In this photo released by the Syrian official news agency SANA, smoke rises in green government buses, in Idlib province, Syria. (Photo: AP)

Beirut: Armed men burned five buses that were supposed to be used for an evacuation near Idlib in Syria on Sunday, holding up a deal to allow thousands to depart the last rebel pocket in Aleppo, where evacuees crammed into buses for hours, waiting to move.

In return for the evacuation of fighters, their families and other civilians from Aleppo, mostly Sunni insurgents have agreed that people in the villages of al-Foua and Kefraya, Shi'ite villages they have besieged near Idlib, should also be allowed to leave.

Videos posted on social media showed bearded men with guns cheering and shouting "God is great" after torching the green buses before they were able to reach the villages and pick up the evacuees.

State media said "armed terrorists", a term it uses for all groups fighting against President Bashar al-Assad, carried out the attack. Pro-Damascus Mayadeen television blamed the rebel group formerly known as the Nusra Front.

Rebel officials said an angry crowd of people, possibly alongside pro-government "operatives", was responsible.

Hours after the incident, as the Aleppo evacuees waited on their buses, it was still unclear what impact the bus burning near Idlib would have on the wider agreement.

The commander of forces allied to Assad said on Sunday there was still a chance for states with influence over rebel groups to find a solution to evacuate civilians safely.

In a statement carried by a military news outlet run by Damascus's ally, the Lebanese group Hezbollah, the allied forces leadership said responsibility for the delay in the evacuation falls with "terrorists and their state sponsors".

Some 40 km (26 miles) to the northeast, hundreds of fighters and their families in Aleppo sat or stood in buses after a deal on Sunday to resume evacuations after a three-day hiatus.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said there was no sign the buses had left Aleppo or the villages, and a passenger on one told Reuters he had been on the bus for four hours and was still in the city's rebel enclave.

Syrian state television, citing its correspondent in the city, said buses had started to leave east Aleppo where over 15,000 people had gathered in a square to wait. Many had spent the night sleeping in the streets in freezing temperatures.

Some buses and Red Crescent vehicles arrived at the entrance to al-Foua and Kefraya shortly after the deal was announced, according to al-Manar television, a broadcaster affiliated with Hezbollah.

Soon afterwards, reports that some of them had been burned began to circulate.

Aleppo had been divided between government and rebel areas in the nearly six-year-long war, but a lightning advance by the Syrian army and its allies began in mid-November following months of intense air strikes, forcing the insurgents out of most of the rebel-held territory within a matter of weeks.

According to Syria's al-Ikhbariya TV news, about 1,200 civilians would initially be evacuated from east Aleppo and a similar number from the two villages.

A document cited by al-Manar television and passed to Reuters by rebels and activists said the entire deal would see 2,500 citizens leave al-Foua and Kefraya in two batches, in exchange for the evacuation of people from east Aleppo in two corresponding batches.

Following this, another 1,500 would leave al-Foua and Kefraya in exchange for the evacuation of 1,500 from the towns of Madaya and Zabadani near Lebanon, which are besieged by pro-government forces.

Once evacuees from the villages have safely arrived in government areas, Aleppo fighters and more of their family members will be allowed to leave, in return for subsequent batches of people departing al-Foua and Kefraya, al-Ikhbariya TV reported.

In the square in Aleppo's Sukari district, organizers gave every family a number to allow them on buses.

"Everyone is waiting until they are evacuated. They just want to escape," said Salah al Attar, a former teacher with his five children, wife and mother.

Thousands of people were evacuated on Thursday, the first to leave under a ceasefire deal that would end years of fighting for the city and mark a major victory for Assad.

They were taken to rebel-held districts of the countryside west of Aleppo. Turkey has said Aleppo evacuees could also be housed in a camp to be constructed near the Turkish border to the north.

The chaos surrounding the evacuation reflects the complexity of Syria's civil war, with an array of groups and foreign interests involved on all sides.

The United Nations Security Council is due to vote Sunday on a French-drafted resolution aimed at ensuring that U.N. officials can monitor the evacuations from Aleppo and the protection of civilians who remain.

The draft U.N. text, seen by Reuters on Saturday, also "emphasizes that the evacuations of civilians must be voluntary and to final destinations of their choice, and protection must be provided to all civilians who choose or who have been forced to be evacuated and those who opt to remain in their homes."

However, Russia said it would veto the draft resolution.

"We cannot support it, we cannot allow it to pass because this is a disaster. But there could be another thing which could be adopted today by the Security Council which would accomplish the same goals," Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin told reporters.

He circulated a rival Russian text to council members during a closed-door meeting on Sunday ahead of a planned vote on the French draft.

Russia, which has provided military backing to Assad's troops, has vetoed six Security Council resolutions on Syria since the conflict started in 2011. China joined Moscow in vetoing five resolutions.

A crackdown by Assad on pro-democracy protesters in 2011 led to civil war, and Islamic State militants have used the chaos to seize territory in Syria and Iraq. Half of Syria's 22 million people have been uprooted and more than 400,000 killed.</s>Hundreds leave rebel-held areas after vehicles set on fire on their way to collect villagers from Kefraya and Fua

The evacuation of east Aleppo has resumed, with about 350 people able to leave a rebel-held pocket of the city on Sunday, according to medical officials.

The move came despite the official postponement of evacuations of civilians and fighters from the devastated Syrian city and as the UN security council prepared to vote on a resolution to deploy observers to the city, with Syria-allied Russia giving cautious backing to the measure.

“Five buses carrying the evacuees arrived from besieged parts of east Aleppo,” said Ahmad al-Dbis, who heads a team of doctors and volunteers coordinating evacuations to rebel-held Khan al-Assal, from where they can travel on to other parts of Aleppo and Idlib provinces.

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“They were in a terrible state,” he said.

“They hadn’t eaten, they had nothing to drink, the children had caught colds, they were not even able to go to the toilet.”.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the 350 were able to be evacuated after Russia and Turkey urged the Syrian regime to allow the convoy of buses to pass its final control point.

Earlier, a deal to free east Aleppo’s remaining civilians in exchange for sick and wounded people from two pro-government villages stalled after six buses sent to evacuate the loyalist areas were stopped and set ablaze.



The buses were intercepted in an area under the control of Jund al-Aqsa, a jihadi faction aligned to the Syrian opposition. The deal to partially lift a siege of the villages, Fua and Kefraya, had been opposed by the al-Qaida-inspired Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, which was largely responsible for a three-year siege of the majority-Shia enclaves.

The Syrian Observatory said on Monday morning that 10 buses had left Fua and Kefraya to take evacuees through rebel-held territory towards Aleppo.

Sabotage attempts have turned an urgent evacuation of up to 40,000 trapped civilians into a protracted series of negotiations, which allow trickles of refugees to leave before breaking down again.



Iran and the Syrian regime have been determined to use the fate of east Aleppo to settle accounts with the opposition elsewhere in the country, while jihadis who influence parts of the rebel movement have delayed the process to win concessions as their grip on northern Syria steadily slips.

Conflict News (@Conflicts) PHOTOS: Reports coming in that an "unknown rebel group" has attacked buses going to evacuate civilians from Kafraya and Fuah - @Ald_Aba pic.twitter.com/7xMPhumeu5

Fua and Kefraya have been key bargaining chips throughout the conflict. Both have been besieged, but not with the same result as east Aleppo. For the past 18 months, Iran has tried to broker a deal with the powerful Islamist militia Ahrar al-Sham which would allow the remaining villagers to be relocated to Zabadani and Madaya, between Damascus and the Lebanese border.

In return, Sunni residents of those towns would be sent to Fua and Kefraya, as part of a population swap that would change the geopolitics of the region and help build a Shia presence from the suburbs of Damascus into Lebanon’s Bekaa valley, and beyond to southern Lebanon.

The population swaps were not part of the original terms of the Aleppo evacuation deal, which were brokered between Russia and Turkey. However, soon after the deal was announced early last week, Iran made a series of its own demands.



In addition to the relocation of sectarian groups, Iran demanded the bodies of slain militia fighters that it had sent to Syria, including members of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Iraqi militias. It also demanded information about any fighters that had been taken prisoner.



The chaos surrounding the evacuation deal underscores the stakes, with east Aleppo in its death throes and the six-year war beginning to lose steam for the first time. It also underlines how a splintered opposition cannot control all the elements in the fight against the Syrian leadership, even as tens of thousands of civilians remain cornered, many of them in the open with little food in the depths of winter.



A claim of responsibility was posted on social media, purportedly by a jihadi front group, which spoke of the trapped Shia communities in strident sectarian tones.



The Free Syria Army, an umbrella organisation of moderate rebel groups, said: “The people who resisted in Aleppo are paying the price of the irresponsible acts of a few. This was a reckless act endangering the lives of more than 50,000 people. It is a crime and a humiliation against our revolution and the resistance of the beseiged Aleppo people.”

Meanwhile, diplomatic efforts to secure a lifeline to those trapped in east Aleppo appeared to inch forwards after the UN security council agreed a compromise draft resolution on UN monitoring of evacuations. A vote will he be held on Monday, diplomats said.

“We expect to vote unanimously for this text tomorrow at 9 am (1400 GMT),” the US ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, told reporters after more than three hours of negotiations.

The Russian ambassador to the United Nations, Vitaly Churkin, had earlier vowed to veto a French-drafted resolution, arguing that it did not account for the preparation needed for UN officials to be able to monitor evacuations.

Russia, which began air attacks on rebel-held territory in September 2015 in support of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, has vetoed six security council resolutions on Syria since 2011.

“I think we have a good text, we agreed to vote tomorrow morning,” Churkin told reporters after agreeing the compromise draft.

The French-drafted resolution had asked for the UN to “redeploy … humanitarian staff already on the ground to carry out adequate, neutral monitoring, direct observation, and to report on evacuations from besieged parts of Aleppo and protection of civilians inside Aleppo”.

It also urged: “The evacuations of civilians must be voluntary and to final destinations of their choice, and protection must be provided to all civilians who choose or who have been forced to be evacuated and those who opt to remain in their homes.”



The fate of more than 500 men who were detained inside Aleppo, or arrested at checkpoints as they tried to leave remains unknown, and rights groups have expressed serious fears for their safety.



By some estimates, up to 80,000 people have left east Aleppo in recent days, most crossing into the regime-held west of the city. Around 8,000 people were evacuated to the north-west Aleppo countryside as part of the evacuation deal. Opposition fighters were among the first to leave the city. Such a move had been central to the drafted terms, but was also being seen by some of the trapped civilians as an abandonment.
Rebels attack and burn several buses en route to evacuate ill and injured people from the besieged Syrian villages of Al-Fu'ah and Kafriya.