ABSTRACT
In peaceful times, Idlib lies at the heart of its namesake province in northwest Syria. About halfway between the major Syrian cities of Latakia and Aleppo, Idlib, with its tall palm and cypress trees, is just a few miles from the Turkish border and close to the Mediterranean Sea. But 2015 was not a peaceful time. Rebels seized the heavily bombed town in the ongoing civil war, and President Bashar al-Assad’s national army retaliated with chlorine bombardments. Civilians fled into neighboring Turkey and Lebanon, filling a string of refugee camps that looked like a pearl necklace on the map. More than two dozen camps in all, established by the Lebanese and Turkish governments, these centers were largely provisioned and financed by the United Nations’ primary refugee agency, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Full to overflowing, camps within an arduous walking distance of Idlib provided safe haven for more than 200,000 of the estimated 850,000 Syrian refugees in Turkey. To pay for the costs of humanitarian aid, both to fleeing Syrians and those displaced internally, the UNHCR appealed for $6.5 billion, the biggest amount ever requested to date for a single humanitarian emergency.
