Exodus

Sometimes too this proffering of documents is like an act of reaffirmation. A way of confirming to themselves and others that, despite now being refugees, they are also survivors of the vicious civil war that wracks their Syrian homeland.

All of them have stories, variations on the common themes of displacement, flight, exodus and exile. Many are entire families blown by the winds of war to alien places and uncertain futures.

"For four months our neighbourhood was under siege, there was constant bombardment and no bread," says Ishtar, recalling the time in June this year before she and her children fled Syria for Lebanon.

During those months, up to 70 people died in Ishtar's district and many more were wounded, but there was nothing more than basic first-aid kits with which to treat them. "After that we just watched them die," she says.

Fridays were always the worst day, according to survivors. The weekly gatherings at the mosques provided easy targets for Syrian Army snipers.

"Bodies were strewn across the streets, we saw one neighbour, a woman, in pieces," Ishtar continues as we sit talking at a former school now called the Fraidis Collective Centre in Lebanon's Akkar district barely a mile from the Syrian border.

At the time of our conversation the centre was a temporary collective shelter for 10 Syrian families who had fled with Ishtar and her children. In the last few weeks they have now been moved with the help of humanitarian agencies after the area came under Syrian Army shellfire from across the border.

Ishtar was three months pregnant at the time of her family's harrowing journey to Lebanon. Most families were divided into groups to ensure that the children would not get lost along the way. One group, however, was unlucky enough to run into a Syrian Army checkpoint and eight extended family members were gunned down, say the women of the Fraidis Collective Centre.

"It was at night, we used a smuggling road, always hiding, the children crying," Ishtar says of those terrifying days. "We felt worse because we were alone without our menfolk."

Now Ishtar has been reunited with her husband and is due to give birth in the next few weeks. She knows it's a girl, she tells me and will only name her daughter after she is born.

What of the child's future, I ask? "We will trust in God for what life holds for the baby, but I wish I had never become pregnant during this terrible time," she confesses.

So often during my stay among these Syrian refugees in Lebanon, I was to hear from families with babies born in the shadow of the war.

Milad's wife was nine months pregnant and, as the time for her delivery grew ever closer, the couple feared they might never be able to leave their house because of intense fighting in the neighbourhood.

"People died at their doorway, I worked for a transport company and was always on the streets, I saw everything," says Milad. "Cars would come to a halt and make sharp turns as they ran into gunfire, or would run on the pavement. I had to do the same when I was working, it was the only way to move around."

Every day Milad would dodge the snipers' bullets to go about his work. Not to do so meant his family not eating. There was no choice but to run this dangerous gauntlet.

On one occasion Milad was arrested and underwent a terrible beating by government soldiers suspicious of why he carried papers enabling him to move around the streets freely.

Milad explained that it was part of his job with the transport company. His family came first, he insisted to his captors. Politics or being part of the opposition to the government did not interest him.

"It was a miracle that I survived that place," he says of the makeshift detention centre in which he was held. Other men picked up were less lucky. From a number of other refugee men I heard accounts of how some prisoners were doused in petrol and set alight. Such torture of prisoners throughout the course of Syria's civil war has now been well documented and eyewitness accounts corroborated by human rights groups working in the country.

Once across the border into Lebanon such dangers diminish but do not always entirely disappear, with some refugee families still living within range of the war's reach.

In a place called Machta Hamoud on a windswept patch of open ground nestling between the hills near the border, I came across a cluster of tents where refugees had made camp, even though the area had recently come under rocket-fire from the Syrian side of the frontier.

"They exploded there," said one man pointing to a muddy area of chewed up earth less that 100 yards away from a tent in which a young couple were sheltering with their newborn baby.

"Here, look, look," insisted the man, showing me a piece of the razor-edged shrapnel, which he had taken from the lumps of ragged metal that lay strewn across the campsite and had ripped into the biceps of another elderly refugee whose arm was still heavily bandaged.

For some weeks these refugees at Machta Hamoud had been stuck in what is essentially a no-man's-land, virtually locked off from the interior of Lebanon by Lebanese army checkpoints set up to secure the border.

Only because of intervention on the ground, by humanitarian agency Concern Worldwide, would they now be able in the coming days to have access to running water. The installation of latrines too by Concern will also help reduce the threat of disease which is likely to dramatically increase as the winter months close in and the weather in this part of northern Lebanon turns bitter cold.

Given this seasonal threat, shelter is by far the top priority in providing assistance to the refugees, says Concern's country director in Lebanon, John Kilkenny. "There are close to 100 improvised tented sites in Akkar province alone," explains Kilkenny, who is reluctant to use the word 'camps'.

"The term 'camps' here is not only inaccurate but something that the Lebanese government are keen to prevent being established," he continues.

"There is a great psychological barrier on behalf of the Lebanese to the idea of camps for Syrian refugees because of the past history of the vast Palestinian refugee settlements here in Lebanon, which became politically problematic for the government," explains the veteran aid worker with wide experience of the Middle East.

To date, the Lebanese strategy has been to try to cope with the massive influx of Syrian refugees by absorption. However, some humanitarian workers say this strategy is becoming increasingly less sustainable, given the huge numbers they have to contend with. Lebanon alone, a small country of some four million people, now has the best part of a million Syrian refugees and is clearly feeling the pressure when it comes to coping with the human exodus that has swept onto its territory.

Asked if Concern has contingency planning for the rise in refugee numbers expected over the winter months, as beleaguered Syrians escape the violence and hardship, Kilkenny points to the difficulties in planning ahead for such eventualities. Instead, he says, Concern and other aid agencies have to be "looking at measures for two or three years down the line when it comes to Syria."

To that end, the agency has embarked on an ambitious and impressive project that has seen former chicken farms being converted into large multi-family units that will accommodate approximately 750 refugees in Akkar province.

While some sceptics might call this a drop in the ocean, given the scale of the displacement, the project has been given Lebanese government approval and acts as something of a partial compromise solution to the issue of housing larger groups of refugees in sites with proper facilities.

For now though, those refugees earmarked for such a provision remain the lucky ones. Far and away the vast majority this winter face bleak conditions in the most makeshift of shelters and Concern points out the urgent need for donations to help provide more blankets, stoves and supplies of winter fuel, as well as other financial support schemes.

During the last few days of my stay among the refugees in northern Lebanon, I watched as many Syrians were forcibly moved by the local Lebanese authorities from municipal land to other sites. Some of these new locations are truly awful places, which will deteriorate more as winter rain, snow and bitter cold set in.

On one of these sites whole families were crammed into the empty garage spaces of unfinished buildings whose entrance-ways were blocked up with cardboard and tarpaulins. With no latrine provision the stench was overpowering, as was the infestation of flies and vermin.

On another site on exposed plain, families huddled around a camp-fire cooking cow's intestines. According to one young boy, it would be their only meal of the day.

Perhaps the most noticeable and poignant thing during my entire time along the border among the refugee communities was the disproportionate number of women and small children that occupied these hell-holes.

One afternoon, as yet another young mother described her ordeal in escaping Syria with her terrified offspring, an elderly woman brought in a tray for me, with tiny cups of coffee and some oranges. "It is all we can offer," the old woman told me apologetically, unaware of how touched I already was by the family's hospitality.

Not for the first time while covering the plight of the world's refugees was I reminded that true generosity comes from those who have almost nothing to give.

Refugees need hospitality from the countries in which they have sought sanctuary. Many Lebanese have already shown great tolerance and sympathy towards their Syrian neighbours with whom, it must be said, they have not always seen eye-to-eye. Over the last few years millions of Syrians have faced exodus and exile from their homeland through no fault of their own. The time has come to show our own compassion and generosity by giving whatever help we can.