I WROTE in last weekend’s Sunday National about the massive human tragedy currently unfolding in Syria’s Idlib province. I’m going to write about it again now and make no apology for doing so. The reason is simple, I’m angry about it.

Just a few weeks ago, Syria Relief, the UK’s largest Syria-focused aid agency took out a full-page advertisement in a UK newspaper.

It wanted to tell people to stop getting angry about things “which don’t really matter” and to be angry about the “escalating humanitarian catastrophe” in Idlib instead.

Megxit, Vegan sausage rolls and the fact that shadow culture secretary Tracy Brabin wore an off-the-shoulder dress in Parliament are not worthy of our rage, Syria Relief pointed out, insisting it would be better directed elsewhere. How right it is. For just around the same time that some in the UK were venting their ire about such trivialities, a Syrian exodus of mainly women and children, now almost a million in total, were, and still are, fleeing for their lives under bombardment or freezing to death in overcrowded camps on the Syria-Turkey border.

A million people, just think of that, one million souls suffering horrendously in a very specific man-made act and barely a peep of concern about it from anywhere.

Mrs and Mrs Angry UK, meanwhile, were in a state of near-apoplexy that a young married couple were leaving the royal household.

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There are those, of course, who will tell you that Syria and the suffering of innocents there doesn’t really matter. Listening to such people it sometimes feels as though there are different rules for those caught up in Syria’s war, as if they are somehow not worthy of the right to live like any other human being in the world.

It’s been going on for so long now, such doubters will casually tell you. But then that’s precisely the problem with Syria’s war, you see – it’s not just that it’s now been going on for almost 10 years, but that time has normalised the unacceptable in the minds of so many.

Millions are forced from their homes, fine. Hospitals and schools are deliberately targeted, fine. Sanctuary is refused to those who run away from the bullets and barrel bombs, fine. Grand geopolitics is played with countless lives and no accountability for war crimes committed in the process, fine. Let’s just normalise the already grotesquely abnormal and turn the other way from potentially the worst humanitarian crisis since the Second World War, fine. What are all these things if not unacceptable?

How is it normal and acceptable that a Syrian father has to devise a private game to help his three-year-old daughter cope with her fear when she hears the sound of explosions?

Watch the video doing the rounds on social media right now of little Salwa leaning against her father, who, in order to distract her when the bombs thud down, has taught her to laugh openly and loudly.

What a poignant, bittersweet moment it is and a telling indictment of how Syria’s war has corrupted any notion of normality. How is it acceptable, too, that a family crammed into a tent in sub-zero temperatures and faced with freezing or having to move a gas heater inside where there is no ventilation, subsequently died from carbon monoxide poisoning?

For that is precisely what happened to Mustafa Hamadi, his wife Amoun, their 12-year-old daughter Huda and their granddaughter Hoor, who was just three years old after they fled Idlib 10 days or so ago.

THERE might be some consolation in all of this if, after nearly a decade of war and carnage, Syria’s conflict still managed to shock. It should, but in reality in many quarters its doesn’t.

As one official from Human Rights Watch said other day, that while the stories coming out of Idlib are not new in the Syrian conflict, they are “surprising in the absolute silence and lack of action that follows”.

The movement of people right now in Idlib has been seismic and their suffering, too, utterly off the scale. Local aid workers, those still able to work, tell of families “traumatised” and “forced to sleep outside in freezing temperatures” because aid camps are full.

They tell of mothers burning plastic to keep children warm, of babies and toddlers dying of exposure.

Life-saving tents cost little over £100 but humanitarian groups are severely lacking in resources and manpower to offer help. As one local aid worker summed up the dire situation, even “the people who help people need help”.

In Idlib, as in so many parts of Syria worst affected by the war, the global response to the humanitarian crisis relies almost entirely on Syrian aid workers, to feed people, tend to the wounded and find shelter for the displaced.

Yet Idlib right now is a place where paramedics have been killed after freeing survivors from rubble.

A hell hole where shelling or air strikes have injured doctors and nurses during their rounds and homeless aid workers have slept in their offices as towns emptied and their families fled, after they stayed behind to help stragglers.

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Doubtless many of you reading this will empathise with those Syrians bearing the brunt of these horrors, but will also be asking yourselves, what can be done?

We might feel helpless in the limited action we can take but taking that action matters all the same. Syria Relief was right in not pulling its punches in its newspaper advertisement a few weeks ago when it asked people to use the hashtag #GetAngryAboutIdlib.

Anger, though, must be matched by positive action. We as individuals need to bring whatever pressure we can to bear in helping put an end to what has been described as “the age of impunity”, when it comes to those actively seeking to attack civilian targets like clinics, schools and markets. It might sound obvious and even insignificant but still we should write to our MPs and MSPs. We must talk about it on social media and donate what we can to those fighting the good fight of humanitarianism.

Above all at least, as Syria Relief says, let’s make a start by getting angry about what is happening in Idlib.