LONDON –

The flood of refugees from the civil war in Syria is a humanitarian disaster to which there is no end in sight. It has called forth a heart-warming response from the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel, which expects to receive around 800,000 refugees this year. This will present significant costs. Integration for linguistic and cultural reasons will not be easy and there will inevitably be some xenophobic opposition from right-wing elements.

Syria immigrants, if they can settle into new homes and a different environment in Germany, may help to solve the imminent problems of a population where the net reproduction rate is one of the lowest in Europe and where the population is aging fast. But it would be wrong to think that the German response has been dictated by such considerations.

The response of other European countries has varied. France and Spain, despite their high levels of unemployment, have been generally supportive of a unified European response to the crisis. East European countries, forgetting their own traumatic experiences during the war and under communist domination, have been at best grudging and in the case of Hungary positively hostile to the flow of refugees coming up through Greece, Macedonia and Serbia.

The photograph of the little Syrian boy washed up on the Turkish shore evoked a huge wave of sympathy and compassion in Britain. Prime Minister David Cameron was slow to recognize the depth of British concern for the refugees. He seemed preoccupied by the government's commitment to cut the level of net immigration into Britain. The British public, perhaps ashamed of their own government's attitude, responded generously to NGO appeals for help for refugees.

Eventually Cameron realized that his government could not sit on the sidelines and simply claim that Britain was doing all it could through the foreign aid budget. Accordingly Britain would, he decided, accept up to 20,000 refugees over the next five years from refugee camps in countries adjacent to Syria. But he was not prepared to do anything about the wave of refugees in Europe. His attitude has not endeared him to his European counterparts, whose help he will need if his renegotiation of the terms of British EU membership are to succeed.

British eyes have been focused on the problems caused by refugees and economic migrants around Calais at the French end of the Channel Tunnel. Groups of refugees sheltering in makeshift camps have caused constant and serious disruption to train and ferry traffic throughout the summer, but the Calais problem is only a small element in the overall refugee problem.

There are some 4 million refugees from the Syrian conflict in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan who exist in primitive conditions, often with very inadequate food and medical facilities. Syria is not the only source of genuine refugees seeking asylum in Europe. Sudan and Eritrea are two other countries where persecution has caused many to flee and seek asylum.

The civil war in Syria is much more than a refugee problem. As the years pass it becomes ever more difficult to find a political solution.

Despite substantial and apparently increasing military help from President Vladimir Putin's Russia and from Shiite-led Iran and its proxies in Hezbollah, the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad is unable to assert its authority over large swaths of the country. Its bombing campaign continues to inflict numerous civilian casualties and misery on the population remaining in the damaged cities and Syrian countryside. Indeed, there have been credible reports that the regime has once again used poison gas in spite of the U.N.-sponsored measures to remove chemical weapons.

The regime's opponents, backed by Sunni regimes led by Saudi Arabia, remain disunited and unable either to gain a decisive advantage over government forces or to find a way to collaborate effectively against either the regime or the extremists. The barbarous and ruthless forces of the Islamic State group, which calls for a Sunni caliphate enforcing Shariah and a medieval intolerance, now dominate these.

The Syrian civil war is thus not merely an internal Syrian dispute. It has become a Shiite/Sunni conflict. It has also become a dispute between NATO countries and Putin's Russia.

NATO countries are divided about how to respond. There is no support after the Iraq debacle to send in ground forces. Airstrikes against Islamic State in Iraq led by the United States have widespread backing.

U.S. forces have also carried out strikes against Islamic State in Syria. Britain, while participating in airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Iraq, has yet to agree to airstrikes on Syrian targets, but it has recently carried out a drone attack in which two British members of Islamic State who were apparently planning terrorist attacks in Britain were killed. The use of drones for this purpose was approved by the British law officers as legal under the U.N. Charter but has dismayed some British politicians on the left.

The British government would like to get parliamentary approval for British participation in airstrikes against Islamic State targets in Syria, but this has become more problematic following the election — to the dismay of moderates in Britain — of the left-winger Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the opposition Labour Party.

The Syrian civil war is further complicated by the recrudescence of friction and conflict between Turkey and its Kurdish minority, which shares its culture and language with the Kurds living in both Iraq and Syria.

Syria is thus a tangled web of humanitarian, political and religious complexities that seem impossible to disentangle. Yet if solutions are not found, the flood tide of refugees and human misery will only grow worse. The United Nations has so far proved powerless in the face of a Russian veto. Putin would scorn an appeal to him on humanitarian grounds. Mediation by powers not directly involved seems unlikely.

Hugh Cortazzi served as Britain's ambassador to Japan from 1980 to 1984.