1000s of Syrians Displaced as Threat of Idlib Attack Grows

The first signs of the predicted mass movement of Syrian civilians seeking to escape an imminent joint Russian-Syrian air assault emerged on Monday when the UN said 30,000 of the 3.5 million people in the opposition-run enclave of Idlib had already been internally displaced.

The UN has warned that Idlib could turn into the worst humanitarian disaster of the 21st century as hundreds of thousands of civilians surge to the currently closed Turkish border to evade an assault led by the regime of President Bashar al-Assad.

Russia and the US also accused each other’s allies of preparing to mount chemical attacks. Donald Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, stated on Monday that the United States, Britain and France had agreed that another use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government would result in a “much stronger response” compared with previous air strikes.