President Bashar al-Assad's army, aided by heavy Russian air strikes, has swept through dozens of towns in Idlib province in the last two weeks in the deepest advance in years, forcing tens of thousands to flee to the Turkish border. Airstrikes and a ground advance by the Syrian regime have triggered multiple waves of displaced people. "We saw 200 Russian and Syrian regime airstrikes in the last three days, mainly against civilians," said the US special envoy for Syria James Jeffrey. The situation in Idlib has been dire but the recent escalation is worsening conditions, according to Fuad Issa, founder of Violet, a humanitarian relief organization helping displaced people in Idlib. "What's different this time is that the areas that people are fleeing to are very crowded... the military operations by the Syrian regime are occurring very quickly, since a month we had five big waves of IDPs the last one was four days ago," he told. "These waves that they are coming from different areas at the same time," he said. The recent violence has pushed people out of multiple towns along the main highways running through the opposition enclave. The Syrian regime announced the capture of the opposition-held city of Maraat Al Nouman.
These towns are part of a so-called de-escalation zone agreed to by Moscow and Ankara in 2018 and the two countries as recently as January 12 announced a ceasefire that has failed to end the violence. The Syrian regime and Russia deny targeting civilians and say they are targeting terrorists, pointing to the dominance of Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS), a former al Qaeda affiliate, in the area. Videos from the area show traffic jams with cars and trucks packed with entire households on major roads leading north toward the Turkish border. Turkey, which already hosts more than 3.6 million Syrian refugees, has said they cannot accept another influx and threatened military force against the Syrian regime and its allies. "If the situation in Idlib does not normalize immediately," Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned in a speech, "Turkey will not hesitate to do whatever it takes including using military force." More than 790,000 people have been displaced since April with nearly half of those people fleeing their homes since December, according to the latest report from UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Sitting outside a tent covered in blue tarp, 60-year-old Khadija Um Mohammad says that when airstrikes struck her house, everything she worked for in life vanished. "Now my life's work is gone. You see where we live now, we have nothing, I don't even have money to buy bread today," she said.
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