Damascus Says 420 Civilians Evacuated from Homs despite Gunfire

A total of 420 people were evacuated Sunday from army-besieged districts of the Syrian city of Homs, the province's governor said, as television footage showed exhausted men, women and children.

"Four hundred and twenty besieged people came out today from the Old City districts of Homs, and the operation is still under way," Barazi said.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights confirmed that "more than 500 civilians" were evacuated Sunday, in compliance with a U.N.-brokered deal over the besieged districts, where some 3,000 people had been trapped.

Television footage showed women, children and elderly men getting off the buses that brought them out of the besieged areas, after suffering a more than 600-day siege.

They appeared visibly exhausted and frail-looking, in video broadcast by Beirut-based channel Al-Mayadeen. Children, carried by their parents, looked pale.

The civilians were assisted by U.N. staff wearing helmets and blue vests, and Syrian Red Crescent volunteers. There was also a strong Syrian army presence at the evacuation site.

"We had nothing. All the children were sick, we even had nothing to drink," said one exhausted woman, her three children standing around her.

A U.N. staffer gave her a bottle of water.

"It's been two years and four months!" a man told a journalist who asked him how long it had been since he had left the rebel-held districts.

A handful of neighborhoods in central Homs have been under choking army siege since June 2012, but even before then they had been under frequent fire and suffered from shortages.

Earlier on Sunday, state media accused rebels of firing on the convoys.

State television said the operation took place under fire from "armed terrorist groups," using the regime's term for rebels.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and activists said fire hit the rebel-held, besieged district of Qarabis in Homs, where dozens of civilians were gathered for evacuation by the U.N.

Activists said a gathering point for civilians was hit by mortar rounds launched from pro-regime districts bordering the besieged neighborhood where civilians have been trapped for more than 600 days.

Sunday's evacuation was the second in three days, since a U.N.-brokered truce for army-besieged districts of Homs was to have come into effect on Friday.

But on Saturday, shelling and gunfire hit a Syrian Red Crescent aid convoy, killing five residents of the rebel-held neighborhoods and wounding 20 others.