Abu Farid was asleep in his tent when his new neighbor started to scream. He rushed outside to see that her nearby tent—one of more than 1,000 erected in the makeshift refugee camp of Atima at Syria’s edge—was engulfed in flames. The fire burned so intensely that it seemed to be lighting up the sky. But within seconds, the tent had been reduced to ash. “I saw the fire. Moments, moments,” Abu Farid said. Then the tent was gone, “all at once.” As Abu Farid’s neighbor wailed by the charred debris, he and other men searched frantically through the ashes for her children, using the faint LED lights on the bottom of their cigarette lighters to guide the way.
The fire had started accidentally—the family of nine, all crammed into one tent, had been using candles for light, since Atima has no electricity. One of the candles ignited the tent’s flammable nylon fabric lining, which provides an extra barrier against the cold, and the whole thing quickly burned. On Tuesday, Abu Farid (who gave a nickname out of safety concerns) seemed to still be recovering from the shock of the recent fire. He recounted with horror how the children’s flesh had separated from their bones as he dragged them from the smoldering ash. “They were burned wearing their clothes—jackets, blankets,” he said.
The Daily Beast 
