More than 235,000 flee intense bombing in Syria

Civilians on Friday packed a road leading out of a flashpoint town in northwest Syria, where two weeks of heightened regime and Russian bombardment has displaced 235,000 people.

Pick-up trucks carrying mattresses, clothes and house-hold appliances ferried entire families out of southern Idlib province, most heading towards safer areas further north, said an AFP correspondent on the ground.

Since mid-December, regime forces and their Russian allies have heightened bombardment on the southern edge of the final major opposition-held pocket of Syria, eight years into the country’s devastating war.

The latest violence in the militant-dominated Idlib region has killed scores of civilians, despite an August ceasefire deal and international calls for a de-escalation.

More than 235,000 people fled the area between December 12 and 25, mostly from the beleaguered city of Maaret al-Numan which has been left “almost empty”, according to the United Nations’ humanitarian coordination agency OCHA.

OCHA spokesman David Swanson said Friday that more than 80 per cent of those who have fled southern Idlib this month are women and children.

“I can’t live in the camps,” said Umm Abdo, a mother of five who recently arrived in a displacement camp in the town of Dana, north of Idlib’s provincial capital.

“The rain is very strong, and we need heating… clothes, and food,” she said, her tired eyes showing through her veil.

Fierce battles, squalid camps

The Idlib region hosts some three million people, including many displaced by years of violence in other parts of Syria.

It is dominated by the country’s former Al-Qaeda affiliate, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, whose chief this week urged militants and allied rebels to head to the frontlines and battle “the Russian occupiers” and the regime.

Since December 19, HTS militants and their rebel allies have been locked in fierce battles with regime forces around Maaret al-Numan.

Damascus loyalists have seized dozens of towns and villages from militants in clashes that have killed hundreds of fighters on both sides.