On Friday, the United Nations cautioned that fighting in northwest Syria could "end in a bloodbath" and called for a truce again, though Moscow denied claims of a mass evacuation of civilians from an offensive led by the Russian-led Syrian government.
Since December, Syrian air force-backed forces have been fighting to destroy the region's last rebel strongholds in a war that has killed an estimated 400,000 Syrians, displaced millions more, and left much of the country in ruins.
The new offensive in the Aleppo and Idlib regions has rooted nearly 1 million people-mostly women and children-who have fled from clashes to seek refuge further north, along the Turkish frontier.
OCHA, a U.N. humanitarian agency, said 60% of the 900,000 people trapped in a shrinking space after fleeing are youth.
"We are calling for an immediate truce to avoid more suffering and what we fear may result in a bloodbath," Jens Laerke, spokesman for OCHA, told a briefing in Geneva.
"The front lines and the relentless violence continue to move closer to these displaced areas, with bombardments increasingly affecting displacement sites and their surroundings."
At a university building in town of Azaz, northwestern Syria, people fleeing Idlib have poured out every day to shelter from fighting and bitter cold.
Souad Saleh, 58, is with her family and dozens of other people staying in a room. "We want to go home but we are not able to. We left things behind because there were warplanes over us and houses were collapsing," she said.
The escape had been frustrating. "Everybody wept," said the woman, bursting into tears.
Hayat al-Fayad, 50, said that since her family ran from the bombing some two weeks ago, her village at Idlib had emptied out. "The whole village has run abroad," she said.
Other families sleep outside on the roads and in olive groves, burning garbage in order to keep themselves warm. Some kids have died from the cold, while some families have at least reached refugee tent camps.
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