Two migrant sisters from Syria, now worlds apart...

In a small town south of Beirut, Fawziyeh keeps her apartment immaculately clean despite its crumbling walls and the plastic sheets flapping across its windows. She shares the three-bedroom flat with 12 others including her five children – all, like her, refugees from Syria.

Almost every day she gets cellphone messages from her younger sister Rabab, in Germany.

They both fled their homeland three years ago, and their divergent lives capture the fates dealt to millions of Syrians forced from their country by its four-year civil war.

Rabab, a 42-year-old widow, and her two teenage children are among the few thousand Syrians selected by a rich European country for re-settlement. They live in a comfortable house and receive free education and health insurance.

Fawziyeh, 10 years her senior, was not re-settled. In Lebanon, she is one of more than one million Syrians with no legal right to work and little aid. She and her children cannot return to Syria, she said: Neighbours there told her the façade of their old apartment block was blown away. Full story...

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