By Morten Tastum 

When a country or region is ravaged by war and conflict, no one suffers more than the civilians. Many lose their homes, family members, and friends, and even if they are still alive they in many cases end up as refugees.

The ongoing Syrian civil war has caused an abhorrent amount of civilian casualties and refugees. It is estimated that more than 80,000 civilians have been killed, a further 6 million have been internally displaced, and more than 3 million have become refugees in the conflict so far between the government of Bashar al-Assad and a panoply of rebel groups.

However, these are all statistics and numbers, which according to Giles Duley make it easy to forget and marginalize the individuals they represent. Duley, a British photojournalist most known for his focus on humanitarian issues and conflict consequences, is himself a triple-amputee from a landmine accident in Afghanistan during one of his projects. Despite his injuries, he continues his fight to make the voices of the forgotten heard.

The harsh conditions that most refugees have to endure is emphasized through Duley’s portraits of individuals such as four-year-old Aya from Syria. Aya suffers from spina bifida, a congenital disorder, which has left her prone to illness and fully dependent on her family, especially her nine-year-old sister Iman, who carries her around. When they fled the war in Syria for Lebanon, Iman carried her during the entire two-month journey. When she was in Syria, she visited the doctor bi-monthly; but the few doctors available to the refugees in Lebanon have little in the way of resources or time to help her. Anything outside of emergency care and basic injuries are too much for the already heavily overworked medical teams there. Despite these detriments, Aya is a happy and resolute girl, surviving years longer than the initial few months the doctors predicted. She remains a central focus of her family and continues to live on in this dreadful situation.

This is the intention of Duley’s work: make people understand that refugees are more than statistics; they are mothers, kids, taxi-drivers, and teachers. They are just like everyone else, but caught in unfortunate and hard situations. Through his work, Duley has visited refugee camps across the world, but none has been as horrific as those he found in Lebanon. The camps there are not recognized as true refugee camp, so people live in squalor, taking up abandoned buildings, rooftops, and gardens. The deplorable situation is unfortunate, but Lebanon simply doesn’t have the resources on its own to deal with the flow of people. The country, already a small place, has over the years seen its population rise more than 25% due to the huge influx of refugees from conflicts in the area. This massive influx is a huge cost to the country, and it does not have the funds to adequately address the issue. Despite this situation, the refugees fight on for their survival and refuse to give up. As Aya herself said, “Aya doesn’t die, Aya lives.”

Duley initially started in the music photography industry, but he grew cynical after years of such work, disappointed by what he calls the low moral standards. He took a long break from work, and through working with disabled people he found a calling much more to his liking. He has since then dedicated his full time to humanitarian issues.

Morten Tastum is a special assistant and finance fellow at the Commonwealth Club of California. He received his B.A. in International Studies with a minor in European Studies from the University of San Francisco. Mr. Tastum has worked with several institutions, the United States Senate, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Swedish-American Chamber of Commerce among them.