Front Burner - 'No safe haven': The escalating crisis in Idlib, Syria

Episode Date: February 21, 2020

A humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding in Syria's Idlib province. Nearly one million people have been displaced since a Russian-backed Syrian government offensive began in December, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to flee to ever-shrinking camps along the border with Turkey. Today on Front Burner, we talk to CNN senior correspondent Arwa Damon, who was just in Idlib, about what she saw on the ground. “These are families that have been displaced multiple times,” she tells Jayme. “What makes this time so much more different is that it’s almost as if there is a sense of finality to it … they’re going to reach a point where they can’t run anymore.”

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Poisson. The United Nations says Syria is on the brink of the biggest humanitarian horror story of the 21st century. I am getting daily reports of babies and other young children dying in the cold. The crisis in the Syrian province of Idlib is escalating. Hundreds of thousands of people are on the run, fleeing airstrikes from the Russian-backed Syrian regime.

Nearly a million people have been displaced since the offensive kicked off in December. But the area to which they can run is shrinking smaller and smaller. Arwa Damon is a CNN correspondent. She was just in Idlib and we're reaching her today in Istanbul. She's going to tell me about what she saw on the ground at the heart of a humanitarian catastrophe. This is Frontburner. Hi, Arwa. Thank you so much for making the time to speak with me today.

My pleasure. Thank you. So the UN says nearly a million people have been displaced in this area since December alone. This number is astonishing. And what does that level of displacement actually look like on the ground? It's on such a scale that I think for those of us who even go in and witness it briefly, and those of us who have gone in multiple times, I mean, it's truly astounding. You think you have an idea of what's happening because we've been covering it, we've been seeing the images, but it's not until you actually get in there and start feeling how claustrophobic it's becoming, feeling this widespread panic that is rippling across this population, knowing that they're being squeezed into this smaller and smaller space, that you begin to only get a sense and a slight understanding of what it is that they are going through. These are already families that have been displaced multiple times. Many of them have been on the run over and over and over again. What makes this time so much more different is that it's almost

as if there's a sense of finality to it. And they know that they're eventually going to reach a point where they can't run anymore because the Turkish border is closed. The regime and the Russians are moving in on them. And out of that number you cited there with the UN, that nearly 1 million, 60 percent of those are children. Wow. Just briefly, for people who may not be familiar, can you describe to me the significance of Idlib? It's like the last opposition stronghold in Syria, nine years into the civil war, right? It is. It is the last rebel-held stronghold. And it is also where previously, in all of the other previous battles that took place, when there were ceasefires negotiated, there were then safe corridors

that were set up from these other areas that would move the civilians and the fighters from these other areas that the regime was recapturing. So Homs, Damascus, you know, all over the country, they would then get shipped to Idlib. Hundreds of men, women, and children are frantically fleeing the besieged city of Homs after being trapped there for 18 months. The issue with Idlib is that there is nowhere for these people to then get shipped to.

So that's why you really get the sense that, you know, this is this is it for this population, because where are they supposed to go? There is no safe haven for them to go to. The regime very much wants to regain control over Idlib because it wants to regain control over the entire country. The Russians are adamant that that is also what needs to happen at this moment. The only true adamant that that is also what needs to happen. At this moment, the only true outside power preventing that from fully taking place to a certain degree is Turkey. But how far is Turkey willing to go at this stage? You know, the Europeans, the Americans, they're all lamenting what's happening in Idlib, but they're not actually willing to do anything to save the civilian population.

Idlib in and of itself is pretty complicated in the sense that, yes, among all of the different fighting groups there, one of the groups, which is among the more powerful groups, is al-Qaeda's affiliate. But at the end of the day, if you look at what's happening, the Russians and the regime are not just going after the extremists. They're not just going after the armed rebel units. They are going after the civilian population. I've heard reports that there are bombs hitting hospitals and other civilian targets. There are bombs hitting hospitals, and this has been a trend, a horrific trend, throughout this entire war. The deliberate targeting of hospitals, of clinics,

to the point where many of them end up in undisclosed locations, or they try to move themselves a few levels underground to try to protect themselves and their patients. Maternity hospitals are being hit. Frontline hospitals are being hit. Normal clinics are being hit. The civilian population, neighborhoods are also being hit. And we've had multiple reports of people as they are fleeing being targeted as well, which is why there is such fear throughout the population. Because look, from the very beginning, this war in Syria, this was a war with no rules, no real front lines,

and a population that right now has no options. And you mentioned that the border with Turkey is closed. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? The idea that these people have nowhere to go to? So Turkey is already hosting about 3.5 million Syrians. And Turkey says that it is not capable of taking in any more refugees. So Turkey, a few years ago, actually shut its border. And what this has done is basically transform the border area that's inside Syria into this massive, sprawling camp. Again, as I was saying, as more and more people from other provinces were finding themselves in Idlib.

What's happening right now is that all of these people are being crushed into this shrinking space. And Turkey right now is still maintaining that it can't open the border. But at the end of the day, either there needs to be some sort of an end to the fighting or Turkey is going to have to somehow open that border. Otherwise, we're literally talking about, you know, millions of lives being at stake. The head of the UN's emergency services himself said... You know, if this goes on, what we're going to see is Italy, that part of northwestern Syria,

turned into the world's biggest pile of rubble, strewn with the corpses of a million children. How much more serious do the warnings need to get? Oh my God. Can you tell me what that journey is like on the road? I know that you spoke to people who are literally picking up anything they can find in very short notice in their homes and fleeing. So the closer you get to the areas that are being bombed, the more you see this emptying of the villages in there. And that's what everyone who lives there will tell you is the exact objective of the regime, the Syrian regime and the Russians.

of the regime, the Syrian regime and the Russians. What you end up finding and what we saw is families packing up trucks and little children hugging their stuffed toys. For the last time, we saw two sisters doing this because on the scale of things, toys are no longer a priority so these children had to leave their toys behind but what was especially striking in that moment that we witnessed was that they didn't cry and they didn't complain wow the kids they just the kids the kids i mean i think back to myself at that age and if someone had tried to take my toy away or any number of other children who are you know eight nine years old and their parents try to take their toys away i mean these kids weren't even complaining about it there wasn't even a word out of their mouths it was as if they accepted this reality of theirs and just up the road from this house a family had just arrived into this particular town and they had been walking for seven hours

in the middle of the night because their village had been bombed and they couldn't get transport. And a couple of the kids didn't even have proper boots on. I was wearing huge winter boots that I've actually taken on my trips to the Arctic. Wow.

It's very cold there right now. It's freezing. They had soaking wet socks and flip flops. I also know that you visited these camps. I do want to get a sense of what they're like. And so can you tell me about some of the people that you met there? Yeah. So right now you have a mishmash

of camps that exists. You have these makeshift camps that are popping up as people are fleeing that they then end up, you know, putting their tent or whatever blankets they've managed to sort of string and sew together to form a makeshift tent and settling down where they can. But many of them end up having to move within a few days of settling in certain places. Then you have the longstanding camps that have been in the province, again, from people that have been displaced, you know, from six years ago. And those camps are like huge, massive, sprawling tent cities that have actually over the years been transformed as more and more years have gone by and people start building up. So your floor becomes cement,

your walls become a layer of cement. We went through, and this is a real, I think, indication of just how dire the humanitarian situation is because Because, you know, even in these camps, even those who've been there for a while, because of the dropping temperatures, because of this humanitarian crisis, there isn't enough for them, for any of the people inside Syria right now, to keep themselves sufficiently warm. So we went to one of the camps at night, the larger camps, and we met a family whose baby, 48 hours before we were there, had frozen to death. Oh, my God. I fed my baby and he went to sleep, Samia tells us, still in shock. At 6.37, the children woke me up screaming.

I touched him and he was icy. This mother is sitting in the corner, I mean, obviously, understandably, still in complete shock. Her husband, once we started talking, just clearly was about to break down and he just got up and left the room. And the mother is sitting there telling us about how her baby was healthy. And she was so happy that he was healthy because you don't very often have healthy babies. He was nine months old. She'd nursed him.

She played with him. She put him to sleep. She woke up in the morning and his body was ice cold. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is unimaginable. Can I ask you, what's it like for you to be witnessing this?

You know, it stays in your throat. It really grips you by the throat and it won't let you go because it is just so fundamentally morally wrong that we live in a world where we have allowed this to happen. Politics aside, when you look at what's happening inside Syria right now, it is as if one is witnessing the shattering of our collective moral compass, or it's that it actually shattered a long time ago or never even really existed. And what's happening in Syria right now is bringing that to the fore in an undeniable manner. Can you tell me more about that? The idea that you think it never possibly even existed? What do you mean by that? I think that comes from, you know, I think back, you know, other wars that took place where the world said, you know, over and over again, the world keeps saying never again, never again, never again, we're going to be better than this, we're going to do better than this as a global community. We are not going never again, never again, never again. We're going to be better than this. We're going to do better than this. As a global community, we are not going to allow

atrocities to be forced onto civilian populations and helpless children. And we're not, we're no longer going to allow their innocence to be robbed by war and cruelty. And yet it keeps happening over and over. And so it really makes you question, you know, who and what we are as a species. You know, you mentioned before that people feel like they're on their own, that there is this collective failure. Is anybody doing anything that could help mitigate some of the catastrophe that that that you've witnessed the the united nations for example i mean look first of all the united nations itself says that it does not have the current capacity to meet the level of the demand inside. Because over the last two months,

there has been such a wave of displacement. And it's not just one day. It's waves upon waves upon waves that the numbers are jumping up. They don't have enough funding to begin with for their Syria appeal. They don't have the capacity. If we look at the UN Security Council,

the Russians and the Chinese veto anything that has to do with Syria or anything meaningful that has to do with Syria. Anyways, there are a number of local Syrian aid organizations on the ground doing some extraordinary work. But it's the thing is, is it's not enough. No matter what we think we the collective global we think that we've done to try to help Syria. None of it has even come close to being enough. And now once again, all of the efforts are not enough. There's no reason for the suffering

to be at this level. There's no reason for us to meet a mother who literally looks at us and says, sometimes I look at my children, and I wish we were all dead rather than have them live this life. What do you think needs to happen right now? I think the most pressing thing right now is to have some sort of a ceasefire negotiated. Okay. And are there any talks? So the Russians and the Turks have been meeting because let's also address the fact that the power brokers inside Syria are not necessarily the Syrians. The talks, the decision makers, it's the Russians right now and it's the Turks. Right. This has turned into a proxy war, essentially. Exactly. And this happened years ago. And right now the Russians are the more powerful player at the table to

our Russian colleague to stop the support of Syria if you tell the Syrians that there is no longer military support to the Syrian regime they will have to stop the onslaught on their own population to my German colleague we will not stop supporting the legitimate government of Syria, which is conducting a legitimate fight against international terrorists. But the Turks are also upping their military posture inside to a certain degree. Remember, they lost 14 soldiers in a period of a week. They have been sending in more military hardware. President Erdogan has been issuing warnings to the regime saying, you've got to pull back to the previously negotiated border. Remember,

two years ago, the Turks and the Russians had negotiated a border to be drawn around Idlib province and some parts of Aleppo province that was meant to be a buffer zone that was meant to create inside of the buffer zone, this de-escalation zone to keep the civilian population safe. Since its inception, it has never really held up. But at least there have been brief periods of time where the bombing has been reduced and where something resembling a ceasefire has been in effect. So yes, the Turks and the Russians right now are talking. They did actually just have two days of meetings in Moscow. But it doesn't seem like those talks went anywhere. But that but again, you know, the one line of thinking is that you negotiate a ceasefire and at the end of the day, you have the reality that the Russians and the regime right now have the upper hand. They're winning. They hold the majority of the country.

And this is really the last bastion. Exactly. And they have air superiority. They control the sky. And so it's unclear right now how far turkey is actually going to be willing to go you know the world still needs to address this issue of what happens to this civilian population i mean best case scenario is what they end up in a sliver of a buffer zone that will end up most likely being the most densely populated place on earth, up along the border with Turkey,

unable to go back into regime territory because they're afraid that the regime will kill them or that the regime will throw them into prisons like it has historically in the past with so many people. Because remember, people aren't just fleeing from the bombs. They're also fleeing from the Syrian government and what they believe the Syrian government is going to do to them. So you'll end up with a stuck population in a buffer zone, or you're going to end up with

a chilling, horrifying, I don't even want to think about, number of people that are going to die as this continues. It is so striking to hear you say that the best case scenario could be millions of people stuck in these camps. And that is the best case scenario. It is. It is. And, you know, there's some people that will still try to stick to this notion of, well, there's meant to be constitutional all wrong because when I keep thinking about how all indications on the ground are that it is going to end because it doesn't seem like anyone or anything or any government is actually willing to step up and save the Syrian people that are trapped there right now. It defies logic. It truly does.

Arwa, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today and also for bearing witness. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for listening. So before we go today, I want to leave you with the sound of a video of a father in Idlib. It was posted on social media. In an effort to protect his young daughter Salwa from the terror of the sound of falling bombs, Abdullah al-Muhammad says he and his wife have taught their three-year-old to laugh at the sound. Asifi? Yeah, I'm laughing at the sound. Azifi? The family has already had to relocate within Idlib once due to intensifying air raids.

The father told Al Jazeera that he wanted to convince his only child that, quote, this was just a game, that she shouldn't be scared. I needed to remove the fear from her heart. That's all for this week. FrontBurner comes to you from CBC News and CBC Podcasts. The show is produced by Mark Apollonio, Imogen Burchard, Elaine Chow, Shannon Higgins, and Derek Vanderwyk. Derek also does our sound design with help this week from

Mandy Sham and Matt Cameron. Our music is by Joseph Shabison of Boombox Sound. The executive producer of Frontburner is Nygma K. Blokos. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening and see you all on Monday.