Despair of refugees in Atma camp

From a distance, the camp at Atma looked beautiful: tents clustered together in a dash of white on a brown hill, green rows of olive trees on either side. Close up, it was pure misery.

It had just rained. Women were scooping up handfuls of earth, making little damns to stop water from running into their tents. People struggled uphill, slipping and sliding in mud mixed with sewage.

"All the world can see what's happening here. Did anyone help?" a woman shouted.

She was angry that more foreign journalists were there, filming. She didn't think it would make any difference.

"We have no toilets, no water, no food," said another woman. "Is our situation acceptable? You have been watching us like this for two years. You Westerners are all supporting Bashar."

Western governments have, in fact, called for President Bashar al-Assad to go. But there has been no "Kosovo moment" - when images of cold and hungry people out in the open set in train a foreign intervention.

The numbers are certainly alarming: 2.5m internally displaced; 400,000 refugees in neighbouring countries; 11,000 crossing the border in a single day. And those figure, from the Red Crescent and the UN, are probably underestimates.

Atma is the last stop before the Turkish border for those fleeing the violence

So far, though, many of those fleeing the civil war have been invisibly absorbed into friends' and relatives' homes elsewhere in Syria or across the border.
Atma, while distressing enough to witness, is relatively small. But it - or places like it - will probably grow.
That is important for what happens next in Syria. As one senior British official put it to me: "Rolling news coverage of refugees looking wretched could drive policy."
The UN expects the number of registered refugees outside Syria to grow to 700,000 by the end of the year.
Neighbouring Turkey - while generously supporting many refugees - is trying to reduce the flow and so is turning people back.

Fonte: BBC