GAZIANTEP, Turkey — “We could hear their voices threatening to rape women and girls and arrest all the men,” said Fatima al-Ansari, a Syrian woman from Bustan al-Basha Street in eastern Aleppo. Ansari told Al-Monitor, “The people of Aleppo are coming to terms with the idea of death, aware that we could end up dying here. The world needs to know that we have endured until the last moment. We have endured siege, hunger and shelling.”

Ansari and around 50,000 other civilians, including children and wounded people, were trapped from Dec. 16 to Dec. 19 in the eastern district of the city of Aleppo, waiting in line for evacuation to Aleppo’s western countryside or to the city of Idlib in northwest Syria.

On Dec. 19, the UN Security Council adopted a resolution calling for international monitors to be dispatched to Aleppo to oversee the evacuation process. The evacuees began arriving in al-Rashidin in Aleppo’s western countryside, and from there departed for other areas that are still under the armed opposition’s control in Aleppo’s western countryside and Idlib.

Walid Abdel Kader, a young man from the Salahuddin neighborhood in eastern Aleppo, was supposed to be evacuated to Aleppo’s western countryside on Dec. 16. Speaking by phone, he told Al-Monitor, “The bus moved and we had two cars escorting us, one from the International Committee of the Red Cross and another from the Turkish Red Crescent. When we reached the regime’s Ramouseh crossing in central Aleppo, an officer and some soldiers approached us and ordered the drivers to return to where they came from.”