Children In Syria Grow Up Knowing Nothing But War

This is an illustrated interview with Dr. Zaher Sahloul of the Syrian American Medical Society.

"So one child, who was 5 years old, who was basically born before the crisis but spent most of her time under siege, Daraya has been under siege for more than three years."

"So someone gave her a cookie in the bus. … And she look at the cookie and she did not understand what is this cookie. Then she ask her father, 'What is this?' He said, 'This is a cookie; you can eat it.' And she ask him, 'But you told me we eat cookies only in heaven.'"

"Imagine a child who has not seen a cookie or chocolate or milk or eggs."

"Imagine children who have been living in these circumstances for three or four years right now with no end in sight, with no hope in the future."

"This is the situation that children are living through. They don't have access to secular education that children should have, clearly. They don't have the chance to even play in a playground that's in the open. Many of them have lost family members and are very traumatized because of the violence that they have seen."

"Yes we probably celebrated that Omran made it, and he had only a small cut which was sutured. But many other children did not have that luck that Omran had. And as the international community, we have to be responsible with what is happening because these things are preventable."