CROWDS in Aleppo took to the streets following the announcement of the Army General Command restoration of security and stability to the city after liberating it from terrorism and terrorists.
The citizens marched through the streets, expressing joy over the victory of the Syrian army and its allies on terrorists and expelling them from the city. Aleppo residents carried flags of the homeland and raised pictures of President Bashar al-Assad, while the mosques called to prayers and the churches tolled their bells.
Earlier, the last batch of terrorists and their families left the neighbourhoods of Al-Zibdyah, Ansari and Salah al-Din in East Aleppo. An ammunition depot and several explosive devices left behind by the terrorist organisations in al-Sukkari neighbourhood in Aleppo city exploded on Saturday, leaving two civilians dead. Thirty-three others were also reported injured in the explosions.
Four of the injured people are in critical condition, according to a source at Aleppo Police Command. The source told a SANA reporter that the explosions happened at Zaki Jumaa Basic Education School and a nearby building in al-Sukkari neighbourhood. The bombs and ammunition deport were left behind by the terrorists before they were recently forced to withdraw from the neighbourhood.
The army’s engineering units dismantled hundreds of mines and explosive devices that were planted earlier by terrorists in a number of houses, schools and infrastructure before they exited towards al-Rashideen area in the southwestern countryside of Aleppo.
Army units have found warehouses containing large quantities of ammunition and weapons in schools, institutions and service establishments in the Aleppo neighbourhood of al-Zibdiya. The reporter said that the engineering units continue to dismantle mines and improvised explosive devices in the neighbourhoods to clear them fully in preparation for the entry of technical and service workshops to restore basic services.
Terrorists deliberately planted mines and explosive devices in houses before they left in order to intimidate citizens and prevent them from returning to the liberated neighbourhoods. According to the Head of the International Mine Action Centre Igor Mikhailik ‘a workshop for production of improvised weapons’ was found in one of the local schools.
‘You saw the improvised missiles, land mines and today we found improvised antipersonnel mines with a direct casualty radius,’ Mikhailik reported from the site.
He continued: ‘Russian sappers continue to work in the eastern blocks of the city of Aleppo. First of all, we pay attention to socially important objects. We are in a school that was used as a workshop for the production of improvised weapons by militants. You saw the improvised missiles, land mines and today we found improvised antipersonnel mines with a direct casualty radius.’
Terrorist groups, deployed in Northwestern Damascus, contaminated a main source of drinking water of Damascus city and its suburb with a large volume of Mazut to revenge their defeats in the battle against the Syrian Army troops in Wadi al-Bardi region in recent days.
The terrorist contaminated the Ein al-Fijeh spring, a main source of drinking water for Damascus and its suburb, with fuel oil, a move that is seen as a blind attack on the civilian population and, hence, labelled as a war crime. Ein al-Fijeh is a village near the town of Qodsiyeh.
The Damascus City Water Supply and Sewerage Company has cut off the water supply line coming from Ein al-Fijeh and started to pump water for the city and its countryside from other sources. A security official said that this is the first time terrorists carry out such acts, adding, ‘Terrorist groups used to explode or cut off pipe lines or pumping station in the region.’
‘In reaction to the fresh operation of the Syrian army and resistance forces in mountainous region of Wadi al-Bardi, the terrorist groups have now resorted to contaminating Ein al-Fijeh water sources,’ he pointed out. The official went on to say that the Syrian army is trying to take full control of Wadi al-Bardi region in an imminent military operation to force the terrorists to surrender.
Following the liberation of Aleppo, Syrian soldiers have made a gruesome discovery while inspecting the freed city: bodies of dead children with signs of flendish tortures.
Syrian servicemen have discovered the bodies of people, including children, executed by terrorists in one of the schools in eastern Aleppo, military police prosecutor Samer Yousseff told Sputnik Arabic.
‘The bodies of the dead children and adults have traces of executions, including cut off heads and gouged out eyes,’ Yousseff said on Friday, adding that all of the bodies will undergo DNA verification at a hospital. According to preliminary information, the people were executed four to five days ago, some of them were shot at from a close distance, no more than one metre (about 3 feet), the Syrian police said.
Over 100 Syrian soldiers who had been taken hostage during the last four years were summarily executed by the two murdering terrorist groups: Nusra/Alqaeda and Fath Halab. This was confirmed by a Republican Guard officer to Al-Masdar News. The men were between the ages of 18-25 years.
When the Syrian Army high command was negotiating with the terrorists over how they would be evacuated, the army insisted as a condition that the soldiers be released. The terrorists averred that they had no such hostages and, when they saw they could not smuggle the hostages out, decided to put them to death instead.
The so-called ‘Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham’ (ISIS) transferred a large number of fighters from Al-Bab City in eastern Aleppo to the Deir Ezzor Governorate, a military source informed Al-Masdar on Saturday morning. ISIS is expected to launch a massive offensive in the Deir Ezzor Governorate to kick-off the new year and close the gap on the remaining Syrian Arab Army (SAA) soldiers that are inside this province located in eastern Syria.
• The terrorists who have laid siege on Fua’a and Kafraya in Idlib still continue to violate the agreement that envisaged evacuation of militants from Eastern Aleppo and two other cities in return for the transfer of the wounded civilians from the two towns. During the talks held on the evacuation of terrorists from Aleppo, it was agreed that 4,500 people of Fua’a and Kafraya would be transferred to safe areas in Aleppo but reports from Idlib say that the militants are preventing their exit from the two towns.
According to reports, nearly 10,000 terrorists left Aleppo only last week, but only 1,000 residents of Fua’a and Kafraya were allowed by the militants to be evacuated from the two towns. Local sources in Fua’a and Kafraya said that 21 buses were waiting since Wednesday morning for the terrorists’ permission to evacuate the wounded people, the patients and the children out of the two besieged towns.
A Syrian army source said last Wednesday that the terrorist groups lack commitment to the agreement on the exit of injured civilians from Fua’a and Kafraya. The source said that the terrorist groups that have laid siege on Fua’a and Kafraya towns in Northern Idlib once again violated the evacuation agreement’s terms based on which the militants and their family members could leave Aleppo safely.
The Syrian Army and its allies from the resistance front made history and took back the country’s second most important city from thousands of terrorists in a landmark victory that will change the future of the war in Syria. The civilians who have recently been evacuated from the militant-besieged villages in Syria’s northwestern Idlib Province say the population in the area is deprived of almost all essentials for survival.
The people from the Shia-populated villages of al-Fua’a and Kefraya told the Tasnim news agency’s correspondent in Aleppo that they had been experiencing acute shortages of water, foodstuffs, and medical supplies since the siege started two years ago. The report contained video footage showing buses carrying women, children, and critically-ill patients welcomed by a jubilant crowd in the northwestern Syrian city of Aleppo, to which they have been relocated under an evacuation deal.
‘We were being shelled every day. Our children would go to bed starving. What else can I tell you?’ a woman says in the video, weeping. ‘My son does not know how to eat an orange. He has forgotten this fruit, because he was two years old when the siege started.’
The woman said that one of her neighbours used to give pacifiers to their children to help them overcome their severe abdominal pain caused by hunger. Other people who arrived from al-Fua’a and Kefraya warned of a tragic humanitarian situation unfolding in the two villages.
‘We wish the siege on our fellow countrymen ends in al-Fua’a because there is a real tragedy going on there due to hunger, illness, and [the continuation of] shellfire. We can only be happy when our youths leave al-Fua’a,’ said another person from the village. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) announced on Thursday that four buses evacuated a number of the civilians from al-Fua’a and Kefraya.