Syrians vow to fight for freedom

Syrian refugee camps: Lives in limbo

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Read more entries about the situation in Syria at "Anderson Cooper 360"

Syria-Turkey border (CNN) -- The dead are everywhere.

Nonexistent until last June, the encampment of about 1,600 people now is a haven of peace compared with the terror experienced in the country just 300 yards away. Housed in neat, white tents in southern Turkey, with cooking stations in between, people here do not have to worry about being silenced, tortured, arrested or killed.

In other words, they don't live in fear of what they say happened all around them on a daily basis -- and still happens -- in their war-torn nation of Syria.

EU slaps new santions on Syria

They are, however, left with the memories of people killed. And they share them freely, in the form of grainy videos showing their loved ones' funerals, pictures on cell phones of their missing sons and stories about the horrors they escaped but many of their countrymen still endure.

"They want the world to understand them. They want the world to bear witness," Fouad Ajami, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, said Monday from the camp. "They also see the camera as a way of holding onto the memory of this lost world, a world that is very achingly close."

The fighting has prompted thousands to flee Syria, setting up new lives in a number of makeshift camps in neighboring nations. The United Nations estimates at least 9,000 people have been killed over the past 14 months in Syria.

Continued here:
Syrians vow to fight for freedom