The teacher never imagined he would live in a tent.

He once taught high school philosophy in Homs. He holds a Masters Degree. But now he lives with several dozen other refugee families in a huddle of tarp shelters in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley. The walls were made from discarded billboard vinyl. Laughing kids poked their heads in through a hole.

On his phone, the teacher showed me his former home — a wonder of pearly marble, surrounded by orchards. “My life’s work” he said.

The house is long since destroyed by bombing. In Homs, the Assad regime shelled fleeing civilians — the teacher among them.

“I don’t mean to be rude since you’re American, but I have to be honest.” he said, and threw his hands up at Obama’s “red line” on chemical weapons. Shelling had killed many times more people, he told me. When a mortar lands near you, your eardrums can burst.

Outside, I saw a boy with orange burn scars covering half his face. When I asked an adult what happened, he pointed to other children, each with red rashes on their cheeks. “We tried to take them to the hospital, but they wouldn’t treat them. They said they should go get treatment in Syria.”

The teacher and his family. His tent is one of the nice ones, with it’s own generator. Curious kids kept peeking in during our interview.

According to the government, there are no camps in Lebanon. But you only have to drive into the Bekaa Valley to see that this is a lie. Every two hundred yards is another shanty town -- tents, kids not in school, tiny stoves meant for wood but now burning plastic bags. The refugees know this will kill them. They do it anyway. They have no choice. Several refugee children would freeze to death by the end of December. It is cold in these camps that do not exist.

The Lebanese government estimates there are 1.3 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon, making them 1/4th of the country’s population. Refugees’ opinions on the revolution are mixed. One refugee told me, “We were fine. Then the Free Syrian Army came. Things went to shit from there.” Another said “God bless the Free Syrian Army.”

At the beginning, Syria seemed like one of the 2011 uprisings that spread from Tunisia to Tahrir Square — crowds in the streets mobilizing against the old world’s cruelty.

But when schoolboys in Dara’a graffitied slogans they’d seen on Tunisian youtube, police arrested them, tearing out their fingernails in jail. The police chief was Assad’s cousin.

You can only machine-gun so many peaceful protests before they become a revolution.

Now, Syria has become the stage for interlocking proxy wars. Assad’s propped up with Russian cash, Hezbollah fighters defending their fellow Shi’ites, and Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Fears of Islamic extremism held the West back from arming the Free Syrian Army. Soon, the original rebels were indeed overshadowed by Islamic extremists. Flush with Gulf money, extremists had better arms and accordingly wielded disproportionate power to their numbers.

Fundamentalist brigades swelled with foreigners come to fight Assad. They brought with them an interpretation of Islam largely alien to Syria. Chechens who could barely speak Arabic demanded little girls wear face-veils. Masked Britons wielded M16s bought for them by programmers in Qatar. When not fighting Kurds, a Dutch jihadi named “Chechclearr” Instagrammed kittens cuddling AK-47s. He hashtagged them #fluffy #mujaheddin.

As foreigners entered the battle for Syria, Syria descended into hell. Cut off from food by a government siege, infants starved in Damascus suburbs. Assad’s bombs targeted hospitals. Polio, once eradicated, paralyzed kids. The Islamic extremists of ISIS staged public beheadings- once mistakenly of an allied fighter. Regime soldiers raped women with rats.

In the age of camera phones, war crimes are harder to conceal.

While the state news agency tweeted rundowns of swank Damascene nightlife, opposition accounts showed starving men butchering a lion from the city’s zoo. Syria’s war is viewable in realtime on social media. Some thought this would lead to empathy. Mostly, it did not.