Evacuations From Aleppo Stop Again
BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: There are thousands of people in Syria, families and children, desperately trying to get to safety as fighting rages around them. Today the off and on evacuation mission is off again and nothing is moving right now. It's just too dangerous. I'm talking about people trapped in the city of Aleppo. These buses that convoyed about 9,000 people out of Aleppo this week are sitting still today after reports of shooting on the roads going out of the city. Also today, people who worked for the international Red Cross and other aid agencies are being told to get out of Aleppo. They're being told this is just not safe to be there. CNN's Frederik Pleitgen is watching what's happening in Syria from Beirut. And tell us about this, the evacuations that they could restart. It seems like every day it's just back and forth, Fred?</s>FREDERIK PLEITGEN, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Yeah, you're absolutely right. And you know, as usual in situations like this one, Brianna, it's both sides blaming each other for the breakdown of these evacuations. Apparently what happened is that, that earlier today, there one of these convoys that was going. And you're right. Before all of this had been going very smoothly. Some 8,000 to 9,000 people had already been brought out of that little last rebel enclave there in the eastern part of Aleppo when all of a sudden the convoy was stopped. There was some shooting. Apparently several people were either killed or executed and then that convoy got turned back around. Now what happened afterwards is that the Syrian government said that they believed that the people onboard that convoy, some of the rebel fighters who were on it had been carrying weapons that they weren't supposed to carry. However, the opposition said that they believe it was a Shiite militia that fights for the government that stopped this convoy, executed some people because they weren't happy with the agreements to get this evacuation going and the way that it was going to be implemented. Now, the bottom line in all of this is, is that right now no one is being evacuated. From what we're hearing, there are some rebel factions and also the Syrian governments and some other powers as well who are trying to get this started again. But there's really mixed messages about all this, because the Russians are saying that they believe the evacuations had already been completed and that there were only hard-line rebel fighters left in eastern Aleppo who wants to fire at their government. The Turks who are also part of this agreement say, that's absolutely not true. There are still tens of thousands of civilians on the ground. And then there's a lot of them who are very weak and, you know, UNICEF has come out and they said listen, it's not only that there's tens of thousands of people, there's also literally thousands of children who are still stuck there in eastern Aleppo. Many of them orphaned children, some of them very weak, some of them very ill and they need to get to out as fast as possible. So certainly there should be efforts to get this going again. But right now everything is stalled.</s>KEILAR: You're talking about how weak obviously a number of those kids are. We know that some of them have been malnourished. Tell us more about the situation, the desperate situation that they are living in as they wait to get out.</s>PLEITGEN: Yeah. Well, you know what? I'll tell you this -- the people from the Red Cross and Red Crescent who went into eastern Aleppo said when they got there, they were absolutely shocked at the conditions inside eastern Aleppo. They say the people that they met were among the human beings that were in the worst state that they'd ever seen people in. So that's how bad the condition there's are. And I went into some of the neighborhoods that were taken back by the Syrian government when I was in Aleppo a couple days ago. And there was other destruction and some of the people that we saw fleeing those areas were indeed malnourished. Many of them too weak to even walk, many of them had wounds and still had to try to escape as well. And all of them of course were traumatized. And of course, on top of that, the situation is even worse for all of the kids. There's a lot of orphans. We've seen video in the past couple days of orphans begging to get out and to be evacuated and a lot of them are in really bad state. You know, some of the children that we saw were also malnourished wearing some really old, dirty, torn clothes. And all of them, of course, extremely scared about the situation, and now, possibly a return to the violence if in fact this evacuation agreement breaks down altogether.</s>KEILAR: All right, Frederick Pleitgen covering the desperate situation there in Aleppo from Beirut. Thank you for that. Up next, the GOP may have been mostly immune from Russian hacking. Maybe? Doesn't mean the matter isn't causing big problems in the Republican Party. We'll explain, coming up.