On November 24th, I was celebrating Thanksgiving in New Jersey with old family friends. Dinner was coming to a close, and guests were slowly being led to the living room. I sat down, dessert plate on my lap, and was thanking my hosts when my phone blinked with a WhatsApp message. “How are you, Yasmine?” it began. “Omar, I’m well. How are you?” I wrote back. “We’re OK. Exhausted to tell you the truth. Today we barely escaped death. It was 50 meters away. We have been hit by ballistic missiles fired from the sea.”

Omar Dawood lived with his wife and three children in Aleppo, and when the Syrian government’s campaign to retake the eastern portion of the city intensified on November 15th, they were among the two hundred thousand civilians trapped inside. The New Yorker had published an article and radio segment about Omar’s life under siege two weeks before the military campaign escalated. After Thanksgiving, I tried to check in with him, but all my messages went unanswered—undelivered. By December 22nd, the Syrian government had established full control over eastern Aleppo, evacuations were completed, and I had stopped trying.

Then, on a cold Sunday morning in mid-January, to my great relief, I found a missed Skype message from Omar. “It was a slaughter in every sense of the word,” Omar recalled when we managed to speak on the phone. Pro-government planes dropped leaflets warning those who did not leave that they would be annihilated. “Everyone has given up on you,” the leaflets read. Omar lived in al-Mashhad, southwest of the rebel-held area, and his neighborhood was one of the last to fall. As pro-regime forces closed in, frightened civilians retreated their way. Thousands of others fled to regime-held territories. “People began walking out west heedlessly toward the government-held area, toward the sniper lines, in a daze,” Omar said. But the Syrian government isn’t known to take kindly to critics, or even to those who simply live in areas held by opponents. Hundreds of those who fled into government-held territories were later reported missing. Omar left Aleppo in mid-December, after a ceasefire agreement sponsored by Russia and Turkey was finally reached. With an estimated ten thousand others, Omar and his family were evacuated to western rural Aleppo, and to Idlib, forty miles to the southwest.

For the next forty days, Omar tried several times to smuggle his wife, father, and three children across the border to Turkey. The first smuggler took them over difficult terrain that exhausted Omar’s elderly father, and they had to turn back. On their second attempt, the family was stopped by the Turkish border patrol and returned. On the third attempt, Omar had suspicions about the smuggler—he had heard stories of refugees held captive by traffickers demanding extra pay—and turned back. Still, he persisted. He continued to go to smugglers’ offices and ask friends for recommendations, but many were not interested in transporting Omar’s father. “This is the story of the thousands who are on the borders,” he said. Eventually, he sent his wife alone, successfully, hoping to follow her soon after with his father and children. On January 29th, Omar and the rest of the family made it across. “We paid fifty-eight hundred dollars in total for the crossing—eighteen hundred per adult,” he told me.

The family joined his wife’s parents in the Turkish city of Antakya. “The best two things that my in-laws have ever done are that they have accepted that I marry their daughter, and that they left for Antakya five years ago,” Omar said. But Antakya has been straining under the influx of refugees, and Omar has struggled to find a job. “I’m just waiting for my younger brother to come out,” he said. “I need to protect what I’ve got, and all I’ve got is my family. I need to be able to provide for them.”