Amid clean-up operations in the recently-liberated areas of eastern Aleppo, Syrian forces have discovered the bodies of 21 civilians massacred in prisons previously run by the Takfiri militants.

The official Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) said there were five children and four women among those executed by the terrorists before withdrawal from areas under their control in the northwestern city.

“The bodies of martyrs were found inside prisons belonging to terrorist groups in al-Sukkari and al-Kallaseh neighborhoods… Upon close examination, the civilians were found to have been shot at from a very close range,” said Director of Aleppo Forensics, Zaher Hajo.

The military fully liberated Aleppo on December 22 in the final stage of a weeks-long push. The militants had been controlling the city’s eastern part since 2012, a year after foreign-backed militancy swept over the country.

As the terrorists were feeling the heat from army advances, they began using civilians as human shields to hamstring Syrian troops in their operations.

According to the report, towards the end of the liberation operation, scores of civilians, who had been abducted by Jabhat Fateh al-Sham (formerly al-Nusra Front), escaped its prisons, reaching an army checkpoint.

The photo shows a group of militants from the former al-Nusra Front, renamed Jabhat Fateh al-Sham. (By AFP)

The escapees have given gruesome accounts of killings carried out by the Takfiri terror group against civilians.

Meanwhile, SANA said as many as 150 militants had laid down arms in al-Sanamin, a town in the countryside of the southwestern city of Dara’a, in order to fall under an amnesty law issued by President Bashar al-Assad, which pardons those ceasing to partake in the armed conflict.

Dara’a Governor Mohammad Khaled al-Hannous then declared al-Sanamin “the first in the province…to be cleared of the armed presence.”

He added that some villages and towns in Dara’a Province, which bears the same name as that of its capital, were likewise about to be freed of militant presence.