Most of these families are fleeing for the second, third or fourth time. Like mine, their original homes were in places you might recognize from news headlines: Aleppo, Douma, Ghouta, Homs. Each of these places was the site of a massacre by the forces of the Assad regime and its Iranian and Russian allies. The survivors had sought refuge in Idlib. Now they are on the move again. The United Nations Children’s Fund reported that more than 6,500 children were forced to flee Idlib every day last week.

On a train from Washington to New York, I stared at pictures of mothers fleeing Idlib in cattle trucks. I read about the Turkish border being sealed shut, the Russian and regime forces attacking Idlib relentlessly.

The images of the exodus from Idlib return me to being in one of those cars over three years ago, when I was forced to flee my home in Aleppo. My body remembers the cold and pain of that journey. The feeling of holding my daughter, Sama, on my lap and trying to keep her warm. I held a tin of beans and would feed her one at a time. And I tuned the car radio, desperate for any news of the evacuations as we left my beloved Aleppo for the last time.

I scroll through endless updates from Idlib: a 15-second video clip of the Ariha hospital struck by a Russian jet; the son of a White Helmet rescue worker begging to see the body of his dead father; another sobbing White Helmet volunteer who found his own son under the rubble.