Syria’s refugees: Lower the drawbridge

When the top representatives of the world’s international bodies arrived in Beirut last month, they had a clear message to convey. UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres and Anthony Lake, the executive director of UNICEF, were desperate to urge people and governments to extend more help to the victims of the Syrian civil war. Cautioning that the crisis had now produced the worst humanitarian disaster in at least a decade and the highest number of child victims, they warned that future generations would look back on recent months as a lost opportunity to end the war. It looks likely that their appeals will again fall on deaf ears. Frankly, the conflict is falling out of circulation. In March there were more than 100 articles on Crimea and the vanished Malaysian airliner for each one on the Syrian civil war, while the country’s crisis barely featured on Google Trends in