Syria tearsheets

A few screen grabs from around the web from various trips to Syria this year.

CNN Aleppo spot

My pictures and Zak 'big nuts' Brophy on the chaos in Aleppo on CNN:

Airstrikes in Aleppo

 This is my photo essay from Aleppo, which will appear in the October issue of Executive. There's also a slideshow on their website, here.

The show goes on in Tripoli

Two neighbourhoods in Lebanon's northern city of Tripoli have been at war with one another since the early 80's. Every so often the violence will kick off, a few people get shot by snipers and homes get destroyed by RPGs. These days, the conflict is being chucked in with the war currently going on across the border, as the two sides mirror the Sunny vs Alawite conflict currently wracking Syria. I'm not sure if either side have even tried to take so much of an inch of ground in this feud, which has been running longer than I've been alive, or whether they ever will. The last bout – which kicked off at the tail end of last week – was particularly nasty, with over 100 wounded and 17 totally pointless deaths so far. Read more by the talented Mitchell Prothero in the Observer, who picked up one of my pics from AFP. Also check out this account by Josh Wood here.

Syrian refugees flood to Lebanon

They may be buggers to find, but apparently there's some 90,000 Syrians thought to be in Lebanon taking refuge from the fighting across the border. The conditions in which they live differ greatly, but at the muddy end of the stick are a group who fled the embattled Babr Amr district in Homs and set up camp on a farm in the Bekaa valley near Chatura. As I said, finding these refugees can be tricky, and getting them to allow you to take pictures of them is neigh on impossible, due to fears of retribution for family members still left inside. However, a commission last week from Caritas – one of the many NGOs working diligently to offer what help they can – was a golden ticket into a story I've been bashing my head against repeatedly over the last year.

Human Rights Watch Report

It's been a long ol' time since I visited Qatar with Human Rights Watch last year, but they've finally used the pics (see more here) for their report on the conditions faced by migrant workers in Qatar as they begin putting the infrastructure together for the 2022 World Cup, Read the report here.

A walk around Beddawi

In the Beddawi refugee camp, just a few kilometers north of Tripoli, 20-something-thousand Palestinian exiles live within an area of around a single square kilometer. As far as Lebanon's camps go, this one is pretty relaxed, a far cry from the likes of Ain el Helweh. Conditions are hard, but easing; more and more of the 15,000 refugees from neighbouring the Nahr el Bared camp – whose presence doubled the population of Beddawi after the army razed their camp in 2007 – are now returning home. Population figures aside, the camp still suffers from the endemic maladies of Lebanon's Palestinian population; poor services, poor education and poor prospects for anything better anytime soon.