Record number of Syrians displaced

Displacement in first four months of the year is the highest during the 7-year conflict

More than 920,000 people were displaced inside Syria during the first four months of 2018, the highest level in the sevenyear conflict, the UN said Monday.

“We are seeing a massive displacement inside Syria... From January to April, there were over 920,000 newly displaced people,” Panos Moumtzis, the UN regional humanitarian coordinator for Syria, told reporters in Geneva.

“This was the highest displacement in that short period of time we have seen since the conflict started,” he said.

Moumtzis, UN regional humanitarian coordinator for Syria, called on major powers to broker a negotiated settlement to end the war and avoid a bloodbath in Idlib.”

“We worry about 2.5 million people becoming displaced towards Turkey ... There is no other location to move them to (in Syria),” he told a news briefing in Geneva.

An aid convoy reached the town of Douma in the enclave of Eastern Ghouta outside Damascus on Sunday, but the Syrian government did not allow UN staff to accompany it, Moumtzis said.

The United Nations also voiced concern on Monday about an escalation in fighting and air strikes in Idlib where civilians have “no place else to go” within their homeland.

Syrians have been displaced in the first four months this year

Russian air strike

Over the weekend, air strikes likely by Russia on a village in Syria’s rebel-held Idlib province killed at least 44 people, inflicting the highest death toll in a single attack on the region this year, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

“War planes, which are likely Russian, targeted the village of Zardana in northern rural Idlib overnight and caused the highest death toll in a single attack on the region, including 11 women and six children,” Rami Abdul Rahman, the director of the Britain-based war monitor said.

United Nations SecretaryGeneral Antonio Guterres expressed deep concern over the air strikes.

“He calls for a full investigation into the attacks, especially allegations that there was also a second strike targeting first responders, to establish accountability,” his spokesperson, Stephane Dujarric, said in a statement on Sunday.

The northwestern Idlib region remains the largest populated area of Syria in the hands of insurgents fighting the Damascus government.

In recent years, tens of thousands of fighters and civilians have fled there from parts of the country which the army has recaptured with the help of Russia and Iran.