Civilians can no longer flee fighting and bombing raids in Syria because borders are so tightly controlled and neighboring countries are overwhelmed by refugees, creating some of the worst suffering in modern times, a top U.N. agency chief said.
U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi was warning of a new disaster if the rebel-controlled Syrian city of Idlib was the next target of the Syrian military.
“The country is becoming a trap, in some places a death trap for civilians,” Grandi told Reuters during a donor conference for Syria.
“There is an entire population out there that cannot bear its refugees anymore, that is suffering from one of the worse ordeals in modern history.”
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based war monitor, said last month about 511,000 people had been killed in the war since it began in March 2011.
