A children’s advocacy group on Friday said that half of nearly 400,000 displaced people in the Syrian government’s two-month-long offensive on the country’s last rebel-held region are children, calling it a wave of displacement unlike anything seen before in the war in Syria.
The offensive by Syrian government forces, backed by ally Russia, has focused mainly on Idlib Province in the northwest, and also lately on neighboring Aleppo.
It is an attempt to seize control of a strategic highway that links the capital, Damascus, and the north.
The push has accelerated in the past two weeks and government forces on Wednesday seized control of the key town of Maaret al-Nouman, which sits along the highway.
The UN has estimated that 390,000 Syrians have been displaced over the past two months — 315,000 in December and 75,000 last month.
According to advocacy group Save the Children, half of those displaced are children, adding that at least 37,000 children were forced to flee this month.
During a one-week period in the middle of last month, 34 children and 13 women were killed, the UN said.
Trucks and other vehicles have crammed the roads as civilians — some of them already displaced by earlier fighting — packed up their meager belongings to leave towns and villages under attack.
Save the Children said its advocacy partners working in Idlib and Aleppo described kilometers of convoys and said “the sheer scale of displacement is unlike anything they have seen before.”
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces launched the offensive, despite a ceasefire deal struck between Russia and Turkey, which support opposite sides of the conflict.
Turkey, which backs the Syrian opposition, has said that Russia has not abided by previous agreements to end violence.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday warned that Ankara could use military force to bring stability to Idlib after the offensive sent tens of thousands of people fleeing toward the Turkish border.
“We will not stand by in Idlib or other parts of Syria,” Erdogan told a meeting of provincial ruling party leaders in Ankara. “We sincerely want stability for Syria and we won’t hesitate to do whatever it takes, including using military force.”
Turkey, which hosts 3.5 million Syrian refugees, has troops stationed at 12 observation posts in Idlib to monitor the earlier ceasefire.
Asked about Erdogan’s statement accusing Russia of failing to observe its obligations on Idlib, President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the Kremlin disagrees with that.
Peskov told reporters that Idlib has remained “the rallying point for a large number of terrorists who have waged offensives against the Syrian government forces and the Russian military base” on the coast of Syria.
“That causes our deep concern,” he added.
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