Amal Clooney: I'm from a family of refugees

Five years after the start of civil war in Syria, the facts and figures continue to shock: 13.5 million people in the war-torn country need humanitarian assistance, 4.6 million Syrians are refugees, and 320,000 have been killed.

But sometimes, to grasp the human toll of the conflict and understand just how utterly destructive it has been, you need to see the faces behind these figures.

To mark the grim anniversary, the International Rescue Committee did just that: it brought together a group of Syrians who sought refuge in Germany and asked them to tell their stories to actor George Clooney and his wife Amal Clooney, a lawyer specializing in human rights.

“It was unbearable. It was hell,” one refugee explains. “We couldn’t take any more.” Another woman, with her young daughter weeping at her side, describes how she had come to accept the idea they would be killed in the conflict: “All I hoped for at that moment was to die by bullets and not be beheaded. That would be God’s mercy.”

In the video, Amal Clooney, who was recently named a Forum Young Global Leader, talks about her own family’s experience as refugees – and how they managed to move on after the war in their home country ended.

“My own family is from Lebanon, and they also ran away from a war, and were lucky enough to be accepted by a European country.” Her family was later able to return to Lebanon, something she says will hopefully be the case for Syrians. “I hope one day you will all get to go back to a free Syria.”

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