3/8/20
IDLIB, Syria — Before the war in Syria, Idlib city, with its tree-lined avenues and white-stone buildings, was known for its calm, provincial air. Today it overflows with families who fled the war in other parts of Syria, swelling the population to nearly a million people. Some shelter in bombed-out buildings. Those who can’t find shelter are camped in the soccer stadium, and more line up outside for food handouts. Residents are so used to the shelling that no one even flinches at the sound of an explosion. But for Syria’s last rebel-held city the worst is yet to come. To the north, nearly a million people are living along roadsides and in olive groves in what is already one of the worst humanitarian disasters of Syria’s brutal nine-year war. To the south and east, Syrian government forces backed by Russian warplanes are closing in, now just five miles away. When they reach Idlib city, its million residents are likely to flee, doubling the number of displaced people in the north. Dr. Hikmat al-Khatib, an orthopedic surgeon, urged his parents to move to a town to the north. But when it was bombed his mother decided to stay put. “Her words shocked me,” Dr. al-Khatib said. “The only choice is to wait for death.” Amina Sahloul was sitting on the floor around a stove in a large underground room for women and children. “We came away because of the airstrikes,” she said. “They started dropping cluster bombs. It was like fire raining in the sky.” There has been no letup for the people of Idlib Province as the forces of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, backed by Russian air power, have smashed their way forward, demolishing towns and villages in the south and east of the province with punishing airstrikes.
At the soccer stadium, as word came across the radio that Russian planes were near, tension rose as people nervously scanned the skies. When Russian planes begin a concerted assault, they use overwhelming force, laying down lines of repressive fire that force people to run for their lives with only minutes to get away. But most of the province’s three million people are civilians, and they are desperate for an end to the violence. They cling to the hope that Turkey’s growing deployment of troops into the province will stop the onslaught. At an emergency shelter near the Turkish border, Alia Abras, 37, pushed forward to speak. “Do you know the meaning of displacement?” she asked. “You are like stray dogs.” Rescuers took two-and-a-half hours to dig her and her three children out of the rubble of their home in the town of Ariha a month ago, she said. It was the middle of the night but they were left on the street beside their ruined home because there were others still to be rescued. The whole neighborhood around the main hospital had been hit. “We spent two days sitting in the street,” she said until Violet’s rescue team found them and brought them to the shelter, which houses 45 families in a shopping center in the town of Sarmada. “I wish I had died under the ruins and my children with me,” she said. “We lost everything my husband and I spent our lives building up. We are at zero.”
