800,000 Syrians Have Fled in Three Months. This Is What It Looks Like.

By Vivian Yee, Allison McCann, Hwaida Saad and Haley Willis February 14, 2020

It’s an agonizing, dangerous journey on overloaded trucks in freezing weather.

Hundreds of thousands of people — mostly women and children — are trying to escape relentless airstrikes in northwest Syria.

Families have been separated. Some crawl ahead by car. Others go on foot.

It is a migration similar in scale to the Rohingya crisis of 2017.

But here in Idlib, where pro-government forces are fighting to recapture the rebels’ last territory, many people are fleeing for the third or fourth time.

During nine years of civil war, millions of Syrians found safety in other countries or in Idlib Province. It was the refuge of last resort.

But now there is nowhere left to go.

Turkey has closed its border. And as pro-government forces march farther into Idlib, civilians are squeezed into a shrinking space between the border and the war.

Abu Muhammad, a father of four and a former government soldier, fled with his family last year.

He took only what he could fit on one small motorcycle — some blankets and his 18-year-old daughter’s English textbook.

“We left with nothing,” he said.

His family has been uprooted multiple times during the war, moving farther and farther north.

Now, as the fighting gets closer, he is preparing to flee again.

They are part of the exodus that started last year, after Syrian and Russian forces launched a new assault on rebel-held lands.

They hit hospitals, schools and bakeries. In many places, health care is out of reach.

At least 1,700 civilians have been killed since the offensive began last spring.

The Syrian government and its allies have also hit people as they fled.

A strike on one family’s van last week killed nine civilians, including seven women and children.

Some people have set their own houses on fire before leaving, determined not to let them fall into government hands.

“Burn everything. I don’t want to see” government forces inside, Abdul Rahman Abdo said as he burned his home.

The aim of the strikes, it appeared, was to clear people out.

It worked.

If Idlib falls, President Bashar al-Assad will be close to recapturing the country’s last opposition-held territory, which he lost control of in 2012.

Many people fleeing end up in conditions like this: camping in flimsy tents that flood over and over again.

Some have been living here for months.

It’s also bitterly cold. This tent burned down after a family lit a fire for warmth, killing two young sisters. At least 12 people have died of exposure.

Abu Muhammad said he’s using the blankets he brought to try to block the wind from the half-finished room where he’s staying.

Satellite images show the huge expansion of camps and temporary housing over the past year.

And if the fighting continues, hundreds of thousands more will flee and need shelter.

Near the Turkish border, brick housing is going up to shelter a small portion of the displaced. But it’s not enough.

Europe, Turkey, Lebanon — everyone wants the refugee crisis to go away, and for Syrians to return to Syria.

But the country is so destroyed, its economy so ruined, that people may be living as refugees for years.

Can Syrians ever go home?

By Vivian Yee, Allison McCann, Haley Willis, Hwaida Saad, Evan Hill, Christiaan Triebert, Sarah Almukhtar, Dmitriy Khavin and Abeer Pamuk.