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Two days before my birthday, an unsettling tweet appeared in reponse to something I’d posted. “In a few days you will be 37 years old and you still continue to waste ur life with producing lies about Turkey,” it said. I was mildly distressed when some cursory googling didn’t reveal my date of birth, but a friend quickly linked me to a search engine that revealed not only my birthdate, but my voter registration party affiliation and the addressed at which I lived during college in Gainesville, Florida.

“Every day is difficult. There is a constant sense of chaos,” said Mohamed Fajr*, a 22 year-old former Syrian National Army militant living in Atareb, a town in the Idlib countryside.