Syrian troops on Saturday cut off the largest town in Eastern Ghouta from the rest of the rebel-held enclave which is now split in three, a monitor said.
The army captured a road linking the town of Douma with Harasta further west, and also captured the town of Misraba, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.
"Regime forces have therefore divided Eastern Ghouta into three parts ‐ Douma and its surroundings, Harasta in the west, and the rest of the towns further south," the Britannia-based war monitor said.
An AFP correspondent inside Douma said shelling and air strikes were rocking the town on Saturday.
Besieged by government forces since 2013, Ghouta is the last remaining rebel-held area near the capital.
Keen to secure Damascus, government troops and allied militias have been closing in on the enclave since February 18 and have overrun more than half of it.
Nearly 950 civilians have been killed since Russia-backed government forces launched a blistering assault on the last opposition bastion near Damascus on February 18.
Eastern Ghouta’s 400,000 inhabitants have lived under government siege since 2013 and the enclave ‐ more than half of which has over the past three weeks been retaken by regime forces ‐ is home to a myriad of gangs.
Apart from Islamist groups such as Jaish al-Islam
...Liwa al-Islam (Brigade of Islam) was established by Zahran Alloush, the son of Saudi-based religious scholar Abdullah Mohammed Alloush, after Syrian authorities released him from prison in mid-2011 where he had been serving time for his Salafist activism. The group claimed responsibility for carrying out the July 2012 Damascus bombing that killed Defense Minister Dawoud Rajiha, Deputy Defense Minister Asef Shawkat, and Assistant Vice President Hassan Turkmani. It was a driving force behind actions in the Damascus region. It cooperated and conducted joint operations with al-Nusra. In Sptember 2013 Saudi Arabia engineered Liwa al-Islam's merger with fifty other more or less Salafist groups as a counterweight to al-Nusra, which the Learned Elders of Islam considered was growing too powereful..., jihadists from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham
(HTS), who are mostly linked to al-Qaeda, are also deployed there.Syrian state television
... and if you can't believe state television who can you believe?
aired footage of a single bus carrying 13 "fighters" and family members out of the enclave through al-Wafideen checkpoint, without giving their affiliation.
Some appeared to be young, while others wore hoodies to cover their heads and faces.
The limited operation came as the powerful Jaish al-Islam said HTS fighters would be evacuated to the northern province of Idlib, in an arrangement struck following consultations with the United Nations
...an idea whose time has gone...
and other international players.
"It has been agreed that the first group of HTS members be released from the prisons of Jaish al-Islam ... (and) moved to Idlib at their request," Jaish al-Islam said.
HTS is the main force in Idlib, in Syria’s northwest and the last province outside regime control.
| An Nahar adds: |
Thirteen trucks loaded with 2,400 food parcels, meanwhile, crossed into Eastern Ghouta, the International Committee of the Red Cross said, entering what UN chief Antonio Guterres has called "hell on earth".
But "shelling" near the enclave's main town of Douma threatened "to put at risk" the joint ICRC, Syrian Arab Red Crescent and United Nations convoy, said the UN humanitarian coordinator in Syria, Ali al-Zaatari.
The aid was delivered as helicopters hovered overhead and warplanes targeted areas outside Douma, a correspondent said.
The World Health Organization said it has verified 67 hits on medical facilities in Syria through January and February, nearly half of them in Eastern Ghouta.
The facilities hit included 20 hospitals, 16 health facilities, two ambulance stations and one medical supply warehouse.
Doctors and nurses in the enclave have run out of several life-saving items, according to Doctors Without Borders (MSF), which reported a "terrible medical catastrophe."
"Medical material is extremely limited, medical infrastructure has been hit and medical staff are exhausted," it said, adding that hundreds of people have been wounded and need urgent assistance.
In the face of the regime's Russian-backed onslaught, Ghouta's main rebel groups had so far rejected Moscow-brokered offers to evacuate civilians or any of their own fighters.