barber with three young children, fled Syria, with the permission of his wife. Ghalib went first to Turkey, by air, then to Greece, by sea, and, eventually, to Sweden, by truck, hidden inside a wooden crate. In Gothenburg, he took a job at an auto-repair shop. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians were attempting similar escapes. The wealthiest went directly to Europe, but most headed for Jordan, Lebanon, or Turkey, where they often got stuck in refugee camps. Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad, did not seem particularly troubled by the exodus; after several of his advisers defected, he characterized their departure as a “self-cleaning process of the state.”

To support his mother, Ghaith had two part-time jobs: stocking shelves at a supermarket and making kebabs and falafel at a restaurant. In2013, he married his high-school sweetheart. (At Ghaith’s request, her name has been withheld.) With these relationships and responsibilities, leaving seemed out of the question. Once he graduated, however, he would become eligible for conscription, and Ghaith—who was just over five feet tall, with a jockey’s physique—questioned his aptitude for combat. Speaking through a translator, he told me recently, “The thing that frightened me most was that I would become a victim of the civil war—or, even worse, a killer in it.”

His wife and his mother insisted that he follow his brother to Europe.

At first, Ghaith contemplated trying to secure a visa to a European country. But the rising violence in Syria had led most European countries to close their embassies in Damascus. Syrians could travel to Turkey