IDLIB, Syria — Hundreds of Syrian civilians flee Idlib province on Thursday as the presidents of Russia, Iran, and Turkey readied for last-ditch talks on the fate of the last rebel bastion.
Government forces and their allies have been massing around Idlib, where aid groups fear what could be the last major battle of Syria’s seven-year civil war may also prove its deadliest.
Western powers have warned against a bloodbath but Damascus and Moscow are adamant that an offensive is needed to root out the jihadists who dominate the province.
Sporadic bombardment has targeted armed groups on Idlib’s fringes in recent days, and on Thursday families begin streaming out of their battered hometowns to seek safety elsewhere.
Trucks piled high with mattresses, metal pipes, plastic tanks, and wicker mats are seen heading towards camps near Syria’s northern border with Turkey.
“We left because of the shelling, the crazy indiscriminate shelling,” says Abu Naser, who fled on the back of one such truck.
“We don’t know where to head now. So many people fled — what are we supposed to do, sit under the shelling and airplanes?
Another group of hundreds of families flees the province’s southeast for other rebel-held areas, says the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman says “around 180 families, or some 1,000 people” had escaped those areas since Wednesday night, heading to rebel territory further east.
— AFP
This picture from September 6, 2018, shows a Syrian youth riding in the back of a truck with sheep and a refrigerator, fleeing from government forces’ bombardment on the town of al-Tamanah on the southern edges of the rebel-held Idlib province. (AFP Photo/Omar Haj Kadour)
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