The humanitarian crisis in northwestern Syria has largely disappeared from news headlines in recent weeks, yet people uprooted by recent fighting continue to face dire conditions. On March 5, 2020, the governments of Turkey and Russia agreed to a ceasefire in Syria’s northwestern Idlib province, where months of bombing, shelling, and ground offensives by the Syrian government and its allies have displaced nearly a million people. While both the intensity of the fighting and the scale of population movements have decreased in the weeks since, the desperate situation of Syrians forced to flee has not changed.
“The recent ceasefire in northwest Syria doesn’t mean that living conditions in all these camps have improved or that people have returned back to their home,” said Cristian Reynders, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) field coordinator for northwestern Syria. “On the contrary—not only do almost a million people still live in the cold today, many do so in very unsanitary conditions and they sometimes don’t even have access to basic things like drinkable water and health services if they get sick.”
Last month, MSF began providing safe water to approximately 40,000 people in more than 15 camps in the region. And since December 2019 our mobile clinic teams have provided services in various locations, providing medical consultations to more than 17,000 people. Forty percent of these patients presented with upper respiratory tract infections and 13 percent presented with lower respiratory tract infections.
In addition to overcrowded camps and a lack of access to essential services, displaced people in northwestern Syria have also had to contend with freezing winter temperatures. “It’s just one other factor complicating an already incredibly difficult and dramatic situation,” said Reynders. “Some people are so desperate that they’ve been using dangerous materials to heat their tent.”
