They left by the thousand, the jihadis of Ghouta and their wives and children and parents. Many were still armed – Kalashnikovs over their shoulders, watched by the Russian soldiers in steel helmets and flak jackets – and they prayed, some of them, on waste ground, beneath leafless trees, next to the smashed metal wall of a broken factory behind which their chadored wives were waiting.

There were dozens of tourist buses waiting for these armed men, these Islamists whose faces had never appeared before us in past weeks – those of them who didn’t cover their faces with scarves. So they climbed aboard air-conditioned Pullmans with “Happy Travel” and “Express Tours” and other preposterous advertisements on the side. One of the vehicles even had “Very Important Personae” stencilled across the back window in English and Latin. Weirder, it could not have been. But sinister, too.

There were shells still thumping across the other side of Ghouta – if these Jaish al-Islam men and their families were leaving, others were not – and one of their conditions for evacuation were no photographs, no interviews with the press, no publicity, rules that were disregarded with care. The Islamists we could now see leading his very young wife and two children onto a tourist bus. And there was so many of them.

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https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/syria-eastern-ghouta-islamist-fighters-russia-idlib-a8279901.html