Our moral obligation - Telegraph William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, has announced that Britain is going to make "more active efforts" to protect the lives of rebels fighting the regime of Syria's President Bashar al-Assad. This means supplying non-lethal military equipment such as body armour and armoured cars, as well as testing equipment to find evidence of chemical weapons. We might regret the fact that Britain has to get involved at all in a civil war that finds both sides compromised by allegations of human rights abuses, but standing by and watching the slaughter unfold is no longer an option. We certainly have a moral obligation to act. Yesterday, the UN released a report that put the number of refugees fleeing Syria at more than one million. Around half are children. The destabilising of the region also threatens Britain's strategic interests: Lebanon's population has increased by 10 per cent and Iraq, which already has more than a million internally displaced people, has taken on an additional 100,000 mouths to feed. This chaos could create a breeding ground for Islamic radicals, adding to the ranks of the global jihadist network. To end the conflict, Mr Assad has to go. Although he has clung on to power for far longer than expected, his money reserves are running low and the rebels are making military progress. By offering limited, but potentially invaluable, support, Britain might add to the pressure for Mr Assad to leave the country peacefully - something that would admittedly require a change of heart on the part of his Russian allies. Of course, the strategy contains some element of risk - we have to be careful that the hardware does not fall into the wrong hands. Full-scale military intervention may be out of the question, but the growing scale of the carnage justifies a more hands-on policy.