David Pratt meets aid workers and refugees as the Syrian refugee crisis continues

In that time I’ve often been asked whether I get used to what I witness. It’s almost as if people expect you to become thick skinned or emotionally detached from the pain, suffering and terror of those encountered. Nothing could be further from the truth. For the simple fact is that the longer I find myself reporting conflict, the more I realise how irrevocably and indelibly it has come to shape my view of the world. 

The war in Syria has only reinforced that view. The scale of its violence and destructive power is something scarcely seen in decades. In its course it has thrown up the worst refugee crisis since the dark days of the Second World War. 

If there’s one thing I have also learned, it’s that statistics rarely convey the real measure of what war and its fallout mean in human terms. However, the vile facts that Syria’s carnage has spewed out would shock even the most cynically dismissive.

Over half of the country’s population of 22 million has been uprooted since the war took grip in 2011. Inside Syria’s smouldering ruin of a nation seven million people have been hounded from their homes by the dogs of war, be they regime soldiers, opposition militias, jihadists of the Islamic State (IS) or airstrikes by warplanes of multiple airforces. More than four million more ordinary Syrians have had enough of this rapacious onslaught and fled the country.

What follows are cameos of a few of those Syrians whose lives have twisted in the winds of that war and been irrevocably damaged as a result. These are the lives of those refugees I met on a recent journey from the Syrian border through Turkey and across the Aegean Sea to the Greek islands and a Europe some hope will provide sanctuary. 

All journeys have a beginning and the start of mine was when I met Salah in the Turkish town of Gaziantep, where he works for the humanitarian agency Mercy Corps. For the best part of four years the agency has toiled tirelessly across the border to provide Syrians with the help they need to stay alive. 

That Salah’s job as an aid worker helping his countrymen and women comes second only to his love of basketball is something he jokingly admits. “Four years ago I didn’t know what an aid agency was,” he tells me as we sit talking at Mercy Corps' headquarters.

He has been a basketball fanatic since he was 12 years old, and rose to play in Syria’s professional league and be selected for the national squad. “It wasn’t just because of my height, but because I’m talented,” he says, pulling another of the wide grins that makes this giant of a young man in his early twenties such an affable character. 

As we talk I find myself transfixed by his shoes and can’t help asking what size he takes. 

“Size 50 [UK size 15],” he replies. He pulls another smile before adding, “I’ve always had big feet.” 

Salah tells me of life in his home city of Aleppo from which he fled. “On one street you can have nothing and on another 50 people can die in a moment,” he says of the bombardment under which he and his terrified mother and sister lived for so many years. “Sometimes we considered those who were killed as being lucky in that they no longer had to suffer from the lack of food and other shortages.” 

Like so many young Syrians I met along the border, Salah is determined to stay just inside Turkey in the hope that he will be among the first to return when Syria is once again peaceful. Also like most Syrians, though, he doesn’t expect that to be any time soon.

In his demanding schedule as a humanitarian worker I ask whether he still finds time to play basketball. There is a pause that seems like an age before he replies. “So many of my team-mates have died in Syria,” he begins.

“We were between 15 and 18 players in our club and now five or six of those are dead and the others refugees,” he continues, eyes glazing over with tears. “I don’t find the same passion to play basketball any more." In an instant all hint of the natural joker has vanished as decisively as those friends and neighbours he saw eviscerated in his Aleppo neighbourhood. 

Salah’s decision to stay near the border sits at odds with the common perception among many people that most Syrian refugees want to come to Europe. For many of those who have chosen to stay in Turkey this has meant putting down temporary roots in places that, though devoid of the barrel bombs and bullets, present living conditions scarcely better than those they experienced in Syria. 

Travelling through the country I found myself in the dilapidated neighbourhood of Mevlana in the city of Izmir on Turkey’s Aegean coast. From the political graffiti on the walls to the Arabic spoken on the streets, you feel the war in Syria is never far away in this shoddy district in an otherwise upmarket coastal tourist haven with expensive fish restaurants, smart hotels and nightclubs.

Here Syrian refugee families can be found living in disused shop fronts and tumbledown outhouses, ruthlessly exploited by Turkish landlords, who in some instances have charged rent for premises that were scheduled for demolition.

Emira has been living in a shop front in Mevlana with her husband and four children for over a year and is worried about the winter months. “My target has always been to pay the rent then water and electricity and not be evicted,” she tells me as we sit in the single room she has partitioned using curtains to offer some privacy. For the basic utilities of rent, electricity and water, Emira pays 300 Turkish lira (about £70), 370TL (£84) and 100TL (£23) respectively.

These costs she has to manage with no savings and on the little her husband can get from any occasional work, for which Syrians are paid a rate considerably less than their Turkish counterparts. It’s a far cry from the happy pre-war days in Syria when her husband had his own business as a cobbler and the family owned their own house.

It is the youngsters, especially, for whom life is very tough. Since the outbreak of the war, Emira’s eldest daughter Istaa, who is 10 years old, has only had one year of schooling and the others no tuition at all since becoming refugees.

As we talk I notice that one of the children has drawn a crayon picture of a man and woman surrounded by the shape of a heart. It hangs on the wall alongside another heart-shaped ornamental cushion on which the words I LOVE YOU are embroidered.

The drawing is the work of Istaa, who says it is a picture of her mum and dad. When I ask if I can take a photograph of it and raise my camera, the little girl runs to hide behind the curtain, tears in her eyes, afraid of being in the picture for fear that it might get into the hands of “Bashar” – Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Only the gentle persuasion of her mother enables her to pose with her wonderful drawing. “She has nightmares and cries whenever she sees images on the news from Syria,” explains Emira. This, too, is another of the terrible tragedies of war: its ability to cling to the psyche and corrode the lives of the youngest and most vulnerable.

Throughout my journey I would stumble across the shards of such broken lives. People like 26-year-old Zaina, who graduated in English literature from Aleppo University before she and her family fled four months ago as fighting raged.

Today Zaina, her husband, children and uncle all sleep on the floor of a small over-populated house, the rooms of which are infested with mice and cockroaches. Swaddled in blankets on the floor lies Zaina’s daughter who is just a few months old and who for the last 20 days has been very ill with a lung infection.

“I went to the hospital and they didn’t accept me because my identity card has not been renewed,” she explains, highlighting a recent administrative problem that has seen a numerical classification mix-up on ID cards that has left many Syrian refugees barred from access to the services to which they are entitled under Turkish law.

It is the constant uncertainty as well as the practical struggle to survive that haunts refugees. “We lost everything, and almost lost our minds in Syria. We are in shock about what is happening,” says Bassem, a Syrian grandfather who fled his village home north-west of Hama with eight of his family.

Over the past few years this family, like so many others, have known fear in all its forms. One of Bassem’s sons lost an eye from his injuries after missiles hit a field hospital near their village where he was helping move patients.

Another of his sons, Mohammed, who is 17 years old, still has a piece of shrapnel in his chest that needs removing. As I talk with the family he stands nearby listening, before yanking up his shirt to show the scar tissue and lump where the metal is lodged.

It was on the final leg of my journey that I came across Bassem and his family. A few days before we met they had made the perilous night-time sea crossing from near the Turkish port of Bodrum to the Greek island of Kos.

“The most difficult thing is to put your feet inside the boat knowing the danger,” Bassem tells me, echoing the fears of the many families who have come before them. 

A few days earlier I had made that same crossing, albeit aboard a safe and comfortable passenger ferry in broad daylight and calm seas. It was enough, though, to imagine what it must be like crammed into an improvised inflatable boat with 40 or more people in the dead of night, a swell rising on the sea slowly filling the craft with water.

As our ferry slowly made its way out of Bodrum harbour, I watched a Turkish coastguard vessel slip past returning from a night-time patrol. Cowering on deck was a group of soaked refugees, their tiny deflated rubber raft lying like a symbol of their punctured hopes. They had come this far on their own journey, now so near and yet so far from Europe.

In Bodrum the quayside is lined with the elegant yachts and motor launches that are the playthings of the rich. Many who holiday or stay here are British. A few yards back from Bodrum’s picturesque harbour with its castle are backstreets lined with yacht chandlers and sailing shops.

Here, too, can be found the cottage industries that have sprung up making "fake" life-jackets for those refugees about to make the crossing to the Greek islands. Selling their wares at 300TL (£70) a time the owners of these workshops deny their trade, even if the tell-tale cuttings of material and bubble wrap on the floors suggest otherwise.

Those refugees who can’t afford such extras make do with inflatable tyre inner tubes or kit their infants out in the armband water wings you most often see at public swimming pools.

These life "preservers" would do nothing to help prevent the unimaginable horror that befell 33-year-old father Ali Chadan and his children in the cold, inky blackness of the Aegean Sea as they attempted the crossing to Kos at night. 

Ali's dream of a new life became a nightmare that will haunt him until his dying day. Long before that moment he had watched his wife die and feared for his children as the barbaric fighters of IS drew ever closer to the district in which they lived. It was then he decided that the time had come to spirit his loved ones to safety and make the journey to Europe, where he would join his mother and sister already settled in Switzerland.

But for two of his four children that odyssey came to an end that night in the Aegean as the raft in which they were sailing foundered and sank, spilling all on board into the waves. For the next two hours Ali treaded water, his three youngsters clinging to him for dear life. A fourth and eldest child, still only 10 years old, had struck out for shore on his father’s orders, a swim that would save his own life.

During that interminable time in the water Ali watched helplessly as his youngest boy Hussein, six, drifted off in the sea. As if this was not horror enough to contend with, after struggling on to the beach frozen and exhausted with his two daughters, nine-year-old Hawra and four-year-old Zainab, he would have to confront the fact that the ordeal had proved too much for Zainab, who died shortly afterwards.

“My baby, I must go,” was all Ali said in broken English by way of unnecessary explanation as we stepped on board a motor launch a few days after Hussein went missing at sea, on what was to be a fruitless quest to find any clue as to the fate of his son.

“It’s not that he expects to find the boy, just that he feels a sense of guilt that he couldn’t save him and cannot leave without at least looking for Hussein’s body before he can continue on his journey to Switzerland,” said Yussef Walid, who accompanied us as a translator.

That afternoon as we scoured the isolated beaches around Kos I watched Ali Chadan’s hopes rise and fall with every sighting of what might have been the body of Hussein. As I write there is still no trace of the boy. 

My journey through choice, unlike that of little Hussein and hundreds of others, came to an end on the beaches of Kos. For his father Ali and surviving siblings there is still some way to go.

David Pratt travelled to Turkey and Kos with Mercy Corps, a global charity helping refugees and families around the world. To donate to Mercy Corps visit www.mercycorps.org.uk, call 08000 413060 or send a cheque, payable to Mercy Corps, to Mercy Corps, 40 Sciennes, Edinburgh EH9 1HJ