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Syrians flee raging assaults on two fronts

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Thousands of terrified Syrian civilians fled for their lives on Saturday, as they sought to escape two raging offensives in a rebel bastion outside Damascus and a northwestern Kurdish enclave.

Syria’s civil war this week entered its eighth year with world powers unable to stem a complex conflict that has killed more than 350 000 people and displaced at least half the country’s population.

Tens of thousands have taken to the roads with their belongings, as Russia-backed regime fighters push deeper into rebel Eastern Ghouta outside the capital and Turkey-led forces press an assault in the Kurdish enclave of Afrin.

Civilians trudged out of Eastern Ghouta‘s Jisreen on Saturday after regime forces seized control of the town, many with small children walking by their sides.

One man held up a Syrian flag as regime tanks rolled by.

An AFP reporter in the nearby town of Arbin heard intense bombardment, as the month-long assault that has claimed over 1 400 civilian lives ground on.

Air strikes killed 37 civilians across the shrinking rebel territory Saturday, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor reported, most of them in the town of Zamalka as they prepared to flee.

Throughout the day some 20 000 people did manage to stream out of the last rebel stronghold near Damascus, taking the total number to escape the carnage over the past three days to an estimated 50 000, the monitor said.

Regime forces have retaken some 80% of Eastern Ghouta since launching a brutal air and ground offensive on February 18, carving it up into three ever-smaller pockets held by different rebel groups.

In their latest advances Saturday pro-government forces took control of the two towns of Kafr Batna and Sabqa in the southern pocket held by the Faylaq al-Rahman rebel group, the monitor said.

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