Traumatised Syrians find uneasy shelter in Lebanon Protesters: Amid the violence, refugees who have already endured months if not years of fighting inside Syria are trying to find a safe haven. In a tree-lined street in Qalamoun, a port town on the outskirts of the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, 200 Syrians - refugees who have fled the shocking violence of the civil war being fought just across the border - quietly gather. More than two years after Syria's revolution began, the increasingly ugly sectarian battle that has already claimed at least 80,000 lives has created a sea of displaced civilians, pouring across the borders into Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq. Syrian refugees are visible everywhere in Lebanon - nowhere more so than in Tripoli, the country's second-largest city. But Tripoli, particularly the neighbourhood of Jabal Mohsen, is also home to an established community of about 30,000 Alawites, the offshoot of the Shiite sect to which Syria's President Bashar al-Assad belongs. For the past fortnight Jabal Mohsen has been at war with the nearby Sunni neighbourhood of Bab al Tabbaneh - 30 people died and at least 250 have been wounded in the bloody street-level clashes, local authorities say. Amid this violence, refugees who have already endured months if not years of fighting inside Syria are trying to find a place they can feel safe. Sabeh al Hassan, 60, and her sister Najla al Hassan, 54, arrived from the Syrian province of Homs six months ago. Each lost her husband in an air strike that destroyed their homes - anything left was later burnt to the ground by Syrian regime forces to "erase any trace of the village," Sabeh says. "We have been inside Syria with the fighting all around us - now we are here and we have no work, no family, nowhere to live and we are moving from apartment to apartment, staying in people's lounge rooms," she says. The sectarian battles that have erupted on the nearby streets of Tripoli are nothing compared with the aerial bombardment the sisters experienced in Homs, but it is deadly and frightening nonetheless. "There is still fighting all around us now, and yes, we are worried," Sabeh says. We hope to go back to our own country, and to one day feel safe again. The scale of suffering caused by Syria's civil war is unimaginable - in a country of just 20 million people, nearly 7 million require humanitarian assistance, 4.25 million have been internally displaced - often moving several times to escape the constantly moving battlefield - and at least 1.6 million have fled to neighbouring countries to seek refuge, the UN reports. Families make do with severe overcrowding - one family Fairfax Media met is already sleeping 12 people to a three-room apartment and they are preparing for the arrival of five more who are attempting fleeing the bombardment in Qusayr. "Every day it feels as if the fighting gets nearer to us and it feels like there may soon be no safety," says 25-year-old Lama Dabket. We came from Homs to Damascus and then to Lebanon and even though we are OK we are still very worried about how we will live - we have nothing. The refugees are waiting to receive much-needed rental assistance from Oxfam - part of a program that is helping 2000 households to secure safe housing. Yet organisers say it is just a drop in the ocean of need: there are at least 10,000 households in the area desperate for urgent assistance but international donations have all but dried up. "An estimated 6.8 million people are affected by the ongoing violence and require humanitarian assistance," a recent European Union assessment found.