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Hundreds flee Yarmouk Camp in Damascus following IS attack

Xinhua, April 5, 2015 Adjust font size:

Hundreds of people from a main camp for Palestinian refugees in south of the Syrian capital of Damascus fled to nearby areas, escaping the ferocious attacks by the Islamic State (IS) militants, a monitor group reported Sunday.

Hundreds of the Yarmouk Camp residents reached the rebel-held areas of Yalda, Babila and Beit Sahm in the southern edge of Damascus over the past two days, as a result of the clashes there between the Aknaf Beit al-Maqdes rebel group and the IS militants, who unleashed a wide-scale offensive against the camp since early this month, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The rebels inside Yalda, Babila and Beit Sahm have recently agreed to a reconciliation with the government forces, which allowed the entry of food and aid to those areas in exchange of a halt of hostilities by the rebels inside those areas.

While, the situation of the three towns is still not better than that of Yarmouk, as they all suffered from hunger and illness.

The Yarmouk Camp has seen ferocious shelling and battles, as the IS and the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front have become in control of over 90 percent of that camp, the UK-based watchdog group said.

A total of 26 militants from both sides were killed over the past few days, and the IS executed seven civilians there, the Observatory added.

Aknaf, a group of Palestinian fighters who sided with other jihadist groups in the face of the Syrian government, was seen as a terrorist militant organization by the government, after the group refused several reconciliation attempts that were designed to disarm the militants inside the camp and alleviate the suffering of the trapped people inside.

Reports said the Nusra Front, which was stationing near the camp, had facilitated the entry of the IS militants into that battered area.

The Yarmouk camp is a large district in southern Damascus. Among its one million residents, 170,000 are Palestinians. Most of them fleed to Syria in 1948 following the establishment of the Israeli state.

Many people inside the camp have suffered a big deal during the last two years as the suffocating siege by the government troops prevented the entry of food and medicine to the trapped people, save for some aid convoys that were delivered in cooperation between the Syrian authorities and humanitarian organizations. Endit