BEIRUT (Reuters) - The last group of rebels and other people who wanted to leave the besieged Barzeh district of Damascus have done so, the Syrian capital’s governor was quoted as saying on Monday by state television, bringing it under state control.

Some 1,012 people, including 455 fighters, left Barzeh in a bus convoy for rebel-held parts of northern Syria as part of an agreement between the government and insurgents, state TV said.</s>The last rebels and others who had agreed to leave the besieged Barzeh district of Damascus have done so, the Syrian capital's governor was quoted as saying on Monday by state television, bringing the entire area under state control.

BEIRUT: The last rebels and others who had agreed to leave the besieged Barzeh district of Damascus have done so, the Syrian capital's governor was quoted as saying on Monday by state television, bringing the entire area under state control.

Some 1,012 people, including 455 fighters, left Barzeh in a bus convoy for rebel-held parts of northern Syria as part of an agreement between the government and insurgents, state TV said.

Barzeh and the adjacent districts Qaboun and Tishreen, in northeast Damascus, will now come under the sway of President Bashar al-Assad's government, giving him almost complete control over the capital for the first time since 2013.

Most residents of the once-bustling area, which sheltered displaced people from other parts of Syria during the war, fled over the last two months as violence there intensified.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based monitoring group, said the last buses began to leave Barzeh on Monday afternoon.

The Observatory said most evacuees were going to Idlib province, a rebel stronghold in northwest Syria bordering Turkey. Some would go to Jarablus, a town that Turkey-backed rebels control along Syria's northern border.

Hundreds of rebels and civilians have left the Damascus districts this month under agreement with the government after weeks of intense fighting and bombardment.

Assad has promoted local evacuation deals for rebel bastions in what the state calls "reconciliation" deals as a way of reducing bloodshed in the six-year conflict. Residents can stay on in those areas if they agree to submit to government rule.

But the United Nations has criticised both the use of siege tactics that have preceded such deals and the evacuations as amounting to forcible displacement.</s>More than 1,000 people quit a rebel-held district of Damascus Monday, its governor said, in the final phase of a deal bringing Syria's government closer to controlling the entire capital.

The evacuations from the northern neighbourhood of Barzeh are part of a so-called "reconciliation" agreement for three opposition-held districts of Damascus.

Under such deals, fighters and civilians are granted safe passage to other rebel-held territory in exchange for an end to bombardment and siege.

The agreement has allowed Syria's government to declare control over the Damascus districts of Qabun and Tishrin, and on Monday the last evacuees left Barzeh.

"The last phase of the reconciliation deal for Barzeh is complete, with the departure of 1,012 people including 455 armed men," Damascus governor Beshr Assaban told state news agency SANA.

"This will allow state institutions to return to the neighbourhood," Assaban said.

The agreement was struck earlier this month and had already seen more than 5,000 people -- nearly half of them rebels -- leave Barzeh in several waves.

Like the thousands who left Qabun and Tishrin, they will head to opposition-controlled territory in northern Syria.

There are now only a handful of areas in Damascus that remain outside government control.

Rebels hold part of the heavily damaged Jobar district in the east, and in the south, the Tadamun and Hajar al-Aswad neighbourhoods as well as the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmuk are now mostly controlled by jihadists.

The evacuation deals follow a pattern of similar agreements in towns and villages around Damascus, as well as in third city Homs.

The government says the deals are the best way to end the six-year war, but the opposition says this amounts to forced displacement.

Damascus has been insulated from some of the worst violence of Syria's war, which has killed more than 320,000 people since it began with anti-government protests in March 2011.

But the government has made securing control of the last remaining rebel districts in the capital a key priority.</s>A Syrian military source said on Monday that the army had recaptured all the positions it had lost on Sunday.

A Reuters witness said that warplanes were active above Damascus early in the day and that some streets in government-held areas near the fighting had been closed.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based war monitor that collects information from a network of sources across Syria, said heavy fighting continued around the Jobar and al-Qaboun districts in the northeast of the city.

Rebels had attacked in Jobar to relieve military pressure after their recent loss of ground in nearby Qaboun and Barza, a commander from the Failaq al-Rahman group which is fighting there said on Sunday.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his army, along with allied Russian, Iranian and Shi'ite militia forces, have put rebels on the back foot with a steady succession of military victories over the past 18 months, including around Damascus.

Rebels still hold a large, heavily populated enclave in the Eastern Ghouta district of farms and towns to the east of the capital, as well as some Damascus districts in the south, east and northeast of the city.

The most recent fighting has focused on the areas around Qaboun and Barza, which the army has isolated from the rest of the main rebel enclave of Eastern Ghouta and the eastern districts of Damascus.</s>Syria has reached another deal on evacuation with another rebel faction near Damascus, with over 1,000 people, including rebels and family members bused out of the Barzeh District, and sent north toward the Idlib Province, which is held by various rebel factions.

Barzeh has been described as a virtual ghost town during the civil war, as the rebel presence and the constant fighting around the periphery has made it, like a lot of Damascus suburbs, profoundly unsafe. As fighting has turned against the rebels, more and more have been willing to make deals.

The government has been eager to make such deals, as actually engaging in urban fighting to remove the rebels is a messy proposition, and they appear to much prefer having them evacuated into the north, which at the very least clears more of the area around the capital city.

In the end, such evacuation deals are filling Idlib up with a lot of rebels, and while there is some infighting among them, it’s also such a large force it may be very difficult for Syria’s military to ever retake these areas, making the displacements potentially the start of a permanent division within Syria.
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• McCain: Putin Is a Bigger Threat Than ISIS - May 29th, 2017</s>The escalation, reported by witnesses, state TV, rebel sources, and a monitoring group, marked a bid by the rebels to relieve army pressure on besieged areas they control to the east of the capital.

Moderate Free Syrian Army (FSA) and jihadist groups were both involved in the assault on the districts of Jobar and Abbasiyin, some 2 km (1.2 miles) east of the Old City walls.

Syrian state television said the army had repelled an infiltration attempts by the militants and bombarded them with artillery, inflicting heavy losses.

Witnesses said the army deployed tanks in some adjacent neighbourhoods, and troops could be seen patrolling on foot.

"The streets are empty and the army has despatched dozens of troops in the streets, and tanks are being moved. The sounds of mortars from Jobar have not stopped," said a resident of the nearby Tijara district, who asked not to be named.

Another witness said most shops had closed in areas close to the fighting, as people fled further away from the clashes.

Heavy explosions rang out in the background as state TV broadcast live from Abbasiyin square, a usually teeming area that seemed to be deserted of traffic and pedestrians.

With the recapture of the city of Aleppo last December, President Bashar al-Assad's army reinforced its dominant position across most of the country. Since then it has been trying to break down rebel resistance in Damascus and reassert full control of the capital after six years of war.

The army and its militias have for months been targeting Eastern Ghouta, the biggest remaining rebel bastion near Damascus, while making only incremental gains.

Rebel sources said their attack on parts of Jobar, which they held for a time in 2013, was in response to their loss of ground in Qaboun and Barza, two other districts to the north.

"This is to relieve the pressure on rebels, with the regime not stopping its bombardment and artillery shelling on our people," Abu Abdo, a commander from rebel group Failaq al Rahman said via internet messaging, adding that the aim was to link up Jobar with Qaboun.

He said the rebel operation had included two suicide bombings launched by Tahrir al Sham, a coalition of jihadist groups whose backbone is the former al Qaeda affiliate Nusra Front.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the war, said rebels had captured several industrial sites and buildings between Jobar and Qaboun after launching their surprise attack.

An official of Ahrar al-Sham rebel group said the

capture of large swathes of the industrial area that has long been an army line of defence for the capital could help a bid to push deeper into the heart of the capital in coming days.

The Observatory said rebel shells hit several districts, and government warplanes pounded the Jobar area in response. At least 30 raids were conducted and hundreds of surface-to-surface missiles targeted rebel-held areas.

Another rebel fighter acknowledged army advances in the last two days towards a major road between Qaboun and Barza had been a big blow.

The capture of that road would sever the link between the two besieged rebel districts, where tens of thousands of people live and would force the hands of rebels to agree to deals worked out elsewhere that force them to pull back to northern Syria.

The deals are viewed by rebels as forcibly displacing people who oppose Assad after years of bombardment and siege.

"Taking this road would isolate Barza and Qaboun completely and with a security belt around it," said Abu Abdullah, another fighter with Failaq al Rahman.7

Rebels said several factions in Eastern Ghouta, including the dominant Jaish al-Islam group, were sending reinforcements to Jobar to help rebels maintain the momentum of the assault.</s>Air raids and artillery hit three towns in Eastern Ghouta, part of Syria's Damascus province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. A ceasefire had been agreed in the area until March 20, Russia's Defence Ministry said on Tuesday.

The Syrian air force struck at jihadists linked to a former al Qaeda offshoot in Irbeen, a city north-east of Damascus in Eastern Ghouta, and in al Qaboun, closer to the centre of the capital, according to a media unit of Hezbollah, a Damascus ally. There was no immediate comment from the Syrian military.

At least 30 air raids hit the region on Wednesday, along with dozens of artillery rounds and ground-to-ground missiles fired from government-held areas, a rebel and a resident said.

The Syrian army has been closing in on eastern suburbs of Damascus still in rebel hands, such as Qaboun, and seeking to storm neighbouring towns in Eastern Ghouta. Air raids and fighting have escalated in recent days, opposition sources said.

The army and its allies are trying to force rebels to agree to truces similar to those that have led to the evacuation of thousands of opposition fighters to northern Syria.

The army has for the last 20 days concentrated its air strikes on Qaboun district, effectively ending a ceasefire that rebels in the area agreed with the Syrian army which had been in place since the end of 2013.

The army suspects tunnels from Qaboun to Eastern Ghouta have become a lifeline for people and rebels in the besieged area, the opposition's largest remaining stronghold near Damascus.

"If they take over Qaboun, the regime will be able to enforce a complete siege of Ghouta," said a fighter from Failaq al Rahman, a rebel group operating in the area called Fahed.

Thousands of civilians have fled Qaboun, a district that had drawn tens of thousands of people escaping from violence elsewhere. They have found refuge in the adjoining Damascene district of Barza, where many families have taken refuge in the streets, public gardens and mosques.

Barza has agreed a full truce with the government that has been in place since 2014. Unlike other besieged suburbs, most of civilians living in Barza can go to the capital to work and to buy food and other supplies.

Before the Syrian conflict began in 2011, more than half a million people lived in Eastern Ghouta. The sprawling mix of urban districts and farmland was once a major economic hub serving the capital, but now its population has dwindled to tens of thousands and continues to shrink.</s>Syrian government forces and their allies clashed with rebels near Damascus on Friday, and used helicopter gunships in raids in the area in the latest violence to disrupt a nationwide ceasefire that otherwise appeared to hold, monitors said.

The clashes took place in a rebel-held valley northwest of Damascus, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

A rebel official also reported clashes in the area, where the Syrian army began an offensive last week to recapture the area which provides most of Damascus's water supplies.
Damascus's governor says the last group of rebels and civilians have left the city's besieged Barzeh district.