The United Nations is pursuing diplomacy at the highest level to achieve a cease-fire in Syria, where the besieged enclave of eastern Ghouta is at a "breaking point" and the Idlib governorate is a "catastrophe," a senior U.N. official said on Tuesday.
Eastern Ghouta, a rebel-held enclave on the outskirts of the capital Damascus, is particularly vulnerable, with 400,000 people besieged in an area increasingly sealed off from any outside help, said Ramesh Rajasingham, U.N. deputy regional humanitarian coordinator for the Syria crisis.
"What we would like to see is an immediate ceasefire, and I think that's very possible. We've had it before, it's not pie in the sky," Rajasingham said.
"I know that we are engaging on all fronts, at the highest level as well, to ensure that there is a ceasefire throughout Syria. If there's a will it can be done, definitely, and this is what the United Nations is pushing for in all its political initiatives."
Rajasingham said that hundreds of patients in eastern Ghouta desperately need medical evacuation and many are dying while they wait.
"A breaking point is when people die unnecessarily when they could be saved. So we're at that breaking point," he said.
Rajasingham said Idlib governorate, in northwest Syria near the Turkish border, is "a catastrophe in every single sense": humanitarian, medical, political and military.
He said Idlib needs to resume the ceasefire agreed upon last year by Russia, Turkey and Iran, which allowed hospitals to operate and people to avoid being displaced.
"We are back in a very intense conflict in an area where we thought there was actually going to be no fighting," Rajasingham said.
More than 330,000 people have been displaced in the Idlib governorate since December – more than in the battle for Aleppo a year ago – taking the total number of displaced in the area to about 2 million, he said.
U.N.-led talks with the warring sides in Syria reached a deadlock in December.
The mediator of the talks, Staffan de Mistura, plans to brief the U.N. Security Council on Wednesday and then meet ministers at the Munich Security Conference this weekend.
The foreign ministers of Russia, Iran and Turkey plan to meet next month to discuss the situation, Kazakh Foreign Minister Kairat Abdrakhmanov said on Tuesday.
