United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Friday called for an immediate ceasefire in Syria’s Idlib region “to end the humanitarian catastrophe and now also to avoid an uncontrollable escalation.”
“For almost a year we have seen a series of Syrian regime ground offensives supported by Russian airstrikes. This month there have been repeated deadly clashes between Turkish and Syrian regime forces,” Guterres said.
“This man-made humanitarian nightmare for the long-suffering Syrian people must stop. It must stop now,” he told reporters in New York.
Earlier, the Kremlin said President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan had agreed in a phone call to intensify talks on Idlib region to reduce tensions and implement a ceasefire.
Syrian regime forces backed by Russian air power have been battling since December to eliminate the last opposition strongholds in the region in a war that has killed an estimated 400,000 Syrians, displaced millions more and left much of the country in ruins.
The latest offensive in the regions of Aleppo and Idlib has uprooted nearly 1 million people - most of them women and children - who have fled clashes to seek sanctuary further north, near the Turkish border.
The UN’s humanitarian agency OCHA said 60% of the 900,000 people trapped in a shrinking space after fleeing are children.
“We call for an immediate ceasefire to prevent further suffering and what we fear may end in a bloodbath,” OCHA spokesman Jens Laerke told a news briefing in Geneva on Friday.
“The front lines and relentless violence continue to move closer to these areas which are packed with displaced people, with bombardments increasingly affecting displacement sites and their vicinity.”
Turkey, which currently hosts 3.7 million Syrian refugees, has said it cannot handle a new influx and has warned that it will use military power to repel Syrian advances in Idlib and ease a humanitarian crisis.
Turkey and Russia back opposing sides in Syria’s conflict, but have collaborated towards a political solution. The regime onslaught in the northwest has upset this fragile cooperation, causing Ankara and Moscow to accuse each other of flouting de-escalation agreements in the region.
Turkish and Russian officials have failed to find a solution to the clashes in several rounds of talks, and a flare-up on the ground on Thursday which killed two Turkish soldiers brought the total Turkish fatalities in Idlib this month to 15 troops.
Speaking to reporters earlier, Erdogan said the French and German leaders had proposed a four-way summit with Russia in Istanbul on March 5, but that Putin had not yet responded. He repeated that Turkey was not withdrawing its forces from Idlib.
Earlier on Friday, the Kremlin said it was discussing the possibility of holding the summit with Turkey, France and Germany mentioned by Erdogan.
The German and French leaders called Putin on Thursday to voice alarm about the humanitarian situation.
French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel also held a phone call with Erdogan, who asked Paris and Berlin for concrete support in the crisis.
