Al-Roj camp, Syria
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We stepped out of the bitter cold, through a plastic flap that passed for a door into darkness.
It was warmer inside the tent, but hard to see anything with only a bit of outside light sneaking through the cracks.
“Come in! Come in,” said a female voice in English.
Two children, a girl and a boy, were scampering around. They were speaking in a mixture of English and very proper standard Arabic – the latter immediately striking me as odd since no one in a casual setting speaks that way.
We were in Al-Roj camp, a detention center in northeastern Syria where more than 2,000 women and children (though some…

