Syria's Children is a long-form photo documentary project attempting to share the stories of some of the war in Syria's unheard victims. The stories told through the project are of child refugees living in Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon between the ages of five and fifteen. The children were photographed on Impossible Project polaroids which were then scanned and handed back to the children. Each child involved in the project was interviewed in a safe environment with parental or guardian consent, and at the end of the interviews their portraits were taken. The interviews focused on who the children are in an effort to document their individual, unique, and important lives. 

Instead of viewing refugees as statistics or headlines, this project is a collection of individual children and shares them in the most honest way possible. By choosing Polaroids as the medium it aims to forge a connection with the audience that’s less glossy, more tangible, and in that way more human. Every polaroid develops with its own flaws and color nuances, and that quality renders the portraits as real. Each photo is human enough to reach out and touch anyone that looks at them, in the way that these children are all incredibly real and alive and human. This project conceptually is about finding a way to bridge the gap between an incomprehensible war and its very real victims.

The Syrian war is one of the most important world issues of our time, and one that was has been ignored by the international community for years. Syria's people are experiencing calculated, organized suffering on a massive scale and the world community seems content to sit by and watch it happen. This project stands as a permanent testament to this war’s effect on Syria’s children. 

Our generous Partners that helped tell these stories

if you would like to financially support an organization helping syrian refugees we suggest donating to the rise organization. without their generous assistance we would have been unable to tell the stories shown here from iraq. 

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This project was created by Cengiz Yar with extensive editing and production assistance by Christopher O'Brien.