Aid agencies staff said that families and families who fled the aerial bombardment and the advance of the Syrian forces in Idlib Governorate sleep in the open, in the streets, and in the olive groves, and have to burn toxic piles of garbage in order to seek warmth during the harsh winter nights.
The attack on the area displaced hundreds of thousands and led to the accumulation of an increasing number of displaced people in a pocket near the Turkish border, whose area is constantly shrinking.
Aid agencies say this is the largest single displacement of civilians in the nine-year-old war, but these displaced people have no shelter or supplies to help them.
Aid workers said ten children had died in the past week alone in makeshift camps scattered around the border area. The roads are crowded with an endless stream of cars and vehicles loaded with the baggage of fleeing civilians, while others are displaced on foot.
A displaced person in a camp in northern Idlib recounts how a family of four died on Tuesday asphyxia in smoke after they set fire to old shoes, clothes and cardboards.
"Most people brought piles of old shoes and clothes to burn ... The family members were sleeping and they suffocated," Adnan al-Tayyib told Reuters by phone.
There are about three million civilians still trapped between the Syrian government forces advancing in the region and the closed Turkish border. Turkey is already hosting 3.6 million Syrian refugees and says it cannot receive more.
The storms, which covered most of northwestern Syria with snow this week, exacerbated the plight of the displaced. In these circumstances, shelter became scarce after homes and tents were filled with dozens, while the landless had no longer enough to buy fuel or heating materials.
"People burn everything that is available to them," said Rachel Ceder of the Norwegian Refugee Council.
The United Nations Deputy Regional Humanitarian Coordinator on the Syrian crisis, Marc Katz, described the situation in Idlib as disastrous.
"We constantly hear stories of infants and individuals dying from the cold and their inability to prevent it," he said.