From Antakya, the seat of the Turkish province of Hatay, it is a 40-minute drive to the town of Reyhanli, the last ten minutes of which follow the jagged line of the Syrian border. The border is protected by high watchtowers and barbed wire, but the towers are frequently unmanned, and making your way east on Route D420, you can see Syrian refugees—men, children, and women with babies strapped to their chests—slipping easily between the gaps in the fence.

Reyhanli was, until recently, a sleepy backwater. Even the natives complained of feeling bored there. The area is shaped like a sunburst—a tightly-coiled town square and a series of progressively diffuse lines wandering out into the patchwork farmland. In summer, the temperature regularly soars to 90 degrees, and a terrible, parched stillness takes hold over everything.

But as the Syrian civil war approaches its third bloody year and the refugee count soars, Reyhanli has been transformed. On the outskirts of town, dozens of new apartment complexes are being built. There are Arabic grammar schools for Syrian children and airless storefront “hospitals” funded by donors in the Gulf states. In the afternoons, long lines of amputees wait outside in the heat for treatment. And due to its proximity to the border, Reyhanli has also become the de facto base of operations for hundreds of Syrian citizen journalists.

On a mild morning in August, one of those journalists, a 26-year-old named Wassim, was dozing on the couch of the Syrian Media Center (SMC), an amateur operation headquartered above the local barbershop. Wassim—he asked that only his first name be used—grew up in Homs and has amber eyes and the lacquered hair of a pop singer.

For the past six months, Wassim had been sleeping in SMC’s offices, alongside Lulu, a long-haired white kitten. He typically awoke at noon, ate flatbread and cheese, smoked cigarettes, and waited for videos and photographs to come in from the SMC’s 100-odd informants scattered across Syria. Most of the clips, sent by an unpaid coalition of young male activists, depicted destruction: the bloody aftermath of regime artillery attacks on schools, hospitals, and apartment buildings. Occasionally, there were shaky Handycam shots of running battles between opposition and regime forces.