As the Tokyo Olympics came to a close over the weekend, 120 boys from 12 different refugee camps gathered on Saturday for their own version of the Games in Syria's last major rebel stronghold of Idlib.
For the children wearing the colour of their camp, it was their turn to be the star athletes.
The 8 to 14-year-olds competed in a host of disciplines including martial arts, javelin, discus, high jump, hurdles, gymnastics, volleyball, badminton, football, running and even "horse racing" — using cutouts of horse's heads.
The Idlib region is home to nearly three million people, two-thirds of them displaced from other parts of Syria over the course of the country's 10-year-old conflict.
The majority of those who have lost their homes live in camps and are dependent on humanitarian aid to survive.
Organiser Ibrahim Sarmini, a representative of Syrian charity Benefits, told AFP that the event aimed to give the children some hope, but also draw the attention of the international community to their plight.
We wanted "to introduce the kids to different kinds of sports that we, as a society, hadn't really tried before", he said.
"The main aim was to shine a light on the camp residents, children and adults, who are living a very tough life."
A decade of war in Syria has left nearly half a million people dead, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said earlier this year, in a new toll that includes 100,000 recently confirmed deaths.
At the Tokyo Olympics, Syrian athletes competed as part of two teams, with six on the national team representing the Damascus government, and nine on the international Olympic Refugee Team.
This created a situation in which two brothers competed on different Olympic teams, with swimmer Alaa Maso on the international refugee team and his brother Mohammed, a triathlete, in the official Syrian team.
The two brothers from Aleppo now both live in Germany, having fled in 2015 from the ongoing Syrian civil war.
📷 Omar Haj Kadour / AFP via Getty
Reposted from @viceworldnews
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