Thousands of people will be evacuated from two besieged pro-regime towns in Syria in exchange for the release of prisoners held in government jails, an activist group said Tuesday.
Under a deal brokered by regime ally Russia and Turkey, Al-Foua and Kfarya, the last besieged towns in the country, will be fully evacuated after three years of encirclement by rebels, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Syrian state media reported Tuesday on preliminary information on a deal to free "thousands" of people in Al-Foua and Kfarya.
Al-Foua and Kfarya, the only two places in Syria currently designated as besieged by the United Nations, are home to an estimated 8,100 people, most of them Shiite Muslims.
They came under siege in 2015 when rebels and allied militants overran the surrounding province of Idlib in Syria's northwest.
The evacuation deal is not the first that has been reached for the area.
In 2017, thousands were bussed out of Al-Foua and Kfarya in exchange for parallel evacuations from two towns near Damascus that were being besieged by the government.
But a blast targeting a convoy of evacuees from Al-Foua and Kfarya left 150 people dead, most of them civilians and including 72 children.
AFP
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