I first learned about barrel bombs in January 2013 on a trip with John McCain to the Zaatari refugee camp, a massive city of canvas tents sprawled across the sandy moonscape of northern Jordan that was then home to tens of thousands of Syrians who had fled the civil war raging in their country. It was there that we met a Syrian mother who had recently lost all five of her children in a barrel bomb attack by forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad. She fled the country with nothing more than her own life. As a parent myself who had just had my second child, I was haunted by the emptiness in
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