Every year in my job covering Syria, I told myself that at least the next one couldn't possibly be worse than the last. But each year seemed to outdo itself.

Along with colleagues posted in Beirut, I discovered there were somehow always new depths to plumb, even greater misery to report, as the war went on.

Lebanon is the hardest of postings. You spend most of your time covering a place that is just a few hundred miles away but largely impossible to access, and that creates a cognitive dissonance. You watch videos of dead and dying children, file your story in time for deadline and then meet your friends for late-night cocktails in one of Beirut's many bars.

The party scene in Lebanon didn’t stop because there was a war raging next door – and nor should it have been expected to. I remember a visiting European surgeon, who had just returned from a trip to Aleppo, griping to me over dinner that he thought it showed an unforgivable lack of compassion on the part of Beirutis.

But only the short-memoried could forget that Lebanon's own brutal 15-year civil war had ended not all that long before. If life paused whenever there was a threat of another conflict, the country would be in a state of near-permanent paralysis.

Beirut was where I took my first job in journalism, a brief stint at the local Daily Star newspaper in 2009-10. I made several trips – visa dashes, as we called them – over the border to Syria before the conflict.

I remember the air feeling much thicker in Damascus and the atmosphere being much darker, even in those days. The presence of the feared mukhabarat, or secret police, could be keenly felt even by visitors. Lebanon, in comparison, always felt much freer.

After I left the Middle East to take up the graduate scheme at The Telegraph in London, the Syrian friends I had made before the war implored me to do what I could to draw attention to the increasingly bleak situation in their country. Naively, I thought that by returning to the region in 2016 I could make a difference, however small.

In my first year in the post, journalists watched as Bashar al-Assad's forces besieged tens of thousands of civilians in Aleppo, Syria's second city. Pictures of children crushed under rubble, their skulls caved in, and WhatsApp messages from doctors trapped in the basements of bombed hospitals arrived to our phones in real time.

It 2017, there was a deadly chemical attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib, four years after the US had declared that such an attack would be its "red line". I reported on Abdulhamid al-Youssef, a father who lost infant twins. The pictures of him holding their limp, pale bodies to his chest as he sobbed stayed with me for a long time. They apparently also stirred Donald Trump, the US President, who ordered punitive strikes on government targets and told the world that such a thing would never be allowed to happen again.