The trauma of everyday life in northwest Syria

JEDDAH, 01 Sep 2019 [Fik/News Sources]: “Three million people — two-thirds of them women and children — are counting on your support to make this violence stop,” said Mark Lowcock, the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, to the Security Council on Thursday on the situation in northwest Syria.

Lowcock’s plea is the latest in a long line of impassioned appeals by UN officials to the international community to pressure the warring sides to give peace a chance in Syria. They have largely fallen on deaf ears.

For residents of Idlib, not only has there been no respite from war since 2011, violence has sharply intensified since President Bashar Assad’s forces launched an offensive four months ago to reclaim the governorate from opposition fighters.

At around 10 p.m. on April 28, just a few days before Ramadan, families in Kafr Nabudah, in Hama governorate, were huddled in their homes trying to focus on the approaching holy month, when they were rattled by the noise of heavy bombing in the distance.

Little did they know that the bombing was just the beginning of a torrent of death and destruction that residents of both Idlib and Hama describe as the worst they have endured in eight years of uprising and civil war.

IN NUMBERS
500 - Civilians killed in Idlib and Hama over the past three months.
440,000 - People displaced in Idlib and Hama during this period.
3 million - People currently caught in the crossfire in the northwest.
500 - People killed in the latest wave of hostilities. (Source: OCHA)
One man who knows the dread felt by the people of Idlib and Hama since that April night is Ahmad Dbis, the Turkey-based safety and security manager of the Union of Medical Care and Relief Organizations (UOSSM), a coalition of humanitarian organizations founded in 2012. At the time, he started receiving voice notes on his smartphone from his family in Kafr Nabudah.

“My mother and siblings along with their families lived in different neighborhoods of Kafr Nabudah, just an hour’s commute from Idlib,” he told Arab News from somewhere near the Turkey-Syria border. “We could not communicate via telephone lines but the internet was still working.

“In the messages, I could hear the air strikes in the background. It was unreal. I could not believe the bombing was happening again.”

Dbis’ family told him it was the most intense air assault they had experienced since the beginning of the war.

“We received information from fellow medical staff that moving cars were being targeted (by regime forces) in that part of Syria,” he said. “People were either at home with their families or out stocking up on supplies for Ramadan.”

April was the month the Syrian military, backed by Russian warplanes, launched a fierce onslaught on rebel strongholds in Idlib and Hama. The offensive, which continues today, has killed hundreds of combatants and civilians, destroyed civilian infrastructure and displaced tens of thousands of Syrians, according to the UN and local relief organizations.

A day after Lowcock called on the Security Council to take “meaningful action” to protect civilians in Idlib, Russia, whose military has been backing Assad since 2015, announced that a cease-fire by Syrian regime forces would come into force on Saturday morning in the “de-escalation zone.”