In early August, the media reported the death of a 21-year-old Syrian man as he tried to cross from the rebel-held province of Idlib to Turkey. After eight years of war in Syria, the report may have sounded almost commonplace at first, but the details of the story were far from ordinary.
Hisham al-Mohammed was shot inside Syria, about 400 meters (nearly 440 yards) from the border. Which side the fire came from remains unknown. The wounded man was taken to a hospital on the Syrian side, where he eventually died. What drove him to Turkey was his family, which he left behind in Istanbul when police forcibly sent him back to Syria.
