Idlib's Homeless in Syria, Russia, Turkey Confrontation
"There is no house of concrete or of mud or even a chicken coop that is not inhabited."
"People are in dire need of any shelter. Even a tent sometimes is not available."
Maad al-Khalaf, 41, Sunni Syrian homeless exile
"I could not reach the helicopter crash location because the whole area is being bombed."
"The attacks on Idlib itself make it clear that nowhere in this area is safe."
Abd Albaset, 32-year-old refugee from Ma'arat al-Nu', freelance war photographer
"Our teams documented the killing of 208 people in January, including 60 children and 28 women."
"In February, we retrieved the bodies of 127 people, 12 of them were today, after regime airstrikes on Idlib city."
"Northwestern Syria is witnessing the largest military campaign to date by [the Syrian] regime, Russian and Iranian forces."
Sayeed Mousa Zaidan, spokesman, White Helmets
"The recent deployment of Turkish military has significantly increased in the last two weeks both in terms of equipment and ground troops."
"This is the biggest build-up of force by Turkey so far, but it still seems within the defensive mode in terms of preventing the further advance of the regime into Idlib."
"They are trying to keep this zone out of [Syrian President Bashar al-] Assad's hands until after the implementation of a political process for Syria."
Ammar Kahf, executive director, Omran Center for Strategic Studies, Syrian affairs research organization, Istanbul
"We count up the assault on civilian infrastructure, and it's unprecedented. In the past month alone, 11 medical facilities, 28 schools, seven refugee camps and nine groceries were bombed or shelled in northwest Syria. The regime also targeted five civil defense White Helmet centers, four bakeries, 19 mosques, three water stations, and two power plants."
"As a result, our group made the tough decision to cease its education and anti-extremism programs after our staff fled for safety."
Isam Khatib, director, Kesh Malek, local mutual aid organization
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| Civilians flee Idlib for safety near the Turkish border, 11 February 2020 |
Displaced Syrians, looking for haven once the overcrowded tent cities reached maximum, sought refuge in mosques. Then the mosques became crowded and the refugees strove to put together flimsy shelters in the olive groves. Winter arrived, trees lost their foliage and the shelters offered little in protection from the cold. Maad al=Khalaf is forced to share a tent with his wife and children along with another family. Once a landowner, before the civil war destroyed their lives, they live now on abandoned farmland adjacent the border with Turkey.
The family is but one among over a million people forced to leave their homes since the Syrian offensive began last April when Russian planes gave air cover to Syrian regime troops determined to retake all of Syria from its Sunni Syrian rebels. Of the total million, about 700,000 have been displaced n the last ten weeks alone after a ceasefire collapsed in December. This number is believed to represent the greatest number of displaced people in a single period in the last 9 years in Syria where now an estimated 3.6 million Syrian Sunni civilians remain forced up against the closed Turkish frontier.
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| A man wails after a government airstrike in Idlib, 11 February 2020 |
"Syra has the world's largest concentration of displaced people and it urgently needs a cessation of hostilities", Jens Laerke from the United Nation's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs warned. Rebel militias numbering several thousand fighters, are defending their last bit of territory. The Syrian regime backed by its Russian allies have continued to blast the province with airstrikes. Over 60 hospitals and other civilian structures have been hit in deliberate efforts to coerce civilian populations to leave.
Leave they have, but there is nowhere for them to turn to. Turkey shut its border after the 2015 migrant crisis, housing some 3.5 million Syrian refugees in squalid refugee camps so Turkey now refuses to permit any more entrants. Moscow, the European backer of Bashar al-Assad, wields veto power in the United Nations Security Council, forestalling an emergency summit called by the United Kingdom, leaving the UN hamstrung in its wish to act.
"The numbers are enormous", Mercy Corps, an NGO aid group working in Syria said of the recent exodus, struggling to provide basic aid to the refugees. "The worst part is that we saw this coming. The UN, the international community, the governments -- they all knew that we were here and that this was going to happen. And yet nothing has been done", the Mercy Corps spokesman said in frustration over their powerlessness in the desperate situation.
The question is, why would they expect anything to be done by the United Nations? It represents a wholly dysfunctional institution managed by the world's foremost human-rights abusing nations for whom corruption is an established government tool. And it is these failed nations that refuse to dignify human life that take command of the UN's focus and actions. And their focus happens to be on Israel, a country at peace with itself and its neighbours, whom Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey and Iran would, given the chance, destroy.
Yet Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey and Iran sit on many of the UN administrative arms. And the Human Rights Council chooses to overlook the countless human rights abuses, war crimes, crimes against humanity committed by all of them, preferentially focusing on Israel, accusing it of crimes they, not Israel commits, and doing their utmost to isolate and delegitimize the Jewish State.
Labels: Civil War, Conflict, Homeless, Regime, Russia, Syria, Turkey, United Nations
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, February 13, 2020
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