Syria - Following the ceasefire agreement between the government and the armed groups in Homs and amid sporadic shootings, IOM has assisted in the evacuation of 1,149 vulnerable civilians to date.

Numbers are expected to increase as operations are ongoing and the truce, which began on Friday, has been extended. An estimated 4,000 people have been besieged in the Old City of Homs for some 600 days.

“Many of those we evacuated appeared in poor conditions after so many months without proper access to food or basic commodities,” said Shihab Al Kairawan, an IOM operations officer in Homs.

Among the people evacuated by IOM were 124 elderly people, 308 children under 18 years old, 465 men aged between18 and 55 years old and 252 women. A mother described the relief operation as a “rescue” for her. “We were trapped, with almost nothing to survive on for months. My children were growing thinner in front of my eyes,” she added.

The evacuees chose the locations where they wished to proceed and were taken to homes of relatives or friends in Homs city or in the surrounding area. IOM has been able to check the areas to ensure that they are relatively safe. But it will continue to monitor the situation closely in Homs to provide assistance as needed.

The IOM operation started on Friday and has involved 10 buses manned by operations and medical personnel. It is part of an inter-agency evacuation mission led by the UN and, besides evacuation assistance, is providing essential relief items to civilians in besieged areas of Homs.

The organization has pre-positioned 1,000 winter kits as part of the UN joint convoy to help 1,000 families. Trucks are ready to enter in the besieged city as soon as the security situation permits. The situation is still currently tense.

Since the outbreak of the conflict in Syria, IOM has helped to provide non-food relief items to over 963,000 internally displaced persons in Syria. It has also rehabilitated 88 collective shelters and distributed hundreds of shelter kits. It has also evacuated over 4,000 foreign migrants, provided resettlement assistance to more than 16,000 refugees, reached over 101,000 individuals with psychosocial support, and enrolled some 259 destitute households in cash for work schemes. IOM’s network of staff and partners inside Syria extend across all governorates of Syria.

For more information, please contact

Maria Rumman
IOM Syria
Email: mrumman@iom.int