MP NICOLA BLACKWOOD on her experience of the war-torn region

More than two years into the Syrian crisis, with 80,000 dead and millions injured and displaced, we’re at the unpalatable stage as conflict observers where Syrian stories now have to hit a new low in the war-torn horror stakes to seem significant or newsworthy.

Recently, I too have just spent three days in Beirut with Oxfam. I met with Palestinian and Syrian refugees who have fled the fighting in the last few months. In Shatila, a Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut, I met women and girls who fled similar Palestinian camps in southern Syria.

They didn’t know what had happened to their husbands and brothers, some of whom were still in Syria fighting. Menal, a beautiful, articulate 19-year-old girl, broke down in tears when telling me she felt in danger all the time in the camp where the Lebanese police have no jurisdiction and that all she wanted to do was go back home to Syria.

Inevitably, so far the situation inside Syria itself has been the focus of international attention but any conflict has regional implications as people scatter and economies destabilise. Some conflicts, however, are more regional than others. Unlike Libya, for example, Syria is a small country and refugees fleeing for safety have nowhere to go but out — into Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon.

That is one reason that refugee numbers are vastly outstripping all predictions and all resources. It’s become increasingly clear that those resources were never going to be enough. I saw this firsthand in a haunting visit to a tented refugee site in the Bekaa Valley.

Although there was clean water and sanitation installed on the site it was relatively new and water supplies were running low across the country because of the increased pressure. Already refugee numbers are barely comprehendible — there are 424,000 registered refugees in Jordan and it is estimated that will rise to 1.2m by the end of the year, a fifth of the Jordanian population.

Lebanese estimates show that registered and unregistered refugee numbers have already topped the 1m mark — that is a quarter of their population. So far these countries have kept their borders open. In Lebanon, some schools teach Lebanese children in the morning and Syrian children in the afternoon (they have a different school syllabus so can’t be taught together).

Many Lebanese hospitals trying to cope with the influx of wounded have cancelled all non-emergency procedures, the housing and labour markets are both destabilised. Investors are nervous, tourists are staying away and the Lebanese are not spending.

The economy is on the brink of recession as everyone holds their breath to see how much more pressure Lebanon can take. In a country whose history of entrenched sectarian violence is so very recent and where many have seen decades of Syrian intervention in their own affairs as malignant and destabilising you get the sense that the Lebanese, generous as they are being, feel their country reaching saturation point.

Two years into this uprising we certainly are now facing a regional humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. But not only do lack of resources and coordination mean that crisis threatens to destabilise countries like Jordan and Lebanon, but the sectarian realities of the Syrian conflict combined with that weakening resilience risks creating a security time bomb stretching beyond the borders of Syria itself.

In Syria, there was a collective failure to prevent conflict and the bloody consequences are played out daily for all of us to see. With sectarian tensions and humanitarian crisis putting so much pressure on neighbouring states, let’s heed the warning signs.

Because whether I was speaking to a Syrian refugee, a Lebanese school teacher, an international businessman or a diplomat in my three short days in Beirut and the Bekaa Valley their only glimmer of hope for the future hinged on one single factor: stability.