Refugee Crisis

“The extent to which refugee children have been conditioned by their environment is heartbreaking. We wanted permission to take this young girl’s photograph, so we asked if her mother was nearby. Her eyes filled with the most uncontrollable fear that I’ve ever seen in a child. ‘Why do you want my mother?’ she asked. Later, her parents told us how the family had crouched in the woods while soldiers ransacked their house in Syria. More recently they’d been chased through the woods by Turkish police. After we’d spent a few minutes talking with her parents, she returned to being a child and could not stop hugging us, and laughing, and saying ‘I love you so much.’ But I went to sleep that night remembering the terror on her face when we first asked to speak to her mother.”
More from this series
“I lived in Mosul for five months under ISIS. I tried to avoid trouble but one of my neighbors reported me for shaving my beard”
“The extent to which refugee children have been conditioned by their environment is heartbreaking.”
“I worked as a waiter in Saudi Arabia for seven years to save money so that I could build a house in Syria.”
“I saw the army burn my neighbor’s house. They set it on fire and took photographs while it burned.”