TRIPOLI, Lebanon — I was in Tripoli to draw, documenting the Syrian refugee crisis; that was what I was doing when I met Samar. She was queuing for food vouchers, along with fellow Syrian refugees, at the office of a local Sunni leader. Her young son, Hamad Noor, played at her feet. Like most refugee children, he wasn’t going to school.

“If they gave me a weapon, I’d fight in Syria,” Samar told me through an interpreter. She went on to describe how she came to be in this bullet-scarred street in Tripoli.

Samar’s husband worked at a state-owned rice corporation in Aleppo, Syria. When the danger from fighting kept him from work, the Assad regime arrested him as a defector to the rebels. Samar begged the police to take her as well. Instead, they burned her house down in front of her. She couldn’t even retrieve her identity card.

Samar’s husband died, she told me, in Mr. Assad’s jails. Her mother’s home was looted. Both her brothers took up arms with the Free Syrian Army. Fearing for her safety, Samar’s family smuggled her into Lebanon. Distraught, she prayed to be shot crossing the border.