BEIRUT -- A stalled population transfer in Syria resumed Saturday after an explosion killed at least 100 people, including children, government supporters and opposition fighters, at an evacuation point.
The blast ripped through a bus depot in the al-Rashideen area, where thousands of government loyalists evacuated the day before waited restlessly for hours, as opposition fighters guarded the area and negotiators bickered over the completion of the transfer deal. Just yards away, hundreds of evacuees from pro-rebel areas also loitered in a walled-off parking lot, guarded by government troops.
Footage from the scene showed bodies, including those of fighters, lying alongside buses, some of which were charred and others gutted from the blast. Personal belongings could be seen dangling out of the windows. Fires raged from multiple vehicles as rescuers struggled to put them out.
A witness who gave his name as Ali described watching a frail old woman stumble and fall. "We reached her too late, her leg had snapped and there was nothing we could do. What did she do to deserve this?"
The casualties were the latest in the unyielding bloodshed Syrians have seen in their civil war. Earlier this month, at least 89 people were killed in a chemical attack as children foaming at the mouth and adults gasping for breath were caught on camera.
The mayhem that followed the Saturday attack only deepened the criticism of the transfer as population engineering. It also reflected the chaos surrounding negotiations among the warring parties. The United Nations did not oversee the transfer deal of the villages of Foua and Kfraya, besieged by the rebels, and Madaya and Zabadani, encircled by the government.
The population shift is an attempt to alleviate the hardships of residents in towns under siege by both rebel and government forces. Each side has used the civilians it surrounded as bargaining chips to gain leverage over the other.
Some 2.3 million Syrians lived under complete siege or in areas at risk, according to Siege Watch, a Washington-based monitoring group.
No one claimed responsibility for Saturday's attack, but pro-government media outlets and the opposition exchanged accusations, each pointing to foreign interference or conspiracies undermining the deal.
State TV al-Ikhbariya said the attack was the result of a bomb attached to a car carrying food aid to be delivered to the evacuees in the rebel-held area and accused rebel groups of carrying it out. A TV broadcaster from the area said: "There can be no life with the terrorist groups."
"I know nothing of my family. I can't find them," said a woman who appeared on al-Ikhbariya, weeping outside the state hospital in Aleppo where the wounded were transported.
Ahrar al-Sham, the rebel group that negotiated the deal, denounced the "cowardly" attack, saying a number of opposition fighters as well as government supporters died in the attack. The group said the attack serves only to deflect the attention from government "crimes" and said it was ready to cooperate with an international investigation to determine who did it.
Yasser Abdelatif, a media official for Ahrar al-Sham, said about 30 rebel gunmen were killed in the blast. He accused the government or extremist rebel groups of orchestrating the attack to discredit the opposition.
The Syrian Civil Defense in Aleppo province, also known as the White Helmets, said its volunteers pulled at least 100 bodies from the site of the explosion. White Helmets member Ibrahim Alhaj said the 100 fatalities documented by the rescuers included many children and women, as well as fighters.
Syrian state media outlets said at least 39 people were killed, including children. The opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights put the death toll at 43, adding that it likely would rise because of the extensive damage. A Facebook page belonging to the pro-government Foua and Kfraya villages said all those in three buses were killed or are missing.
According to Abdul Hakim Baghdadi, an interlocutor who helped the government negotiate the evacuations, 140 people were killed in the attack. He added that it was not clear how many rebels were killed because they were evacuated to their areas.
Hours after the explosion, the transfer resumed -- as dozens of buses, starting with the wounded, headed to their respective destinations. Before midnight Saturday, 100 of about 120 buses from both sides had arrived.
The explosion hit the al-Rashideen area, a rebel-controlled district outside Aleppo city where evacuation buses carrying nearly 5,000 people from the northern, rebel-besieged villages of Foua and Kfraya were stuck. Residents from the two villages had been evacuated Friday, along with more than 2,000 from Madaya, an opposition-held town outside Damascus besieged by government forces.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres condemned the attack Saturday in a statement from his spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, and called on all parties "to ensure the safety and security of those waiting to be evacuated."
"Those responsible for today's attack must be brought to justice," the statement added.
The coordinated evacuations delivered war-weary fighters and residents from two years of siege and hunger but moved Syria closer to a division of its national population by loyalty and sect.
Madaya and Zabadani, once summer resorts for Damascus, have been shattered under the government siege. The two towns rebelled against Damascus' authority in 2011 when demonstrations swept through the country demanding the end of President Bashar Assad's rule.
Residents were reduced to hunting rodents and eating tree leaves. Photos of gaunt children shocked the world and gave new urgency to U.N. relief operations in Syria.
Foua and Kfraya, besieged by the rebels, lived under a steady hail of rockets and mortar fire. They were supplied with food and medical supplies through military airdrops.
Critics say the string of evacuations, which could see some 30,000 people moved across battle lines over the next 60 days, amounts to forced displacement along political and sectarian lines.
The explosion came as frustration was mounting over the stalling evacuation process.
"The situation is disastrous," said Ahmed Afandar, a resident evacuated from the opposition area near Madaya. "All these thousands of people are stuck" in an area smaller than 500 yards.
He said the area was walled off from all sides and there were no restrooms.
Afandar said people were not allowed to leave the buses for a while before they were let out. Food was distributed after several hours, and by early afternoon the evacuees from rebel-held areas were "pressured" to sit back on their buses, Afandar said.
The evacuees from Madaya headed to rebel-held Idlib, west of Aleppo. After the blast, evacuees from opposition areas pleaded for protection fearing revenge attacks.
Syrian state TV blamed the rebels for obstructing the deal.
An opposition representative, Ali Diab, accused the government side of violating the terms of the agreement by evacuating fewer armed men than agreed to from the pro-government areas.
Russia: visit attack site
Russia, meanwhile, called for international inspectors to visit Idlib province, where the U.S. and others have accused Assad of carrying out the deadly chemical-weapons attack.
Syria's government invited the Organization for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to visit the site of the April 4 attack and the air base that the U.S. later bombed, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said. Representatives of U.N. Security Council members, the European Union and the Middle East should travel with the organization's inspectors to ensure a "transparent" investigation, he said at a meeting Saturday in Moscow with his Qatari counterpart, Mohammed Al Thani,.
U.S. President Donald Trump ordered cruise-missile strikes on the air base in Syria earlier this month, and his administration accused Russia of helping to cover up Assad's role in the chemical-weapons attack. The Kremlin contended that the chemicals were under the control of terrorists, while Lavrov said Friday that he sees "growing evidence" that the incident was staged. Russia hasn't provided any proof to back that up.
"Within the framework of the Organization for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the U.N., we will insist on the immediate dispatch of inspectors both to the site of the incident and the air base where our western colleagues claim missiles were loaded with chemical substances," Lavrov said.
The organization reported to the United Nations last year that its inspectors detected the presence of previously undeclared chemical agents in Syria. The group earlier had certified that Syria disposed of its stockpiles and was dismantling product facilities under a deal Russia helped broker with the U.S. in 2013.
While Lavrov, who met with his Iranian and Syrian counterparts Friday, called for an "independent investigation," Russia vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution Wednesday that demanded the Syrian government cooperate with an inquiry into the suspected sarin-gas attack.
Separately, former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, an Assad ally, said Saturday that he does not view the U.S. missile strikes on Syria as a message for Iran.
The former leader made the remarks in an interview in his office in northern Tehran, three days after he stunned Iranians by registering to run for president again.
Ahmadinejad dismissed suggestions that the U.S. strike on Syria also might be a warning for his country.
"I do not think it has a message for Iran. Iran is a powerful country, and people like Mr. Trump or the United States administration cannot hurt Iran," he said.
Trump's administration earlier this year announced that it was putting Iran "on notice" in part over its ballistic missile tests.
Information for this article was contributed by Sarah El Deeb, Philip Issa, Nasser Karimi and Adam Schreck of The Associated Press; by Stephen Bierman of Bloomberg News; and by Louisa Loveluck, Zakaria Zakaria and Suzan Haidamous of The Washington Post.
A Section on 04/16/2017