Orphaned Children Remain Trapped in Aleppo After Evacuations Suspended
The children were seen pleading to be evacuated in a video recorded this week.
— -- Orphaned children in Aleppo who were seen in a video this week pleading to be evacuated remain trapped in Syria’s war-torn city, according to one organization.
A source with the Afkar Foundation, which oversees an underground orphanage in eastern Aleppo, told ABC News that the children were not able to leave the area's last rebel-held enclave after the evacuation of civilians and fighters stopped Friday. The children were told to turn back when they reached an evacuation checkpoint, the source said.
In September, ABC News profiled the underground orphanage, where many children have sought refuge from years of devastating war. The facility was forced underground in order to protect the children from the life-threatening reality above them. In a video message recorded Wednesday, the children at the orphanage pleaded to be evacuated following the collapse of another cease-fire between Syrian rebels and forces loyal to the government.
“Today might be the last time you see me and hear my voice,” one 10-year-old girl says in the video, surrounded by the other children at the orphanage. “Please help us get out of Aleppo.”
The girl is one of 47 children living at the orphanage. The children, who range in age from 3 to 14 years old, have either lost their parents or have parents who can no longer care for them. They were hoping to evacuate as a second cease-fire took hold on Thursday and an operation to evacuate thousands of residents from the last rebel-held enclave of east Aleppo got underway.
“We have not been able to leave because of the airstrikes and we are scared of the continuous shelling,” the girl says in the video. “All we want is to live like any other child in this world.”
A member of the Afkar Foundation told ABC News on Thursday that it was not possible to move the children as the battle for Aleppo intensified.
"We hope to eventually get the children to Turkey, where we are working on setting up another orphanage," he said. He asked not to be named for fear of reprisals by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Some 8,500 people, including around 3,000 rebels and 360 wounded, have left the rebel-held areas of east Aleppo in buses and ambulances, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group based in the United Kingdom.
The evacuation was negotiated as part of the latest cease-fire deal. The truce marks the end of years of fighting and a months-long government siege of eastern Aleppo.
On Friday, Elizabeth Hoff, the World Health Organization representative in Syria, told reporters that the WHO, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Syrian Arab Red Crescent were told to leave the area and weren’t given a reason for why the evacuation was suspended. Robert Mardini, the Middle East director for the International Committee of the Red Cross, confirmed the suspension on Twitter but did not provide a reason.
Syrian state TV accused rebels of firing on a convoy of evacuees at a checkpoint while anti-government activists said that pro-government militias had blocked the passage to protest the siege of two Shiite villages, Foua and Kafraya, by rebels, the majority of whom are drawn from the country’s larger Sunni population.
“The reason for the stop of the operation is pressuring the rebels,” Zakaria Amino, the deputy head of east Aleppo's local council, told ABC News.
Amino also blamed Iran, a Shia ally of President Assad, for a hand in halting Aleppo’s evacuations.
“Iranians are using this to pressure rebels to allow wounded and injured to leave Foua and Kafraya,” he said.
The conflict in Syria has caused the largest humanitarian crisis since World War II, with more than 8 million children in danger, according to UNICEF.
What began as a local uprising against Assad in 2011 slowly burgeoned into an international war involving the United States, Russia, Iran and almost all of Syria's neighbors. Military planes belonging to the Syrian regime and Russia, which began its military operations there against ISIS and other militant groups last September, regularly targeted rebel-held areas.
ABC News’ Benjamin Gittleson and Kirit Radia contributed to this report.