RPT-INSIGHT-All our dreams are gone; Desperation escalates for Syrians as conflict escalates

(Repeats without change)

By Dominic Evans

IDLIB, Syria, March 2 (Reuters) – In a maternity hospital in northwestern Syria, an alarm flashes at the main entrance to alert staff. These are not patients en route to the hospital. They are war planes.

Doctors at the hospital face a daily struggle to care for pregnant women in the midst of an attack by the Syrian government that has penetrated deep into Idlib province in an effort to stifle the last rebel stronghold fighting President Bashar al-Assad. Medical staff said there has been a marked increase in miscarriages and premature births in the past two months. Some pregnant women arrive in shock after leaving home terrorized by the bombing, and four or five babies die in the womb every day, a doctor told Reuters.

"For me, the last step was the most difficult of all," said the doctor, Ikram, 37, eight months pregnant.

Speaking Thursday in a small room filled with a dozen tiny babies in incubators, she said the last hospital she worked in was hit by an air strike. She said her stepfather's home was too, and a rocket landed unexploded next to the kindergarten her two young children, 3 and 4 years old usually go to.

A few minutes after speaking, the hospital alarm went off. An amber light flashed to warn of an approaching aircraft and a red light signaled the danger of a direct hit.

While motherhood has been spared, the intensification of air strikes and bombings in northwestern Syria has caused the largest displacement of Syrians in the 9-year conflict, in which hundreds of thousands of Syrians were killed.

Nearly a million people, more than half of these children have been uprooted since December while fleeing the destruction of their towns and villages, which the United Nations says could be the worst humanitarian crisis of the conflict. Traumatized by the war and several already uprooted by the fighting, they are now crammed into a pocket of land that is shrinking between the Syrian government forces advancing from the south and east and the fortified Turkish border to the north.

The Russian-backed Syrian government has attempted in recent months to recapture the province of Idlib, a region that stretches about 100 km (60 miles) into Syria from its northernmost point of the border Turkish. He says he is fighting to eliminate terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, from his land and has pledged to take back "every inch" of Syria. Turkey, which has declared that it cannot cope with the number of people fleeing the war, supports the rebel forces fighting against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

More than 130 civilians, including at least 44 children, were killed in the month of February alone, with dozens of hospitals and schools among the establishments affected by the strikes, according to the United Nations.

Fighting has intensified in recent days, bringing Turkey's North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Russia closer to a direct confrontation in Syria. Turkey launched a counter-offensive against Russian-backed Syrian government forces in the region after the death of 33 Turkish soldiers in Syrian air strikes in Idlib last week.

Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has said he hopes to achieve a ceasefire in Idlib, Syria during talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin this week. On the battlefield, however, both sides doubled.

Ikram, who requested that her last name not be released for security reasons, qualified ten years ago just before the uprising began in 2011. She decided to stay in Syria, even then that other doctors were leaving. She worked in the town of Maarat al Numan, where there was a shortage of doctors, then moved to a hospital in her hometown of Idlib. "I wanted to do what I could," said Ikram, becoming visibly emotional.

The maternity ward she currently works in has been open for about five years, she said, adding that she is one of only three doctors to work there.

At Idlib city central hospital, a missile hit the road outside last week, leaving a large crater. The strike that injured four medical personnel and damaged hospital rooms and employees' living quarters was the third near-accident in recent months, said surgeon Mohammad Abrash, said. expressing Friday in a room overlooking the crater still visible outside.

He said that medical personnel were on the front line to treat people but that they were overworked, that medicines and medical equipment were scarce and that there was no replacements.

"It is so difficult for us to work in these conditions," added Abrash, 58, of the neighboring city of Saraqeb, before rushing to an operating room in the basement to treat a bleeding wounded man. injuries to the abdomen.

Trapped in a war zone

For the estimated 3 million Syrians crammed into the Idlib province, crossing the Turkish border to safety is a distant dream.

Hundreds of thousands of people are housed in camps at the sight of the concrete border wall that marks the border, struggling with freezing temperatures in recent weeks in which up to ten children have died, according to the Nations United.

Along the 30 km (20 mi) road from the border to the town of Idlib, other settlements are planted through olive groves and fields of ocher mud or perched on rocky outcrops. Some date back to the early years of the war and are now small towns of solid concrete block dwellings. But others have emerged in the past two months.

In a camp created in January to absorb the most recent IDPs, there are communal tents each housing 20 to 40 families as well as smaller tents, according to camp administrators.

"We came to this camp to shelter us from the winter," said Mamdouh al Darfil, 55, sitting in front of a 3-by-3-meter tent that he and some of his family members share on the site, near the town of Maarat Misrin. , north of the city of Idlib. He said that he and his nine children were displaced six times during the conflict.

They first moved into houses abandoned by other families, then sought refuge in tent camps. He and his two married sons now share three tents with each other, but he described living there as nothing more than a living, with no heat and little health care.

"THEY FELL US AND DISTRIBUTE US"

With nowhere to go, some 270 families have taken refuge in a sports stadium in the town of Idlib, many living in tents planted under concrete terraces, where the smoke from fires is lit to keep them warm. mixes with the stench of wastewater.

Some stadium families are as far apart as the former rebel strongholds in eastern Damascus, 270 km (170 miles) to the south, from where they were moved years ago. Many have been uprooted repeatedly by Syrian forces, which have progressed steadily since 2015, when Russia intervened to support Assad, turning the war decisively in his favor.

This includes furniture maker Ragheed al-Masri, 38, and his four children who were evacuated three years ago from their hometown of Saqba, east of the capital, to the province of Hama. He said that before being evacuated, conditions in his former rebel-held hometown had become unbearable, with a blockade imposed by government forces, making it difficult even to obtain A kilo of rice.

After leaving Saqba, they moved north to the town of Maarat al Numan, where they remained until it was captured by government forces in January. Now their house is a tent erected outside the sports stadium.

On Thursday, during a visit, children played among the tents, linen hanging along a fence inside the stadium and workers unloaded bags of food a truck. On the stadium walls, northwest of the rebel-held city for five years, religious slogans are painted reflecting the Islamist agenda of insurgent groups that dominate much of the province.

Shaza Deek, 20, said that she and her parents and siblings arrived about a week ago. She said her family was forced to flee their village of Kafr Ruma, south of Idlib, at the end of last year by the Russian-backed Syrian government offensive.

“They threw us from our homes in the cold. We went from house to house, ”she said. After taking refuge in an Idlib mosque for three weeks, his family moved to the stadium. "They are bombing and dispersing us, and no one is helping us," she said, noting the exception of Turkey which she says has helped and supported the rebels.

"I didn't expect things to reach this situation. In this revolution, we lost everything … I wanted to be a doctor, to study. All our dreams are gone. "(Dominic Evans report; Edition by Cassell Bryan-Low.)