Iran's lost generation: Refugee children without a future

LEAD PIX, USE 8 COLS IF POSSIBLE, PLACE HEADLINE INSIDE PIC: Life, interrupted: A young Syrian-Kurdish refugee sits inside a make-shift refugee camp in Iraq. There are 1.2 million Syrian children refugees, two-thirds of whom are out of school. -- AFP photos

A bestselling Afghan-American author and UN Goodwill Ambassador shares his experience in Iran of meeting ‘so many children older than their years, refugees deprived of a future’.

SOMETHING about the boy was not right. He seemed disoriented, detached from his surroundings. He barely spoke, and when he did, it was in flat monosyllables, his eyes unfocused and downcast, as if too heavy to roll up from the weight of all they had seen. He was the picture of quiet devastation, of a childhood forever splintered.