As of September, an estimated 11 million Syrians had fled their homes since the war started in March 2011. They escaped to neighboring countries like Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, and Lebanon, as well as to Europe.
As migrants made the trek from their war-torn homes to new and unfamiliar places, many of them used messaging apps like WhatsApp, Viber, and Line in order to communicate with their families. One used a smartphone to convince the Greek Coast Guard to rescue a boat full of people, as we reported on our podcast, Codebreaker, produced with Marketplace. Others use Google Maps to track their locations.
This is the first refugee crisis that has been digitally documented. And migrants are adding to that in one critical way – they're taking selfies at different points throughout their journeys to memorialize their path to safety.
"We want memories from the bad trip we had," Mehar Ahmed Aloussi, 30, from Damascus, told TIME. "When I go and settle down in another country, I want to remember my way."
The season finale of season 2 of Codebreaker has more stories of how technology is affecting migrants:
SEE ALSO: Children have suffered the brunt of Syria's bloody civil war
Alvand, 18, from Kobani, Syria takes a selfie with his friends as they walk along a railway track after crossing into Hungary from the border with Serbia near the village of Roszke.
Syrian refugees take "selfies" moments after arriving on an overcrowded dinghy at a beach on the Greek island of Kos, after crossing a part of the Aegean sea from Turkey.
Syrian refugees take selfies moments after arriving on a dinghy on the Greek island of Lesbos, September 14, 2015. Of the record total of 432,761 refugees and migrants who made the perilous journey across the Mediterranean to Europe as of September 2015, an estimated 309,000 people had arrived by sea in Greece, the International Organization for Migration said.
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