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I’m a doctor who’s seen the world’s worst humanitarian crises – but the suffering I’ve seen in Syria is unprecedented

I stood in the muddy field of one of the 1,150 camps for the internally displaced people in Idlib. It was raining and the mud was a couple of feet deep. It’s very cold here in January, but children were walking in light shoes and slippers. Just three weeks before my medical mission, there...

Finding Freedom in a Syria of Ever Fewer Men

The women of eastern Aleppo were rarely visible before the war, but now they shape the bitter peace. In the poor, conservative districts of Syria’s ancient commercial capital, many women seldom used to leave the house, and only with their husbands if they did; the men not only won the bread,...

Having fled bombing, Syrian children learn to read in tent schools

Syrian teacher Ahmad al Hilal listens to his young pupils sitting on a mat reciting the Arabic alphabet in a makeshift school in a tent on the outskirts of a sprawling refugee camp city along the Turkish border. Many ran for their lives with their mothers under heavy aerial bombing by...

Syria refugees bring new tastes and traditions to Kurdish Iraq

At first, no one in the Iraqi Kurdish capital Arbil would drink the bitter coffee at Syrian refugee Abdussamad Abdulqadir's cafe. But now it's a hit, part of a growing cultural exchange. Since conflict broke out in Syria in 2011, many ethnic Kurds living in the country's northeast fled...