Imagine the entire population of New Zealand; leaving. On boats, marching over land, sheltering where you can to keep the kids dry and fed along the way.
Since 2011 more than four million people have fled Syria and it is predicted by aid agencies that this could rise to five million within the next few months. That doesn't include more than seven million people who are internally displaced - and either transient, and unable to leave the country for lack of funds or who are living rough because, well their house no longer exists.
More than 11 million people - there is not a UN summit or political agreement on refugee quotas that is going to fix that. If you read reports from the UK newspaper the guardian, as late as last month, these people are not leaving because of Isis. They're running away from their own government. The brutish senseless murder of more than 120 people in Paris over the weekend is utterly deplorable. Yet so too is the coughing and foaming deaths by chemical warfare launched by a nation's leader on its own civilians, more than 1500 of them, many of them children, in one attack alone.
If you ask the people who work with refugees here, they will tell you Syrians will not publicly criticise anything happening in their own country, not because of fear of retribution from Isis - but because they are terrified of "the regime".
According to the British-based Syrian Network for Human Rights, Assad's regime has killed civilians at a rate seven times that of Isis. Amnesty International also admits that it is an open secret that Assad is the main perpetrator in the civilian casualties. There may well be many civilian casualties as a result of the French air-strikes and there has been little discussion of also attacking Assad's strongholds if Assad is, by his behaviour the best recruiter ever for Isis.
