Out loud

Jean Pletinckx
Head of Mission MSF

Today these people are trapped here. They say so themselves; they say they’re in an open-air prison.

On map :
Syria
Armed groups controlled area
Turkish controlled area
Government controlled area

In northwest Syria
more than two million people
have been forced to flee their homes
to escape the fighting.

The people who are native to this region have now been joined by huge numbers of displaced people. These people are Syrians. They are stranded here. They can’t go to Turkey anymore; they are trapped here. Nobody wants them. So these people are completely trapped and the only choice left to them is to live in the camps - spread over a very small area of just a few square kilometres and becoming more overpopulated by the day.

The ceasefire
signed in March 2020
is very fragile

They’ve lived through every single conflict in this front line area. And today they are caught in the middle of the internal conflicts underway between all the different armed groups, not just the government and the opposition.

We see more and more military convoys crossing the border every day, coming from one side or the other, to strengthen this border. And there have even been bombing raids recently, very close to the camps.

We’re soon going to have two major problems to deal with: winter’s coming, with conditions that can be very harsh, very difficult, in this region, and people who have been here for several years living in tents that are the now much the worse for wear. And there’s a very high risk of an offensive.

So we have to prepare for that, prepare for winter and prepare MSF’s capacity to provide medical support to the hospitals in traumatology.

The economic crisis
and Covid-19 are further
complicating the situation
in northwest Syria

Most of the people who until recently still had the financial capacity to buy medicines have been coming to MSF for access to our mobile clinics or our treatment centres for patients with chronic diseases. So we’ve been feeling the effects of the crisis at that level.

Since the beginning of the year, we’ve noticed that if we miss a distribution in a camp, people will come and ask us for it. We’re talking about a kit with hygiene consumables like soap and shampoo, the basics… So, if we miss a distribution, once a month, and people come and ask us for it, it’s fair to assume they don’t even have the money to buy soap any more.

Today, our distribution action is linked to a whole series of health risks. It’s linked to Covid, it’s linked to the climate, and so obviously, we’ve upscaled it with more distributions of hygiene products and improvements to the quality of shelters to try to avoid illness and an even more massive impact on living conditions during the winter.

Since April 2020, MSF teams
have been distributing more than 63,000 hygiene kits,
to more than 26,000 displaced families in several camps