This frame grab from video provided by the government-controlled Syrian Central Military Media, shows a Syrian Red Arab Crescent volunteer, left, carries the bags of a Syrian family, center, who are heading to a bus as they leave from Madaya an opposition-held town near Damascus, Syria, Friday, April 14, 2017.
The deal was kicked off on Friday, as hundreds of civilians and fighters who have been under crippling siege for more than two years left the four towns in fleets of buses under a delayed evacuation.
BEIRUT (AP) - Activists and residents say thousands of Syrians evacuated from their besieged towns have spent the night on buses at an exchange point as a much criticized population transfer deal stalls.
"There was no heating, no food, nothing to sustain our lives".
The transfers are the latest in a long series over six years of civil war.
Residents were reduced to hunting rodents and eating the leaves off trees.
The evacuation of civilians from Zabadani, a southwestern hill station town near the Lebanon border, is expected to begin later on Friday.
The agreements are also causing demographic changes, they say, because those who are displaced are mostly Sunni Muslims.
They have been touted by the government as the best way to end the fighting, but have been controversial with the rebels, who say they are starved out.
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The military alliance "also strongly supports the efforts of the fact-finding commission to find out actually what happened". Export-Import Bank, which has been a rallying cry for conservatives who consider it a mechanism of crony capitalism.
An AFP correspondent in rebel-held Rashidin, west of Aleppo city, said at least 80 buses arrived in the region from government-held Fuaa and Kafraya in Idlib province. The other two villages are government-held but besieged by rebel forces.
The fates of Fuoua and Kfraya are less clear.
The reporter said that Aleppo governorate had prepared makeshift centers in Jibrin for the locals of Kefraya and al-Fouaa and equipped them with all basic and necessary services and the medical centers. The arrangement has the town's last 160 holdouts bussed out.
Most of eastern Aleppo was depopulated through force, as well.
According to reports, some 20 areas across the war-torn country remain under siege by Assad regime forces.
"I have conviction that we will be back", Hossam, the man from Madaya, said in the video.
Russia, Syria and Iran have strongly warned the United States against launching new strikes on Syria.
Assad is facing renewed worldwide pressure after accusations his government carried out a suspected April 4 chemical weapons attack on a northern rebel-held town.
"We wish that everyone could stay in his village and his city, but those people like many other civilians in different areas were surrounded and besieged by the terrorists, and they've been killed on (a) daily basis, so they had to leave", he said.
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