MANILA: Ruth Pana remembered the windows of her employer's house in Damascus riddled with bullets. The maid, who escaped first to the Philippine Embassy in the Syrian capital and then to Manila aboard an evacuation flight on Tuesday, also remembered one of the sons of her Syrian employer being killed by government forces. ''His chest was opened like there was large steel that passed through it,” she said, sobbing. “Do you know that we buried him at the back of the house because there were no more cemeteries?''

Pana was among nearly 300 Filipino workers — young women who escaped unemployment at home for jobs abroad as maids and baby sitters — who fled the worsening civil war in the biggest single repatriation negotiated between the Philippines and Syria.—AP