We can all understand the human cost of the Syrian crisis, argues Stylist columnist Lucy Mangan

So, the Calais ‘jungle’ – the encampment housing thousands of refugees from various war-torn countries – is being demolished. It’s both a perverse and apt way, I suppose, of marking the fifth anniversary of the civil war in Syria that has so swelled the numbers of dispossessed there.

Five years. That’s a long time. Long enough for 320,000 people to have been killed and nine million to have fled their homes, spilling out into Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, and then for 150,000 or so to have made their way down what are now well-worn migrant routes to what they hope will be the safety of Europe.

I still don’t understand, really, what is happening in Syria, any more than I understand – in more than the broadest brush terms – what has happened in all the dozens of war-torn states and countries whose people bleed out of them because there seems to be nothing any higher or international power can do to bind the wounds.

I used to feel bad about this. I know I should know more. Not for the first time, I would like to put a call out to the BBC to start doing a Newsround for adults. John Craven’s still with us. He’d do it. Perhaps he could read through my Twitter and Facebook feeds, where people keep posting articles that apparently back up their myriad beliefs and ringingly refute those of others, and arrange them into one coherent whole for me.

“Syria – it’s simpler than they want us to believe” Lucy Mangan on the human cost of the Syrian crisis