Mohammad was barely two months old when war broke out in Syria. After losing his hand when his home was shelled his family made a perilous journey to safety in Beirut.
ADVERTISEMENTMohammad was just two months old when war broke out in Syria.
Now both he and the war that has forced him to flee his country are seven years old.
UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, estimates that there are now more than a million Syrian refugee children like Mohammad who have never known their country at peace, their earliest memories shaped by war and exile.
Mohammad has survived but at a cost. He had to have his hand amputated after a piece of shrapnel was lodged inside it.
If he could've made it to a hospital soon after the shelling of his house surgeons may have been able to save his hand.
"We couldn'`t take him to the hospital because there was shelling. His hand had to be amputated," Hussein Ibrahim, Mohammad`'s father said.
Mohammed was diagnosed with a hearing impediment when he was one and a half, but he's now lucky enough to attend the Father Andeweg Institute for the Deaf, a specialist school near Beirut.
"We don't have enough funds to have more refugee children here. If we can get help we can receive more Syrian children," Shawish, the school manager said.
There are now 20 Syrian refugee children who attend free of charge alongside 50 Lebanese students.
Armed groups took control of the area around Mohammad's village in 2015 and prevented people from leaving.
In 2016 and with no other choice, his mother paid smugglers to get her and her four children out of extremist-held territory so they could join their father in Lebanon.
That journey took two traumatic months and Aisha was forced to beg strangers for water along the way as well as walk for hours at a time with her four young children.
It's a journey that's still being taken by thousands of Syrians desperate to reach safety in another country.
And there are thousands more who have fled their homes but remain within Syria.
On Thursday the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the number of people fleeing a rebel pocket in eastern Ghouta to government territory had risen to 12,500.
Civilians are streaming out of the towns of Kafr Batna, Hammouriyeh, Jisreen and Saqba, said Rami AbdulRahman, director of the Britain-based war monitor.