GENEVA/BEIRUT: Syrian regime forces and allied militias have raped and sexually assaulted women, girls and men in a campaign to punish opposition communities — acts that constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity, UN investigators said on Thursday as the conflict entered its eighth year. In a gruesome report, they found that opposition groups had also committed crimes of sexual violence and torture, although these were “considerably less common.” The 29-page report is based on 454 interviews with survivors, relatives, eyewitnesses, defectors, lawyers and medical staff. Karen AbuZayd, an American commissioner on the panel, said the documented cases represented the “tip of the iceberg.” Regime forces raped civilians of both sexes during house searches and ground operations in the early stages of the conflict, and later at checkpoints and detention facilities, the report said. The youngest known victim was a nine-year-old girl. On Thursday, thousands of civilians streamed out of two besieged enclaves on opposite sides of Syria. At least 10,000 men, women and children emerged from Hamouria and nearby opposition towns near the Syrian capital, carrying their belongings in suitcases and bags, as government forces pushed opposition forces out of the town with a punishing aerial and ground campaign, according to state-run Syrian television and a war monitoring group. Thousands more fled Afrin, near the Turkish border, after Turkish forces tightened their siege around the Kurdish-run town, according to a pro-regime station and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, addressing the European Parliament on Thursday, said he would not halt his campaign against the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, known as the YPG, which controls Afrin. “We won’t leave until our job is done,” he said. Ankara says the YPG is connected to a Kurdish insurgency inside its own borders and sees the militia as a national security threat. The rights group put the number of those who had left Eastern Ghouta at over 12,000. It also said regime forces targeted a column of civilians fleeing Hamouria before dawn on Thursday, wounding several people, and that 26 people were killed in regimes strikes on the town on Wednesday. “They are burning Ghouta to the ground,” said Anas Al-Dimashqi, a media activist and resident of Kafr Batna, a town also targeted in intense airstrikes on Thursday. Dimashqi and other monitoring groups reported that government and Russian aircraft were using napalm-like incendiary weapons to spread fires in the towns. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told AFP that the regime controlled more than 70 percent of Eastern Ghouta. Turkey and the US will form a “safe zone” around the northern Syrian town of Manbij if Washington keeps its promises, Turkish president’s spokesman said on Thursday.