Retired Foreign Service Career Minister and Jackson School Lecturer Mark Ward writes about the plight of Syrian refugees and the dangers faced when returning home in an editorial published in The Conversation titled “Refugees forced to return to Syria face imprisonment, death at the hands of Assad.”
“As grateful as they are for the welcome in Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon, the refugees want to go home and try to put their lives back together. Their homes, their property, their cemeteries and loved ones are inside Syria. But as a longtime humanitarian aid official, I believe that now is not the time,” Ward writes.
Most recently, Ward was the U.S. Government’s chair of a task force to improve humanitarian access for Syria, co-chaired with the Russian Federation, at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland.
