ARBIN: 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 north-western 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.

In the nearby town of Arbin, intense bombardment was heard, 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 percent 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 northwestern Syria meanwhile, more than 200,000 civilians have fled the Kurdish-majority city of Afrin in less than three days, according to the monitor.

On Saturday, a Turkish air strike killed 11 civilians in the city as they tried to leave, it said.

The monitor says more than 280 civilians have been killed since Turkey’s Afrin campaign began, but Ankara has denied the reports and repeatedly said it takes the “utmost care” to avoid civilian casualties.

Published in Dawn, March 18th, 2018