DAMASCUS, July 19 (Xinhua) -- After three years of siege, the people of Kafraya and Foa towns in Syria's northwestern Idlib province are free as their towns were the last besieged areas in the seven-year-long war.
After several attempts to evacuate people from the both pro-government Shiite towns failed to put an end to the years-long siege, they are finally free.
On Wednesday, an Iranian-backed deal took place and the rebels in Idlib agreed to let the remaining 7,000 people from Kafraya and Foa leave to government-controlled parts in Aleppo City in northern Syria.
A total of 121 buses, as well as ambulances, entered the towns on Wednesday and the evacuation started earlier on Thursday with the two batches of the people, including fighters, from both towns reaching the Eis area south of Aleppo.
The deal also includes the release of kidnapped people from rebels' custody from the town of Ishtabraq in the northern countryside of Idlib.
In return, the government has released a total of 1,500 detainees from the rebels and their affiliates.
A source in Aleppo told Xinhua that some of 1,500 detainees the government was releasing refused to go to Idlib, and demanded to stay and reconcile with the government.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor group said Kafraya and Foa are completely empty of their population, while some other activists claimed that 15,000 rebels are expected to storm the empty town and take positions.
The evacuees from both towns will be hosted in the Jibreen displacement center in Aleppo, but their later destination is still unknown.
Now, the buses transporting those people are keep coming to Aleppo, with the source telling Xinhua that the rebels have thrown stones on the buses while leaving Idlib.
The people of Kafraya and Foa had rejected a previous deal for their evacuation last April as they had received no strong guarantees of their safety after a similar deal was implemented last year and largely failed.
In April of 2017, 112 people from both towns were killed while reaching a rebel-held area in Aleppo, when rebels detonated a car bomb near the buses transporting them to the government-controlled parts in Aleppo city.
This evacuation has granted the people of Kafraya and Foa their freedom since the rebels besieged them in 2015. The towns have also been subject to systematic shelling due to their alliance with the government and Iran, as both are inhabited by Shiite people, some of which were fighters.
Those towns were the last besieged towns in Syria's prolonged war, as both the government and the rebels have besieged each other's areas during the course of the Syrian war.
But with the progress of the Syrian army across the country, those sieges were broken by both sides, the latest of which was the government siege on the Eastern Ghouta countryside of the capital Damascus.
The government retook this area from the rebels earlier this year and thus the siege was automatically broken.
