Date: Feb 27, 2019 Source: The Daily Star Flare-up displaces thousands in Idlib Agence France Presse BEIRUT/NEAR BAGHOUZ, Syria: Thousands of people have been displaced and dozens killed in one of the worst flare-ups to rattle a precarious truce deal in northwestern Syria, an activist group said Tuesday. Twenty government soldiers and allied fighters were killed in attacks by a militant group on the edge of the Idlib region since Sunday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said. The latest casualties were five government and allied fighters killed Tuesday near a planned buffer zone around rebel-held territory in neighboring Idlib. The Britain-based Observatory said the attack was led by Hurras al-Deen, an alliance formally linked to Al-Qaeda that includes Syrian and foreign militants. At least nine militants were killed in the clashes, among the deadliest since a deal was reached in September last year to spare the region a massive government assault. Regime bombardment near Khan Sheikhoun, in Idlib province, also killed two civilians Tuesday, raising the civilian death toll to 42 since Feb. 9, the Observatory said. The Idlib region is mainly controlled by the militants of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, a Syrian group led by former Al-Qaeda fighters, after they pushed back smaller, Turkey-backed rebel outfits last month. Under the Sept. 17 deal, all fighters in the zone were supposed to withdraw their heavy weapons and militants including HTS and Hurras al-Deen were supposed to leave. Increased regime shelling on the Idlib town of Khan Sheikhoun has sparked one of the largest waves of displacement since the truce agreement was struck in the Russian resort of Sochi. David Swanson, spokesman for the U.N. Regional Office for the Syria Crisis in Amman, said 7,033 women, children and men were displaced from Khan Sheikhoun from Feb. 1-21. The vast majority moved to districts within Idlib, while around 152 people were displaced to the town of Afrin in Aleppo province. In eastern Syria, meanwhile, the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces Tuesday screened and treated truckloads of suspected Daesh (ISIS) militants and relatives who left a village where the group’s “caliphate” is making its last stand. The SDF struggled to cope with the flow of people exiting the very last shred of a once-sprawling proto-state that claimed dominion over millions of people. Several thousand of them are believed to remain in a last redoubt, which has been shrunk to about half a square kilometer on the edge of Baghouz, a hamlet by the Euphrates River. Hundreds of them, mostly women and children, arrived Tuesday from Baghouz to a desert screening center in a convoy of 11 huge double-trailer trucks. The women formed a queue to be searched before heading to a distribution point where baby formula, diapers and bread were being handed out. Overwhelmed fighters from the Kurdish-led SDF were still treating some of the more than 2,000 people who were trucked in the previous day. An AFP reporter saw an 11-year-old girl who had lost her leg, a small child with a broken hand and his pregnant mother as well as others who had suffered wounds from land mine explosions and bombardment. Kurdish fighters there said 30 people, mostly women, had already been sent to other facilities for treatment and that a total of 300 had received emergency care. Their accounts of the makeshift camp in Baghouz, where the SDF has said around 5,000 people remain, describe a death trap of disease and starvation. Many of the women told AFP they were not able to leave earlier for lack of funds to pay the smugglers who spirit groups out of the besieged area. “Inside, there is nothing but hunger,” one of them said. Next to her, two famished, dust-caked children were spooning out jam from a pot with their grimy fingers. Nearby in the chaotic SDF outpost, a woman from Kazakhstan was walking around asking people if they knew whether meals would be handed out soon. The number of people trapped in the last Daesh pocket near the Iraqi border has exceeded all estimates from a month ago, when SDF forces looked poised to complete their takeover. The SDF, which has spearheaded the fight against Daesh in Syria since 2015, has complained that the burden was too heavy and urged the world to scale up its humanitarian effort. Many of the civilians and militants emerging from the ruins of the Daesh “caliphate” are foreigners whose countries of origin are reluctant to repatriate. According to the Observatory, around 50,000 people have quit the last Daesh pocket in the Euphrates valley since December 2018. Among them are up to 5,000 suspected Daesh members, while most of the rest are their relatives. After being vetted, women, children and men not suspected of belonging to the extremist group are transported north to the Kurdish-run camp of Al-Hol, while suspected militants are sent to SDF-held detention centers. More evacuations are likely in the coming days but SDF forces, with backing from the U.S.-led coalition and its aerial might, are then expected to move in and flush out any die-hard Daesh militants.