The Syrian conflict, which marks 10 years later this month, has resulted in the largest displacement crisis since World War II, with an estimated 2.4 million people displaced in and outside Syria every year since the war begin in 2011.

“Syria has fallen off the front page. And yet the situation remains a living nightmare,”  U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said.

The civil war has killed nearly half a million people, wounded more than a million and displaced half the country’s population, including more than 5 million as refugees. A new report by UNICEF shows that 12,000 of those deaths were children.

“The scale of atrocities shocks the conscience,” Guterres said.  “Their perpetrators must be held to account if there is to be sustainable peace in Syria.”

Over the past year, the situation has been compounded by a severe economic and financial crisis and the spread of coronavirus in this Mideast country, where medical facilities have been hard hit by a devastating war that left large parts of Syria destroyed.

(AP)