Syria: damned to exile

"We only found out later what happened to her," Fatima's mother-in-law tells me before reaching down to pick up one of her grandchildren crawling around the filthy floor of a concrete outhouse in an old scrap yard. This, for now, is home in Lebanon's Akkar province close to the Syrian border.

Young and old, the family had walked for six hours the day they fled. Then Fatima made the fateful decision to turn back alone to retrieve the passport and ID cards forgotten though panic while escaping the shellfire and marauding gunmen ripping their neighbourhood apart.

She was to make it all the way back to the house before the sniper caught her in the cross hairs of his rifle sight as she stood in the living room and despatched the bullet that ended the young woman's life.

Fatima knew all too well that such important documents would be needed if her family were lucky enough to make it across the border to join the million other Syrians who had come before them to face life as refugees in Lebanon.

Without those precious papers for which Fatima gave her life, the family were then forced to make an illegal crossing into northern Lebanon at a place called Wadi Khaled. Even there however, you are so close to the war that personal mobile phones will often show an unsolicited text message from Syria's Ministry of Tourism welcoming you to the country. Like the refugees and opposition fighters who criss-cross this region, the mobile phone network drifts back and forth between Syria and Lebanon.

Though officially on the Lebanese side of the border, parts of Wadi Khaled still see Syrian army shells and rockets rain down on refugees who believe they have at last have found sanctuary only to find out instead that Syria's civil war is sometimes no respecter of international borders.

It has been said that in civil war the firing line is invisible in that it passes through the hearts of all those caught up in such a conflict.

Never was this truer than in Syria. Here the civil war makes no concessions for age, gender or status. Young and old, male or female, rich or poor, it blights equally all those innocent civilians trapped in its path.

All over Lebanon you see the human fallout from this protracted struggle. Some refugees stay in tents or in rickety shacks made from scrap wood and tarpaulins. Others have sought shelter in garages, truck containers, on waste ground and in derelict buildings. They live in freezing basements and rooftops and sometimes on the open streets.

The cost of living in Lebanon is far higher than in Syria. Even those refugees who managed to bring savings saw them disappear at a terrifying rate as they paid for profiteering smugglers to help them across the border or used the money just to eat and stay alive once inside Lebanon.

With a population of only four million, Lebanon is a tiny country, and the influx of one million Syrian refugees is putting an enormous strain on its resources.

Most of the Syrians who come cannot find work. Those who do are often ruthlessly exploited by unscrupulous Lebanese employers and landowners alike.

"I got two days' payment for 10 days work, during the olive harvest," one man in a tented settlement called Bebnine told me."10,000 Lebanese Lira (£5), nothing", he shrugged despairingly.

While many Lebanese have been incredibly generous and sympathetic to the refugees' plight, some landlords are making hefty profits from renting barely habitable premises including stables, unfinished building and outhouses.

In one large unfinished apartment block I came across families crammed into tiny rooms with no running water or toilets. Outside,the ground was covered in human faeces while the walls of what was effectively a building site were just unrendered breeze blocks that will turn the rooms into refrigerators when the frost and snows of winter set in. For this they were paying a landlord $130 per month, a substantial sum for a Syrian refugee with next to nothing except a few savings.

No-one is spared from such hardships or exploitation. From toddlers to young adults and the elderly, Syria's civil war has impacted on every generation. Abdul, a 95-year-old former agricultural labourer, can remember French rule in Syria.

"Where are they now just when we Syrians need them?" he complains as we sit in his ramshackle shelter talking about times past and present.

Abdul and his 80-year-old wife Hanaa travelled for six days by car to escape the war. Dodging shellfire and skirting countless government checkpoints, their last leg to the border was by a taxi from the Syrian capital Damascus, driven by what Abdul describes as "a kind man." Now the couple seem destined to live the last years of their lives in a shack made of scrap wood, cardboard and plastic sheets on some waste ground in Lebanon's Akkar Province.

"Each day here is like a year, it makes me very sad," says Abdul, who remembers the Syria of his youth and times before the war as a "heaven".

Asked when he was most happy, he looks at his wife and tells me: "I was happy when I first loved Hanaa.

I love her a lot, a lot, a lot, but the fuel has run out," he says, with a mischievous grin.

From the entrance to the couple's shack we can see that the hills in the distance have their first dusting of winter snow and the air is chilly. Like so many refugees here, Abdul and Hanaa will doubtless suffer terribly in the cold and Abdul says they are worried about making it through the freezing months ahead.

As if this was not enough to contend with, Hanaa was recently attacked while she slept one night by what was most likely a large feral dog that came into their shack. The animal dragged her by the hair and tore at her arm until she was able to beat it off with her walking stick.

Time and again in the makeshift settlements housing refugees here, they tell of the vermin that plague their lives.

In one small tented settlement, bait boxes deployed by humanitarian agencies tasked with helping the refugees, remain empty - it is said the rats are too big to enter the traps.

"When we have food, the rats eat with us," was how one Syrian I met summed up the vermin problem.

Snakes and scorpions too pose a threat, as does the infestation of flies that breed when there are no proper latrines or sanitation. According to figures from international humanitarian agencies working in Akkar Province, one district containing a cluster of settlements and camps had chronic life-threatening diarrhoea prevalent in 75% of children under five.

At times the courage and resourcefulness of the refugees in these communities is staggering. Foza, a woman in her early 30s, told of how the day she crossed the border into Lebanon was the worst of her life. Her husband, who had arrived some days before her, had arranged for a smuggler to pick Foza and her children up and bring her by motorcycle to a river crossing on the frontier between Syria and Lebanon.

On arrival at the river there was a terrifying barrage of shelling and shooting. Seven months pregnant Foza waded into the freezing water, at times chest deep and carrying her two small children. On landing on the Lebanese side she was attacked by a pack of wild dogs, and only saved by the intervention of a local Lebanese man who fought them off.

"I used to cry every day when I first arrived, it was so difficult here I almost regretted coming but now things are a little better but I so miss my family that are still in Syria," she says.

Like many mothers of refugee children, Foza told how such traumatic experiences have impacted psychologically on her youngsters.

At the Fraidis Collective Centre in Akkar, which still comes under Syrian Army shellfire despite being on Lebanese soil, mothers described how when the bombardment starts they all huddle together in one room.

"The children play games about war all the time, fighting, checkpoints or carrying a cushion like a 'shahid' (martyr or dead person) to bury it just as we did with the dead in our neighbourhood in Syria," one woman called Dalal told me.

"When the children hear certain noises they scurry away and hide

"There is one 10-year-old boy in our group who is very depressed," she says. "He has not gone to school for three years now, and says he would rather die than live the way we do here."

If life in exile is difficult, it at least pales a little alongside the horrors many of the refugees experienced in their besieged war-torn neighbourhoods inside Syria.

One woman I talked to told how her two teenage brothers were arrested and tortured at the hands of the Syrian regime.

"They hung them up by the feet in the prison alongside each other, and used electric shocks on their bodies," she said. Since then she has heard that all three of her brothers are now dead but has no way of confirming this.

Other refugees spoke of the constant shelling and being trapped indoors for weeks or months on end or witnessing widespread sexual assault and rape.

As we enter the winter months hope of any respite in Syria's civil war seems as distant a prospect as it ever was. Last week, it was estimated that 20,000 refugees a day were flooding over the border as fighting flared around the city of Qara, not far from the Lebanese border. Few believe they will be the last. Anything approaching a normal life is a long way off for the million or so Syrians exiled in Lebanon. Yet, as ever in the middle of war, there are those for whom life still holds things dear.

It is one year since Anifa and Rasoul escaped from Syria's killing fields. It was two weeks ago that the young couple were married on a patch of waste ground that houses a cluster of the refugee tents and shacks that have become a hallmark of this border area.

"It doesn't seem that the situation will get any better soon, so we decided to get married now," Anifa says, explaining their decision to tie the knot despite their desperate circumstances.

With virtually no money, the wedding was made possible with the help of other refugees who live alongside them in this bleak windswept patch of land. Anifa says everyone brought what food they could.

"I hired the dress, from a local store, and we had some singing and dancing," she says, smiling. The only photographic record they have of the day was a grainy picture taken on a battered mobile phone. Yes, the wedding would have been grander had they still been in Syria, Anifa says, but both newlyweds insist it was still something special they will remember for the rest of their lives.

Anifa and Rasoul, a wedding in the midst of war. Abdul and Hanaa, a couple in their twilight years who seem destined to end their lives in exile. And Fatima's children, motherless and facing an uncertain future. Three generations of Syrians whose lives have been irrevocably changed by a conflict with no end in sight. How many more, one wonders, will follow in their wake before sense prevails?

l All names of individuals have been changed for reasons of personal safety