-year-old daughter Narjis when the blast shook the parked convoy.

"Hadi was on my lap and Narjis on a chair next to me. When the explosion happened I hugged them both and we fell to the floor," she said. "I didn't know what was happening, all I could hear was people crying and shouting."

She added, "All I can think about is how we survived all the death during the last few years and then could have died just after we finally escaped."

bik/rs (AFP, AP, dpa, Reuters)

http://www.dw.com/en/death-toll-from...ren/a-38448190

Mass evacuation in Syria to proceed after blast kill 68 kids


BASSEM MROUE
•Associated Press April 16, 2017

• 
• 
• 

This frame grab from video provided by the Thiqa News Agency, shows buses damaged by a blast at the Rashideen area, a rebel-controlled district outside Aleppo city, Syria, Saturday, April. 15, 2017. Syrian TV said at least 39 people were killed Saturday in an explosion that hit near buses carrying evacuees from two towns besieged by rebels nearby. (Thiqa News via AP)


BEIRUT (AP) — More than 3,000 Syrians were expected to be evacuated Sunday from four areas as part of a population transfer that was briefly stalled a day earlier by a deadly blast that killed more than 120 people, many of them government supporters.

As the evacuations were expected to begin Sunday, shells fired by the Islamic State group on government-held parts of the eastern city of Deir el-Zour wounded two members of a Russian media delegation visiting the area, according to state-run Syrian news agency SANA. Russia is a main backer of Syrian President Bashar Assad and Russian journalists enjoy wide access in government-held parts of the country.

The United Nations is not overseeing the transfer deal, which involves residents of the pro-government villages of Foua and Kfarya and the opposition-held towns of Madaya and Zabadani. All four have been under siege for years, their fate linked through a series of reciprocal agreements that the U.N. says have hindered aid deliveries.

Rami Abdurrahman, who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, and Hezbollah's Al-Manar TV said 3,000 people will be evacuated from Foua and Kfarya, while 200, the vast majority of them fighters, will be evacuated from Zabadani and Madaya.

Abdurrahman said Saturday's blast —which hit an area where thousands of pro-government evacuees had been waiting for hours — killed 126. He said the dead included 109 people from Foua and Kfarya, among them 80 children and 13 women.

No one has claimed the attack, but both the Islamic State group and the al-Qaida-affiliated Fatah al-Sham Front have targeted civilians in government areas in the past.

A wounded girl, who said she lost her siblings in the blast, told Al-Manar TV from her hospital bed that children who had been deprived of food for years in the two villages were approached by a man in the car who told them to come and eat potato chips. She said once many had gathered, there was an explosion that tore some of the children to pieces.

After the blast, some 60 buses carrying 2,200 people, including 400 opposition fighters, entered areas held by rebels in the northern province of Aleppo, Abdurrahman said. More than 50 buses and 20 ambulances carrying some 5,000 Foua and Kfarya residents entered the government-held city of Aleppo, Syrian state TV said, with some of them later reaching a shelter in the village of Jibreen to the south.

U.N. relief coordinator Stephen O'Brien said he was "horrified" by the deadly bombing, and that while the U.N. was not involved in the transfer it was ready to "scale up our support to evacuees."

He called on all parties to uphold their obligations under international humanitarian and human rights law, and to "facilitate safe and unimpeded access for the U.N. and its partners to bring life-saving help to those in need."

Residents of Madaya and Zabadani, formerly summer resorts, joined the 2011 uprising against President Bashar Assad. Both came under government siege in the ensuing civil war. Residents of Foua and Kfraya, besieged by the rebels, have lived under a steady hail of rockets and mortars for years, but were supplied with food and medicine through military airdrops.

Critics say the string of evacuations, which could see some 30,000 people moved across battle lines over the next 60 days, amounts to forced displacement along political and sectarian lines.

In eastern Syria, an airstrike by the U.S.-led coalition on the village of Sukkarieh near the border with Iraq killed eight civilians who had earlier fled violence in the northern province of Aleppo, according to Deir Ezzor 24, an activist collective, and Sound and Picture Organization, which documents IS violations.

Airstrikes by the U.S.-led coalition had killed dozens of civilians over the past several weeks as the battle against the extremists intensifies in Syria and Iraq.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/thousands...095248820.html

Sorry, but I cannot tolerate this backward middle eastern muslim crap - they have "wars" to keep their overbreeding inbred populations down - ongoing for centuries and we need to let them do that w/o interference or loss of our precious people.

We need to go back to every foreigner needs a visa to enter our country with a traceable system as Europe is inundated with radicals born on their soil & they do not need visas to enter USA; visa holders overstay too. No one else enters and all w/o proper papers, get out now before we throw you out. Case closed - no judges nothing - no papers = no permission to be here.

We are a country with laws & borders. As long as there are nutcases driving vans into people, bombing buses, etc, we will keep our borders safe by necessary precautions. Forget @ all the "rights" of foreigners, forget @ " economic refugees" - their own countries will have to care for them - would rather donate monies than have them here with their TB, STDs, unbalanced brains.

Americans have rights that are over & above all this speech from illegals, their American traitor jerk lawyers & the imported influx mandated by the muslim run UN! That would stand up in an American court of law. We the citizens trump illegals, refugees & politicians that we are feeding by our $$$ dollars!!

Cursed be bush/cheyney war profiteers for getting us involved with boots on the ground there. They could have prevented 911 too but then they would not have made their profits from the iraq war. Curse obama for paying people $600 ea to find soldiers that turned out to be isis recruiting we payed for. When you repeat the same nonsense over & over, it is insanity, incompetence, profiteering by deceit.

Originally Posted by artist

Cursed be bush/cheyney war profiteers for getting us involved with boots on the ground there. They could have prevented 911 too but then they would not have made their profits from the iraq war. Curse obama for paying people $600 ea to find soldiers that turned out to be isis recruiting we payed for. When you repeat the same nonsense over & over, it is insanity, incompetence, profiteering by deceit.

You are so right.

We do need to go a little farther back and realize our government has been in that part of the world stirring up dissent, bombing and recruiting such people since the late '50's.

We helped overthrow the government in Iran and put the 'Bloody Shah' on the throne - who murdered a lot of his own people.

We were friendly with Saddam Hussein. He was our very own 'brutal dictator' after the Shah was sent packing. I would really like to know the reason for his 'fall from grace' with the Bushes.

We helped create the folk hero status of Osama Bin Laden when the Russians were in Afghanistan.

I am not sure what kind of people we would be if we had had outsiders fomenting and financing constant war and destruction in our country. We might not be so 'civilized' ourselves.

I do agree we don't need them here - we are not equipped to handle them - especially when our government is not interested in 'handling' them - only in turning them loose on us.

Don't ever confuse "civilization" of our citizens of the USA with those from south of the border or economic migrant muslims from middle east & african countries - first of all they are highly inbred, we do have perverts but we do not allow inbreeding, WE DO NOT PRODUCE NOWHERE NEAR THE NUMBERS that illegals and refugee NUTS, that are being forced upon us, do produce. As Jeff Sessions called the gang members, drug dealers, abusers of women, "filth".

I am sick to death of our country being invaded by inbred perverts that are ok with raping women, girls, children, male or female. I have no tolerance for that kind of behaviour.

It has been said that saddam ordered a hit on old man bush and therefore we have this mess and dead, injured citizen soldiers that were back drafted from our prime reserve units to go into iraq - gw is a spoiled brat! he handed the baton off after he used it all he could, to a total incompetent obama & we know the rest - everyone was incompetent that obama appointed!