On Friday, the Syrian civil war hit a grave milestone: one million children have been displaced by the conflict, according to a joint report by UNICEF and the UNHCR. Click through the gallery to see images of the most vulnerable faces of the violence in Syria.
Syrian refugees cross the border this month into northern Iraq. The refugees are scattered throughout neighboring countries, with nearly 2 million having settled into formal and informal camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt, and Iraq.
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A Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) worker tends to a Syrian girl at a refugee camp in Lebanon. Clinical psychologists say that it's impossible to understate the impact of war on a young psyche.
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A father talks to his 13-year-old son the day after the boy was released from the hospital, where he lost a leg to amputation. The child had been hit with shrapnel during the shelling of his hometown Kfar Nubul, reportedly by government forces.
Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty
A refugee and her son cross into Iraq on August 20. Experts estimate that refugees are flooding into neighboring countries at a rate of one person every 14 seconds.
Hadi Mizban/AP
The Zaatari refugee camp sits on the Syrian/Jordanian border. For the 50,000 school-age children in the camp, there exist three schools, with place for only 6,000 kids.
Mandel Ngan, Pool/AP
A refugee girl sits inside a tent at a makeshift camp in Lebanon. Many families are afraid to send their girls to school because they fear that local men will take advantage of the children.
Sharif Karim/Reuters/Landov
Refugees at a new camp in Arbil, north of Baghdad. In early July, UNCHR High Commissioner Antonio Guterres told ABC's Martha Raddatz, "The whole generation that's impacted by war and traumatized by violence is somethign Syria will pay for [over] many years."
Stringer/Iraq
Boys play in a building in a Beirut neighborhood with a high concetration of refugees from Syria. In an academic study at a refugee camp in Turkey, researchers found that 75 percent of children surveyed said someone close to them had been killed in the conflict, and that 45 percent of kids scored above the clinical cutoff line for PTSD diagnosis.
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Syrian children play at a refugee camp in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. Some 3,500 boys and girls have arrived across the border in Jordan alone without their parents.
Sharif Karim/Reuters
A 15-year-old Syrian refugee reads the Quran at noon prayer in a makeshift mosque at Jordan's Zaatari refugee camp. To keep older teen boys in the country, the Syrian government has imposed travel restrictions on military-aged men, banning them from emigrating.
Lebanese and Syrian kids play in an Internet cafe in Beirut. The UNHCR estimates that the number of Syrian children in the public school system will soon be equal to the number of Lebanese.
Refugees at Jordan's Zaatari camp. Classrooms in Jordan and elsewhere are cramped, and schools are strained to the breaking point.
A baby sleeps in a hammock at the refugee camp in Syria's northern city of Azaz. One psychiatrist says, "They could be thousands of miles from that war zone, thousands of miles from where they watched someone be killed, and they'll still say, 'I'm afraid it's going to happen again, I'm afraid bombs will come here, I'm afraid soldiers are going to kill me."
JM Lopez/AFP/Getty
A recent influx of Syrian are flooding over the border into Iraq. "Almost every child we've come across has seen or is aware of a horrific incident...we haven't seen that before," says one UNHCR official. "The trauma of these children is much more direct."
Hadi Mizban/AP
