When nine years of civil war in Syria are nearing completion, the conflict continues to add increasingly worse numbers of devastation in which, by far, the most affected part is the civilian population. The latest warning issued by the UN about the existence of the greatest exodus of refugees since 2011 is a good example of the worrying degradation of a confrontation that beyond its political and strategic implications is having an intolerable cost in human lives.
In the middle of winter and with temperatures that have reached 10 degrees below zero, some 900,000 Syrians from the province of Idlib, on the border with Turkey, have had to leave the place where they were practically with it. Of these, about 290,000 are children and 80% of adults are widowed women. In many cases, these are refugees who have not left their homes, but shelters in which they had settled fleeing war from other areas of Syria. In these fields, living conditions have been described as "horrible" by international aid agencies, but at least there they were safe from war. No longer. Undertaking escape has become a desperate routine for hundreds of thousands of people.
It is urgent that, as the United Nations demands, humanitarian corridors be established that are respected by all fighting groups: the Syrian Army supported by the Russian air force, the Turkish Army, Kurdish militias, rebel groups fighting President Bachar Assad and jihadist militias. It is also necessary that the rules of war and international law be minimally respected so that hospitals, medical facilities and civil schools cease to be systematically bombed as reflected in the allegations of the UN, which attribute most of the attacks (and deaths) to Russian aviation and forces loyal to El Asad.
Even in a scenario of direct confrontation between two countries in the Middle East such as Syria and Turkey, which will have important regional consequences and in which there have been episodes of direct clashes between the armies of both countries, minimum rules should be respected. Diplomacy must first serve so that the humanitarian situation does not worsen and then so that the situation as a whole does not continue to be degraded.
Unfortunately the war in Syria has plunged into a spiral of destruction that makes a short-term solution unlikely, but what they cannot wait for more are concrete and feasible measures to prevent a new bleeding of civilian lives.
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