Little refugees left in the cold
Nine children have frozen to death as Syrian humanitarian crisis grows
The baby wasn’t moving. Her body had gone hot, then cold. Her father rushed her to a hospital, going on foot when he could not find a car, but it was too late.
At 18 months, Eman Leila had frozen to death.
In the half-finished concrete shell that had been home since they ran for their lives across northwest Syria, the Leila family had spent three weeks enduring night-time temperatures that barely rose above 20.
“I dream about being warm,” Eman’s father, Ahmad Yassin Leila, said a few days later by phone. “I just want my children to feel warm. I don’t want to lose them to the cold. I don’t want anything except a house with windows that keeps out the cold and the wind.”
Syria’s uprising began in a flare of hope almost exactly nine years ago. Now, amid one of the worst humanitarian emergencies of the war, some of those who chanted for freedom and dignity in 2011 want only to ward off the winter cold.
Already the effective winner of Syria’s civil war, President Bashar Al Assad is closer than ever to retaking Syria’s last rebel-held territory, Idlib province in northwest Syria, a milestone that will clinch his victory even as it deepens his people’s suffering. Over the past three months, his forces, backed by Russian air strikes, have intensified their assault on the province, driving nearly one million residents toward the border with Turkey.
Many are living in tents or sleeping out in the open in the freezing cold. Eman Leila was just one of nine children who died of exposure in recent weeks.
The exodus is the largest of a war that has displaced 13 million people and taken hundreds of thousands of lives, and ranks among the largest in recent history, second only to the flight of Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar in 2017. With about three million residents trapped between a sealed Turkish border to the north and bombs and shells thundering up from the south and east, the crisis has the potential to grow far worse as the government battles to reclaim all of Syria.
Scrambling for safety
The fleeing Syrians scramble for safety in camps in the rural countryside near the Turkish border or in towns that may be bombed at any moment. The luckiest shelter in rented or abandoned buildings. Those who can afford it buy fuel for heaters, if any fuel is to be had. Those who cannot wrap their children in plastic sheets and fill any bag they can find with hot water to thaw their children’s beds at night. When they run out of wood, they burn clothes and shoes. One family that tried to keep a small fire in their tent this month ended up burning it down as they slept, killing two children.
“There are a lot of other people dying,” Leila said. “Nobody cares.”