For the past fortnight I have been listening to the stories of Syrian refugees who have fled to the border with Lebanon.
Most of those I spoke with were women and children. It is they who have borne the brunt of the brutality, hardship and suffering this bitter civil war has thrown up.
Over the past few days two new reports have highlighted some terrible facts that shamefully have made few headlines.
The first of these is by the London-based Oxford Research Group and entitled Stolen Futures - The Hidden Toll of Child Casualties in Syria.
The second is by the Euro Mediterranean Human Rights Network (EMHRN) and called Violence against Women - a Bleeding Wound in the Syrian Conflict. The facts these documents reveal speak for themselves. Some 11,000 children have been killed in three years, almost 400 hundred of them targeted by sniper fire. Some 764 were summarily executed, and more than 100 - including infants - were tortured. As for Syrian women, 6000 have been the victims of rape.
It is naive to assume that the rules of engagement in any war can ever really respect human rights. But by any standards what women and children have been made to confront in Syria has been truly appalling.
It is always unfair to compare humanitarian crises. Each has their own dynamics. The impact of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines captures public attention and sympathy in a way that the Syrian refugee plight does not. Ask any aid worker and they will tell you that victims of natural disasters have a way of eliciting sympathy that those of war don't.
The same aid workers will also tell you that dealing with these respective types of crises too is very different.
As one I met on the Syrian-Lebanon border summed it up: "Nature breaks, man fixes. It's not as simple when it comes to the human fallout from war."
Not in any way to detract from the disaster in the Philippines, let us remember that Syria is coping with one of the worst humanitarian crises in decades. More than 9 million civilians are in need of assistance, and more than 2.5 million people cut off from aid. Nearly 300,000 civilians are living under a state of siege, mostly at the hands of government forces, and are reduced to foraging for leaves in order to eat.
The impact both physical and psychological on women and especially children has been profound. Many of the Syrian refugee children I met in Lebanon were deeply traumatised. They scurry away at noises that resemble bombs or gunfire. Some of the older ones suffer from depression or anxiety. For these children the war has become all consuming. Even their games are about checkpoints, arrests, fighting or burying the dead. Syria's war is many things but it is also a war on childhood.
Before in this column I have explained why I think military intervention in Syria is a bad idea. This does not, however, absolve the international community from whenever possible bringing pressure to bear on all sides in the conflict to ensure that children are spared and bring to account those who refuse to do so.
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