By Ruth Styles PUBLISHED: 09:27 EST, 16 October 2013 | UPDATED: 10:42 EST, 16 October 2013 Staring into the camera, the girl's striking blue eyes are full of unshed tears. And she isn't alone. The girl in the polka dot headscarf and her family are just some of the thousands of people who have crossed the border into Iraq in a bid to escape the slaughter in Syria. Although the raging civil war has cost her family their home, the girl is luckier than most. An ethnic Kurd, she has managed to escape the fighting that has taken the lives of thousands of her compatriots as well as the bouts of ethnic violence that have taken the lives of Kurds in Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Iran over the last century.
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French photographer Eric Lafforgue travelled to refugee camps near the town of Erbil in northern Iraq
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Erbil is part of Kurdistan, an unrecognised autonomous statelet handed to the Kurds after Saddam Hussein's defeat
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Many of Lafforgue's subjects have been forced out of their Syrian homes after being bombed out of their homes
Now she and other Kurdish refugees are the subject of a series of stunning photographs by French snapper Eric Lafforgue who travelled to @placeholder last month to meet them.
Refugee: This girl, a Syrian Kurd, was forced to flee with her family to a refugee camp in the @placeholder Kurdish city of Erbil after her home was bombed