BEIRUT -- Weeping children begged for food and women picked grass to eat as hunger gripped rebel-held neighbourhoods of the Syrian city of Homs during a nearly two-year military blockade, according to a rare first-hand account by a man evacuated during a truce this week.
It was ultimately that hunger that caused Abu Jalal Tilawi to flee, along with around 1,300 others, mostly women, children and elderly allowed out during the truce.
"They couldn't dislodge us with the missiles they rained down on us," the 64-year-old Tilawi said of besieging government forces. "The hunger defeated us. The hunger, the hunger, the hunger. I left the city where I was born, where my father was born, where my ancestors were born. I was weeping while I was walking."
Tilawi's account in a Skype interview spotlights the suffering experienced by an estimated 250,000 civilians living in over 40 areas across Syria that have been blockaded for months. Most of the sieges are by government forces, aiming to wear down resistance, but rebels have also adopted the tactic in some areas.
Western powers at the U.N. Security Council are trying to push for more sanctions against Syria to punish the government of President Bashar Assad for the blockades, though Russia has vowed to veto a resolution.
"We are facing the worst humanitarian tragedy since the genocide in Rwanda in 1994," France's U.N. Ambassador Gerard Araud said Tuesday. "Starvation is used as a weapon by the regime.'
The continuing siege of rebel-held districts in Homs, Syria's third-largest city, is perhaps the longest. But the rebel-held Damascus suburb of Moadamiyah has been under blockade for 15 months. A government siege of Yarmouk, an area on Damascus' southern fringes that is home to some 18,000 people, has been in place for about a year, and activists estimate more than 100 people there have died of hunger-related illnesses and a lack of medical aid.
In the battleground northern city of Aleppo, rebels have blockaded the central prison, with an estimated 4,000 inmates, for almost year. The Syrian Red Crescent delivered food parcels to prisoners, but had to stop this month because of intensified fighting. Rebels say government forces use the prison to launch strikes on rebel-held districts of the city.
"People will suffer inside the prison, but there are ... people who are suffering in Aleppo because of the regime controlling this prison," said Abu Adel, a rebel from the Ansar al-Haq Brigade taking part in the siege. He spoke via Skype on condition he be identified only by his nom de guerre for security reasons.
Syrian government officials similarly say blockades are to prevent rebels from spreading and accuse them of holding residents in besieged areas hostage.
Homs, in central Syria, was one of the first cities to see a major uprising against Assad's rule in early 2011. Government forces managed to regain control of much of the city, but rebel fighters kept their grip on several districts, including Old Homs, the historic Medieval district that is largely a tight network of small alleyways.
In the summer of 2012, government forces clamped down their siege on the district, barring the entry of food, water and medical supplies.
The effect appeared to have been devastating.
Before the evacuation, an estimated 2,500 civilians were trapped in Old Homs. The truce came after a call by U.N. mediator Lakhdar Brahimi and came into effect on Friday, lasting until Wednesday evening. With a few exceptions, the Syrian government barred men considered of fighting age -- between 15 and 55 -- from leaving.
The truce was shaken by repeated shooting and shelling that prevented many civilians from leaving, killed 11 people, and forced U.N. and Syrian Red Crescent workers to repeatedly halt evacuations and shipments of food into the besieged districts. In the end, around 1,300 made it out -- including 500 children, 20 pregnant women and a number of disabled, according to accounts from U.N. and Syrian officials.
Some of those who emerged --though not all -- appeared frail and skinny, said Matthew Hollingworth, country director of the World Food Program, speaking from Homs about the evacuees.
"They are physically and mentally exhausted from what they have suffered for 600 days, and they are at their wits end," he said.
A Syrian reporter in Homs said evacuees described scrounging for food sources during the months of siege. Some smuggled in supplies through tunnels connecting with other Homs neighbourhoods. Vendors bribed soldiers to let in some food -- albeit at radically marked-up prices: $50 for a kilo (2 pounds) of rice cost, $40 for cracked wheat. The reporter spoke to The AP on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to foreign media.
Others looted abandoned shops and homes, said Hollingworth.
Tilawi, the evacuee, spoke to AP from the home of one his sons in al-Waar, a rebel-held area across the Orontes River from Homs where many of the evacuees went.
It corresponded with accounts evacuees told to the WFP's Hollingworth, what they told the journalist, as well as with AP interviews with several anti-Assad activists in Homs during the truce period and statements by U.N. and Red Crescent officials who described the emaciated state of evacuees.
Tilawi was trapped in Old Homs with three of his five sons. His wife escaped the siege earlier, moving in with relatives in a nearby town, but he hadn't heard from her in three months and feared she may have been killed in fighting.
It took months for the blockade to bite, he said. But by December, Tilawi said their rations dwindled to pickled olives. In their last weeks, Tilawi said he and his sons were eating a dish called "water soup" -- a mix of spices, drops of oil, pomegranate juice syrup and boiling water -- sometimes with cracked wheat if they could scrape up enough money.
The poorest women foraged for grass growing in cracks between concrete and bombed buildings, Tilawi said.
"I would see children crying in front of me. They would be on the streets, shaking the men, saying, 'Uncle, I'm hungry, I'm hungry, give me something to eat!"' he recalled, weeping.
Hollingworth, of the WFP, said that even during the evacuation, he saw people pulling weeks out of cracks in the pavement "to augment what is a very meagre diet." He said he was also told by survivors of people making the watery soup and met a man who caught cats to feed his children.
When the truce and evacuation began, Tilawi said he was initially determined to stay. On the second day, he and other residents were told to gather for trucks bringing in food. When two vehicles arrived, he described chaos as desperate residents descended on them.
"Shame on us, if you saw us, fighting over the food. Tens of people, screaming, women, children, everybody," he said. "Then the mortars fell, and people were wounded, and it was a day of hell."
He decided to leave, abandoning his adult sons.
Other families, too, were separated, said Homs-based activist. One elderly man with a heart problem left with his wife and daughter, leaving his 16-year-old son behind. His wife fell down crying and tried to kiss the hands of rebel fighters, begging them to care for her son, said the activist, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons.
Tilawi walked with dozens of others to reach the evacuation point in an area known as Qarabis. There, aid workers told them to walk between vehicles as cover from continuing fire as they were escorted to safety. They were each given water, an apple, a banana, and a can of Pepsi.
"One of the children asked me what it was. I said, they invented this thing called Pepsi before you were born. The kid had never seen a can of it before," he said.
He has little faith his trials are over. Al-Waar, where he took refuge, has also been under blockade for the past four months.
"We left a blockade, and have come to another one," said Tilawi. "But here, they are still at the beginning, they have food. In three or four months we'll run out, and we'll be hungry again."
