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Smoke billowed over the blast site
A huge car bomb has blasted a convoy of coaches carrying evacuees from government-held towns in Syria, killing at least 39 people, state media report.
It shattered coaches and set cars on fire, leaving a trail of bodies, as the convoy waited at a marshalling point in rebel-held territory at Rashidin.
Russian troops have reportedly moved to shield rebel evacuees from retaliation.
Thousands of evacuees from both sides of Syria’s civil war have been stuck in hostile territory since Friday.
The “Four Towns” deal was meant to relieve suffering in areas under siege.
Some 30,000 besieged people would be taken out of two rebel-held towns and two under government control but, according to AFP news agency, up to 5,000 government evacuees and 2,200 from rebel towns are now stranded.
Last month, the UN described the situation in the pro-government north-western towns of Foah and Kefraya, and the rebel-held towns of Madaya and Zabadani near Damascus, as “catastrophic”.
More than 64,000 civilians are “trapped in a cycle of daily violence and deprivation”, it said.
Images from the scene show bodies lying on the ground outside blackened and devastated coaches.
According to an 24Aleppo tweet, a special unit of the Russian army surrounded the convoy from the rebel-held towns after the bomb and closed the road there to “prevent any reaction”.
The complex choreography of this exchange has been attempted before on a smaller scale, reports Sebastian Usher, the BBC’s Arab affairs editor.
There must now be concern over whether it can continue at all, he adds.
An AFP correspondent west of Aleppo, speaking before the explosion, said the coaches carrying government evacuees had not moved in 30 hours.
The Syrian Arab Red Crescent was distributing food and water to the waiting passengers, who include 3,700 civilians, the agency adds.
BBC