deborah amos covers the middle east for national public radio and has reported on the syrian civil war since it began. she has been in the refugee camps and on the front lines. deborah amos, welcome. >> thank you very much for having me. >> let me share with our viewers two quotes here. this is the u.n.'s high commissioner for refugees. imagine the responsibility of this man. "syria has become the great tragedy of this century, a disgraceful humanitarian calamity with suffering and displacement unparalleled in recent history." supporting his thunderous description of what's happening there. tobias billstrÖm, swedish migration minister, "no other conflict on earth today is as terrible as the long and bloody conflict in syria. that should make many politicians inside and outside the e.u. think about our responsibilities." >> i think that guterres is trying very hard to break through what is almost an overwhelming amount of statistics. it's very hard to take onboard 2 million refugees, tenfold in the last year. to make people understand, whenever i'm out there and i'm in one of these camp

joining me from lebanon is deborah amos. thank you for joining us. i want to get straight to news that damascus is going to welcome the international community overlooking of their chemical weapons. i wonder if some of the diplomatic efforts that we saw this week are at all going to translate into your job as a reporter. in other words, have diplomatic operations put a thaw to reporting what's a difficult country and region to report out of. >> i came this week. i thought i was coming to be a witness to perhaps a u.s. strike on syria and it turned into a dapt diplomatic story overnight. it's been a dramatic swing for many reporters that came to the region. some of what we do won't change. we'll still continue to cover the refugees. there's been fighting across syria all the while the diplomats have been in geneva. that hasn't changed. it perhaps explains why the opposition in syria and the rebels are very much against this agreement in geneva. for them what they see is that only 2% of those who have been killed in syria have been killed by chemical w