As his family crammed alongside strangers into a small, exposed makeshift tent in Syria near the border with Turkey, Mohammed Musa slept outside in the mud through the first heavy rainfalls of autumn. A week earlier the 24-year-old, his wife, child, parents and siblings fled...

Tartus has itself largely escaped the conflict in Syria, but posters of its sons killed fighting for the regime elsewhere in the country line the western city's main road. A wall in the central bus station is a tapestry of pictures of the dead, most of them young, posing in...