{"id":25282,"date":"2018-12-12T16:22:09","date_gmt":"2018-12-12T16:22:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=25282"},"modified":"2018-12-12T16:22:09","modified_gmt":"2018-12-12T16:22:09","slug":"thousands-flee-bombs-and-hunger-in-eastern-syria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=25282","title":{"rendered":"Thousands flee bombs and hunger in eastern Syria"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\nAL-HOL, Syria: Faraj was born in the pouring rain on a nondescript stretch of desert road in eastern Syria as his family fled escalating fighting over the Daesh group\u2019s last bastion.
His family was part of a group of around 200 civilians who managed to escape from a pocket of territory in Deir Ezzor province that is still held by the jihadists.
\u201cI had to resist hunger, cold and rain,\u201d the newborn\u2019s mother Kamela Fadel tells AFP in a camp for displaced people in the northeastern region of Al-Hol.
The young woman, her husband and their four children now sleep under white tents, with hundreds of other people who fled eastern flashpoints in past weeks.
They are huddled on straw mats laid out directly on the gravely earth, wrapped in blankets and hugging bags packed with their meagre belongings.
A nurse helps an elderly lady to the camp clinic as children play at scaling piles of foam mattresses and families sit cross-legged, eating from tin cans.
It is still cold in the vast tent but at least they are sheltered from the rain.
They walked for several days in the winter weather before being met last week by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) battling IS in Deir Ezzor.
\u201cIt was hunger that prompted us to leave, there was nothing left to eat,\u201d says Kamela\u2019s husband, still sporting the thick beard the jihadists impose on all adult men.
He and his family were living in Al-Shaafa, one of the last villages, together with Sousa and Hajjin, that are still under the control of IS.
The SDF, with the support of air strikes by the US-led coalition against IS, launched a major operation against the last rump of the jihadists\u2019 moribund \u201ccaliphate\u201d in September this year.
The jihadists hunkering down in their Euphrates Valley heartland have offered stiff resistance, thwarting coalition hopes of a quick victory.
Warplanes have been raining bombs on IS targets in and around Hajjin, causing significant civilian loss of life in the process, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
The Observatory says almost 320 civilians have been killed, including 113 children.
\u201cThere is destruction everywhere because of the fighting and the bombardment. We were scared for the children,\u201d says Faraj\u2019s father.
Local camp official Mohamed Ibrahim told AFP around 1,700 civilians had arrived in Al-Hol in recent days.
The intensity of the bombardment and the remoteness of the area make it is difficult to estimate the number of civilians who remain, voluntarily or not, in the IS pocket.
\u201cIn Syria, displacement leads to food insecurity as people leave their belongings behind,\u201d said Marwa Awad, a spokeswoman for the UN\u2019s World Food Programme in Damascus.
\u201cThis is why it\u2019s vital to maintain a lifeline of food assistance for vulnerable families such as those escaping violence in Deir Ezzor,\u201d she said.
Awad said at least 16,500 people had been forced to flee their homes in Hajjin and surrounding areas since violence in the area intensified in July this year.
SDF fighters too suffered heavy losses in their assault on Hajjin, where a group of die-hard jihadists with little to lose are making a bloody last stand.
\u201cThere are land mines everywhere on the roads,\u201d says Abu Omar, one of the displaced in Al-Hol.
Fearing retribution against relatives who have stayed behind in IS-controlled territory, he refused to give his full name.
\u201cThe village and our homes have been destroyed by the bombardment,\u201d says Abu Omar, a man in his thirties.
\u201cThere are still high-ranking members of IS and foreigners there, but most are on the Hajjin frontline,\u201d he says. \u201cThey won\u2019t give up easily, they are fighting to the death.\u201d
The US-led coalition puts the number of jihadist fighters holding out in that area at around 2,000.
\u201cThe day we managed to flee, the fog was thick and gave us cover. Had they seen us, they would have wiped us out,\u201d says Ziba Al-Ahmed, who escaped the town of Sousa.
\u201cThe bombardment was so scary and our bellies were crying,\u201d says the mother of four.
Their farming machinery was too precious to leave in Sousa and her husband stayed behind with one of their daughters.
\u201cWe\u2019re worried about them, we don\u2019t know what\u2019s going to happen to them.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

AL-HOL, Syria: Faraj was born in the pouring rain on a nondescript stretch of desert road in eastern Syria as his family fled escalating fighting over the Daesh group\u2019s last bastion.His family was part of a group of around 200 civilians who managed to escape from a pocket of territory in Deir Ezzor province that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":25283,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25282"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25282\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/25283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}