Guests: Kareem Shaheen, Wendy Pearlman

While no longer on the front pages of American newspapers, Syrian civil war continues. Since its start in 2011, hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed, millions have been internally displaced and five million have fled the country. A recent report by Amnesty International details Assad’s strategy of starving the besieged cities where some 500,000 are still trapped. We start this hour, speaking with The Guardian’s KAREEM SHAHEEN about the conflict, the lives of the Syrian people, and the near defeat of ISIS there. Then, WENDY PEARLMAN, a political science professor at Northwestern University, comes in to talk about her collection of interviews with Syrian refugees. Pearlman traveled around the Middle East and Europe speaking to hundreds of refugees in camps and at border crossings–businessman, doctors, accountants, housewives, and teenagers–who were forced to flee Assad’s brutal regime. She’s collected their stories in the book, We Crossed A Bridge and It Trembled: Voices of Syria.