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their way out, but their exact locations and routes remained unclear.
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• AP PHOTOS: For many Syrian refugee kids, a lost childhood without education
• ZAATARI, Jordan (AP) -- For 12-year-old Ahmed Mahmoud, school is a distant memory. Already, the Syrian refugee boy insists he is no longer a child.
• Ahmed helps his father sell vegetables in a wholesale market near their makeshift refugee camp just outside Jordan's capital, Amman, where he has lived for the past year. On a recent day, he watched other kids play but refused to join. Instead, he supervised them, scolding them if they argue or get out of line.
• "These are children. I am a man. I am too old to be playing with them," Ahmed said, wearing a wristband with the colors of the Syrian flag. He fiddled with a kite other children left behind, raising it in the air but then going and picking up his toddler brother who tried to join the children's games.
• More than 2.8 million Syrian children inside and outside the country -- nearly half the school-aged population -- cannot get an education because of the devastation from the civil war, according to the U.N. children's agency, UNICEF.
• They include a half-million children from among the wave of Syrian refugees that has flooded neighboring Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and other countries in the region.
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