I watch a heartbreaking video of a Syrian father reunited with his toddler son, whom he believes had been killed by the latest chemical attack on civilians in a war whose brutality is relentless. He is on his knees, crying without stop, when he found out that his son was alive. He was luckier than many other fathers, whose children lie covered by ice in the Damascus morgue. According to Syrian activists, as many as 1,300 people, many of them children, were killed in a rocket strike carrying chemical weapons in a residential Damascus suburb.
U.N. agencies estimate that one million children, three-quarters of them under age 11, have had to flee their country since the conflict began in 2011.
"This one millionth child refugee is not just another number. This is a real child ripped from home, maybe even from a family, facing horrors we can only begin to comprehend," stated grimly Anthony Lake, executive director of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF.) In addition to the one million who have been forced to flee their country, two million others are displaced within their own country, making of this one of the most serious humanitarian emergencies today.
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