Pro-regime terrorists free civilian hostages near Aleppo

ALEPPO, Syria

Pro-Syrian regime terrorists on Friday evening released hundreds of civilian hostages after briefly detaining them during the ongoing evacuation of Aleppo.

Fourteen of the hostages were reportedly killed by their captors.

The convoy in which the civilians had been travelling, meanwhile, was reportedly turned back to besieged parts of eastern Aleppo.

Earlier Friday, the evacuation of civilians from Aleppo was briefly suspended after pro-regime foreign terrorist groups waylaid a civilian convoy after it left Aleppo’s besieged eastern districts for the nearby city of Idlib.

According to Anadolu Agency correspondents in Aleppo, pro-regime terrorists opened fire on the Idlib-bound convoy of buses, which had been carrying some 800 civilian residents from the war-battered city.

The terrorists forced the vehicles to stop in southwestern Aleppo’s regime-held Ramouseh suburb and took all the passengers hostage, correspondents reported.

Hours later, pro-regime terrorists released the hostages after reportedly killing 14 of them.

Under the terms of an earlier agreement between the Assad regime and Syrian opposition groups, civilians trapped in eastern Aleppo will be allowed to go to the opposition-held city of Idlib.

Situated near the border with Turkey, Idlib is located some 65 kilometers (roughly 40 miles) from Aleppo.

In recent days, at least 7,500 civilians have left eastern Aleppo for Idlib, according to opposition sources.

Syria has been locked in a devastating civil war since early 2011, when the Assad regime cracked down on pro-democracy protests -- which erupted as part of the "Arab Spring" uprisings -- with unexpected ferocity.

Since then, more than a quarter of a million people have been killed and more than 10 million displaced across the country, according to UN figures.

However, the Syrian Center for Policy Research, a Beirut-based NGO, has put the total death toll from the five-year conflict at more than 470,000.