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ZA’ATARI CAMP, Jordan — Just hours before Prime Minister Stephen Harper arrived here Friday, bearing a promise of millions of dollars in Canadian humanitarian aid, a 28-year-old Syrian man named Ali entered the gates of this refugee camp with his family.

Harper spoke of how Canada would not turn its back on the many people displaced by Syria’s civil war — pledging a further $150 million in aid.

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“We talk in terms of hundreds of thousands of refugees and millions of displaced persons,” said the prime minister.

“It’s sometimes easy to forget that these are all individual lives. We are touched by this.”

Just down the street within the camp, the tragic impact of this crisis on one exhausted family was on display. Ali had waited out the civil war in his homeland. And then as the death toll mounted beyond 120,000 lives and the violence continued, he could wait not longer.

“A few days ago I decided the time was now,” he told journalists about his trip to Jordan.