Where the Children Sleep: Magnus Wennman's Syrian Refugee Photos

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Photographer Reveals The Heartbreaking Places Syrian Refugee Children Sleep
Magnus Wennman

"Where the Children Sleep" is a 2015 photo series by Swedish photojournalist Magnus Wennman that shows children who fled the war in Syria in the places they were sleeping: forest floors, pavements, bus shelters, tents and hospital beds. Wennman made the pictures for the Swedish daily Aftonbladet while following families through refugee camps in the Middle East and along the route into Europe, including Serbia, Hungary and Greece. The series spread widely online, was turned into a travelling exhibition with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and Fotografiska, the Swedish museum of photography, and was published as a book by Kehrer Verlag in 2016.

The idea is simple, and that is its strength. Wennman felt that people far away struggle to follow a long and complicated war, but anyone can grasp what it means for a child to have no safe bed. He told CNN in November 2015:

"I was struck by the children there; they are the most innocent."

Below, the children are grouped by where they were photographed. Ages and details are as recorded by Wennman and Aftonbladet at the time. Not every child in the series was Syrian: at least one family had fled Iraq, a reminder that the 2015 migration route carried people from several wars.

The photograph above shows a small child asleep under a patterned blanket in near-darkness. Like most of the series, it was taken in low light at bedtime, with no staging beyond what the families allowed.

Why Wennman photographed where children sleep

Wennman, born in 1979, has been a staff photographer at Aftonbladet since 2001 and has worked in more than 60 countries, winning World Press Photo awards and being named Sweden’s photographer of the year several times. In 2015 hundreds of thousands of refugees were moving through the Balkans, and the news was full of crowds, fences and boats. He wanted a way past the numbers. Asking children to show where they now slept gave each picture a single, personal focus.

He said the hardest thing was not the conditions but the change in the children themselves. In his words to CNN, "They have lost some hope." The quiet style of the photos, with sleeping or resting children and few adults in frame, lets that loss show without spectacle. His explanation of the project was equally plain: "But there is nothing hard to understand about how children need a safe place to sleep."

On the road: Serbia and the Hungarian border

In late summer 2015, the main land route north ran through Serbia to Hungary. Hungary sealed that border with razor-wire fencing on 15 September 2015, and many of these families were racing to cross before it closed.

Lamar, 5, Horgos, Serbia

Lamar, 5 years old, Horgos, Serbia
Magnus Wennman

Lamar’s family came from Baghdad, where a bomb fell near their home as they went out to buy food. Her grandmother told the photographer they could not stay after that. They crossed from Turkey by rubber boat on their second attempt, and Lamar, who still talked about the toys left behind, ended up sleeping on a blanket in a forest near the closed Hungarian border.

Abdullah, 5, Belgrade, Serbia

Abdullah, 5 years old, Belgrad, Serbia
Magnus Wennman

Abdullah, who has a blood disorder, had spent two nights sleeping outside Belgrade’s main railway station. His family is from Daraa, where he saw his sister killed at home. His mother said he still had nightmares every night, and she had no money to buy his medicine.

Ahmed, 6, Horgos, Serbia

Ahmed, 6 years old, Horgos, Serbia
Magnus Wennman

Ahmed fell asleep in the grass after midnight while the adults around him worked out how to get through Hungary without being registered there. His father was killed in Deir ez-Zor, in eastern Syria, and an uncle now looks after him. On the long walks between stops, the six-year-old carries his own bag.

Ahmad, 7, Horgos and Röszke

Ahmad, 7 years old, Horgos/Roszke
Magnus Wennman

A bomb struck Ahmad’s home in Idlib, wounding him in the head with shrapnel and killing his younger brother. When Wennman met them, the family had been on the move for 16 days and were lying on the asphalt beside the motorway to the Hungarian border with thousands of others. They had slept in bus shelters, on roadsides and in woods along the way.

Shehd, 7, Hungarian border

Shehd, 7 years old
Magnus Wennman

Shehd used to love drawing, but before the family left, every picture she made was of weapons, which her mother said were everywhere at home. On the journey she had no paper or crayons and had stopped playing altogether. The family sometimes lived on apples picked from roadside trees, and her parents said that had they known how hard the trip would be, they might have stayed.

Juliana, 2, Horgos, Serbia

Juliana, 2 years old, Horgos, Serbia
Magnus Wennman

On a 34°C day at the end of August, Juliana slept on the ground under her mother’s shawl while flies settled on her face and a steady stream of people walked past. Her family had been travelling for three months and walking through Serbia for two days. They planned to cross into Hungary that evening, in the last days before the fence went up.

In camps and hospitals: Jordan

Jordan took in hundreds of thousands of Syrians, many of them in camps such as Azraq, and some of the most badly injured children were evacuated to its hospitals.

Maram, 8, Amman

Maram, 8 years old, Amman
Magnus Wennman

Maram was home from school when a rocket hit the house and part of the roof fell on her. She was taken to a field hospital and then flown across the border to Jordan with bleeding on the brain. She spent 11 days in a coma; when photographed she was awake but had a broken jaw and could not speak.

Moyad, 5, Amman

Moyad, 5 years old, Amman
Magnus Wennman

Moyad and his mother were walking to the market in Daraa to buy flour when a car bomb exploded beside them. His mother died at the scene. He was airlifted to Jordan with shrapnel in his head, back and pelvis.

Fara, 2, Azraq camp

Fara, 2 years old, Azraq
Magnus Wennman

Two-year-old Fara loves football. Her father makes her balls from scrunched-up rubbish, but they soon fall apart. Each night he says goodnight to Fara and her nine-year-old sister Tisam hoping he can find them a real ball, the one wish he still feels able to grant.

On the streets and in tents: Lebanon

Lebanon, a small country, hosted so many Syrians that at one point refugees made up roughly a quarter of its population, the highest share anywhere.

Ralia, 7, and Rahaf, 13, Beirut

Ralia, 7 and Rahaf, 13 years old, Beirut
Magnus Wennman

These sisters from Damascus lost their mother and brother to a grenade. For a year they had slept rough in Beirut with their father, pressed together on flattened cardboard. Rahaf told the photographer she was afraid of the boys on the street, and her little sister began to cry when she said it.

Walaa, 5, Dar El-Ias

Walaa, 5 years old, Dar-El-Ias Read
Magnus Wennman

In Aleppo, Walaa had her own bedroom and went to sleep without tears. In the camp she cried every night, because night was when the attacks had come. During the day her mother built little houses out of pillows to show her that bedtime need not be frightening.

Amir, 20 months, Zahle Fayda

Amir, 20 months, Zahle Fayda
Magnus Wennman

Amir was born a refugee and had never said a word. His mother, Shahana, believed the trauma reached him before birth. In the family’s plastic tent he had no toys and played with whatever he found on the ground, yet she said he laughed a lot.

Across the border: Turkey

Turkey became the largest host of Syrian refugees, with more than three million at its peak.

Shiraz, 9, Suruç

Shiraz, 9 years old, Suruc
Magnus Wennman

Shiraz fell ill with a high fever at three months old and was diagnosed with polio; a doctor told her parents not to spend much on treatment. When war reached Kobani, her mother Leila wrapped her in a blanket and carried her across into Turkey. Unable to speak, Shiraz spends day and night in a wooden cradle given to her in the camp.

Syria’s displacement, then and now

A correction to how this story was often told in 2015: Syria’s crisis did not begin with the fight against ISIS. It started in 2011, when security forces cracked down on nationwide protests and the unrest turned into civil war. ISIS was one of several armed forces that emerged later. By 2016, more than 6 million Syrians were displaced inside the country and around 5 million had fled abroad, mostly to Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. About half a million had reached Europe by the end of 2015.

The war’s politics changed sharply in December 2024, when the Assad government fell. Some refugees began going home, but violence continued in parts of the country, and by late 2025 more than 13 million Syrians were still counted as forcibly displaced. For many of the children in these photos, now teenagers, the question of where they sleep is still not settled.

Wennman’s series endures because it asks so little of the viewer and gives so much. You do not need to know the factions or the front lines. You only need to look at a child asleep on a roadside and ask what it would take for that child to have a bed again. Organisations such as UNHCR and UNICEF continue to work with displaced Syrian families, and the book and exhibition remain the best way to see the full series.

Sources: Photos: Magnus Wennman / Aftonbladet. Aftonbladet: Where the Children Sleep (original series); CNN, 8 November 2015; Kehrer Verlag: the book (2016); Festival della Fotografia Etica: Magnus Wennman; Wikipedia: Syrian refugee crisis; True Activist (h/t).

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