IT must have felt like an eternity. For at least two hours, Ali Chadan found himself treading water in the night-time inky blackness of the Aegean Sea. Clinging to him for dear life were three of his children. A fourth, the eldest, still only 10 years old, had struck out for shore on his father’s orders, a swim that would save his own life.

Ali was no stranger to life-threatening situations. Long before that terrible night when he found himself in the sea, he had watched his wife die and feared for his children as the barbaric fighters of the Islamic State (IS) group drew ever closer to the district in Iraq where they lived.

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It was then he decided, as any decent father would, that the time had come to spirit his loved ones to safety and make the journey to Europe where he would join relatives already settled in Switzerland.

The makeshift rubber boat Ali and his children had boarded on the Turkish coast that night was overcrowded. As it neared the Greek island of Kos it foundered and sank, spilling all on board into the waves.

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While in the water, the fake makeshift “lifejackets” they had been sold in the backstreet shops of the Turkish port of Bodrum for a few hundred lira proved worse than useless.

Filled with plastic bubble wrap and stitched together they instantly became waterlogged. Those trafficking and smuggling refugees know no pity, they focus only on profit.

No sooner had Ali watched his eldest son Hassan set off to swim for the shore, than he looked on helplessly as his youngest boy Hussein, only six years old, drifted off in the night sea.

Later, as if this was not horror enough to contend with, after struggling onto the beach frozen and exhausted with his two daughters, nine-year-old Hawra and four-year-old Zainab, he would have to confront the fact that the ordeal had proved too much for the toddler who died shortly afterwards.

All this unfolded over three years ago, at a time when such horrors were rarely out of the news. Who can forget the shocking image of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy of Kurdish ethnic background that made global headlines when his tiny body was washed up near Bodrum.

Lying in the surf, his face turned to one side, it was as if he were just asleep. A dead child lying between one world and another, between a world of war and that of a Europe where peace and safety were hoped for, and sought out by so many.

In the three intervening years that have passed since Alan Kurdi died and Ali Chadan lost his children, the world, it seems, has all but forgotten or chosen to ignore the plight of those refugees seeking sanctuary in Europe.

It is certainly not that they have stopped coming. According to the UN refugee agency UNHCR, some 41% of the arrivals in 2018 were Syrian, while 20% were Afghan, 15% Iraqi, 6% from Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and 18% from other countries.

Many of those lucky enough to make it to the Greek islands, often the first point of contact with Europe, have now found themselves in a hell far removed from the sanctuary they set out in search of.

High in the hills of the Greek island of Lesbos, in a former military barracks now filled with containers and tents, more than 8,000 people cram into Moria camp, which was supposed to house around 2,000. Here the walls are graffitied with the ominous message: welcome to Moria prison.

For the men, women and children forced to call Moria their home, the camp is a daily battle for survival. Deadly violence, overcrowding, appalling sanitary conditions and, more recently, reports of children as young as 10 attempting suicide, rarely make the headlines they should.

Last year, the mayor of Lesbos, Spyros Galinos, warned that the facility was starting to resemble “concentration camps, where all human dignity is denied”.

Yet Moria sits in plain sight, on a tourist island in the EU.

It is all a far cry from those days back in 2015 and almost as if Europe has done everything it can to airbrush the refugees from existence. When they are mentioned it’s usually in the abstract, reducing them to faceless, voiceless and grim statistics in order to make a political point on “migration” or “security”.

Whether it’s in Moria camp in the Greek Islands, the slum neighbourhoods of Turkish and Lebanese cities or elsewhere, those who have found themselves uprooted through no fault of their own have continued to show the most remarkable fortitude and resilience.

All have their stories. Harrowing stories like that of Fatima, told to me by her surviving relatives in Lebanon’s Akkar province close to the Syrian border. Even today, years later, Fatima’s family have said nothing to her two young children about what became of their mother.

Where, after all, do you begin explaining to a two-year-old and four-year-old why a sniper would fire a bullet through the window of the family home into their mother’s head?

“We only found out later what happened to her,” Fatima’s mother-in-law tells me before reaching down to pick up one of her grandchildren crawling around the filthy fly-specked floor of a concrete outhouse in an old scrap yard. This is now “home” for the family.

Young and old, the family had walked for six hours the day they fled their home. Then Fatima made the fateful decision to turn back alone to retrieve the passport and ID cards forgotten through panic while escaping the shellfire and marauding gunmen ripping their neighbourhood apart.

She was to make it all the way back to the house before the sniper caught her in the cross hairs of his rifle sight as she stood in the living room and despatched the bullet that ended the young woman’s life.

FATIMA knew all too well that such important documents would be needed if her family was lucky enough to make it across the border to join the millions of other Syrians who had come before them to face life as refugees in Lebanon.

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It has been said that in civil war the firing line is invisible in that it passes through the hearts of all those caught up in such a conflict. Never was this truer than in Syria.

There the civil war makes no concessions for age, gender or status. Young and old, male or female, rich or poor – it blights equally all those innocent civilians trapped in its path. Neither does anyone expect it to stop anytime soon.

News that a major military offensive is due to get under way in the country’s Idlib province has left observers warning of another impending humanitarian catastrophe.

All over Lebanon you see the human fallout from this protracted struggle. Some refugees stay in tents or in rickety shacks made from scrap wood and tarpaulins. Others have sought shelter in garages, truck containers, on waste ground and in derelict buildings. They live in freezing basements and rooftops, and sometimes on the open streets.

From toddlers to young adults and the elderly, the war has impacted on each and every generation. Abdul, a former agricultural labourer and now 95 can remember French rule in Syria.

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“Where are they now just when we Syrians need them?” he wryly complains as we sit talking in his ramshackle shelter in Lebanon about times past and present.

Along with this 80-year-old wife Hanaa, the couple travelled in stages for six days by car to escape the war.

Skirting countless government checkpoints and dodging shellfire, their last leg to the border was by taxi from the Syrian capital Damascus driven by what Abdul describes as “a kind man”. I found Abdul and Hanaa living in a shack made of scrap wood, cardboard and plastic sheets on some waste ground.

“Each day here is like a year, it makes me very sad,” says Abdul, who remembers the Syria of his youth and times before the war as a “heaven”.

Asked about when he was most happy, he looks at his wife and tells me “I was happy when I first loved Hanaa”. “I love her a lot, a lot, a lot, but the fuel has run out,” he says with a mischievous grin.

Many of those Syrian refugees I’ve met over the years have never had the option of trying to make it to Europe. Many of them either cannot afford the journey or simply wish to stay as close as possible to their homeland in the hope of returning quickly.

For some who have chosen to stay in Turkey, however, this has meant putting down temporary roots in places – though devoid of the barrel bombs and bullets – present living conditions scarcely better than those they experienced in Syria under conflict.

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Ali Chadan, who lost his wife and one of his four children in a desperate attempt to reach the Greek island of Kos

In the dilapidated neighbourhood of Mevlana in the city of Izmir on Turkey’s Aegean coast, Syrian refugee families can be found living in disused shop fronts and tumbledown outhouses, ruthlessly exploited by Turkish landlords, who in some instances have even charged rent for premises that were scheduled for demolition.

Emira had been living in a shop front in Mevlana with her husband and four children for over a year when I spoke with them.

“My target has always been to pay the rent then water and electricity and not be evicted,” she tells me as we sit in the single room she has partitioned using curtains to offer some privacy.

For the basic utilities of rent, electricity and water, Emira pays 300TL (about £37), 370TL and 100TL respectively, the electricity charge being so high because it is a shop. With no savings and no prospect of work the future looks bleak.

IT is the youngsters especially though for whom life is very tough here. Since the outbreak of the war in Syria, Emira’s eldest daughter Istaa, who is 10 years old, has only had one year of schooling and the others no tuition at all since becoming refugees in Turkey.

As we talk I notice that one of the children has drawn a crayon picture of a man and woman surrounded by the shape of a heart. It hangs on the wall alongside another heart-shaped ornamental cushion on which the words I LOVE YOU are embroidered.

The drawing is the work of Istaa, who says it is a picture of her mum and dad.

When I ask if I can take a photograph of it and raise my camera, the little girl runs to hide behind the curtain.

There are tears in her eyes and she is afraid of being in the picture for fear that it might get into the hands of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

Only the gentle persuasion of her mother enables her to pose with her wonderful drawing.

“She has nightmares and cries whenever she sees images on the news from Syria,” explains her mother.

Three years ago, just after he had made it onto the beach in Kos with his surviving children, I recall joining Ali Chadan on a search.

With the help of a caring local Greek-Australian businessman who owned a motor launch and who offered to help the father of four look for his missing son, we set off one afternoon from Kos’ picturesque harbour.

“My baby, I need to go,” was all Ali said in broken English by way of unnecessary explanation as we stepped on board the boat on what was to be a fruitless quest to find any clue as to the fate of his little boy, Hussein.

“It’s not that he expects to find the boy, just that he feels a sense of guilt that he couldn’t save him and cannot leave without at least looking for Hussein’s body before he can continue on his journey,” said Yussef Walid, who accompanied us aboard the boat as a translator.

For hours that day we scoured the sea and shoreline littered with deflated dinghies and heaps of discarded fluorescent life jackets, all grim testimony to those who had made the crossing from Turkey to Greece.

Today, over 17,000 of those refugees are still living in Greek island camps in conditions unfit for human habitation.

It is to Europe’s shame that we have wiped them out of our sight.