Their faces said it all, a tableau of fear, confusion and exhaustion. One little boy clutched his mother’s hand, while his sister cowered close to her side, wary of the strangers around her.

Although she could be no more than seven or eight years old, there was something about the look on the little girl’s face that made her appear older than she was.

It was a telling look, a strange mixture of profound sadness, apprehension and bitterness that spoke volumes about the traumatic experience she and her siblings had been through.

On the horizon behind them the dense, black smoke billowing up from around the Iraqi oil town of Qayyara told of the fighting between the Iraqi Army and Islamic State (IS) jihadists, that had forced this family to flee their homes. They had come with only what they could carry.

Lives distilled into a few bulging holdalls and carrier bags, their future now uncertain.

Looking back on that moment towards the end of 2016 as I covered the battle for Iraq’s second largest city Mosul, the look on that little girl’s face seemed to sum up so much of the emotional turmoil that made 2016 the traumatic year that it was. Fear, uncertainty, bitterness, these were the main leitmotifs of 2016.

In terms of world events, few years in recent times can compare with the sheer drama that unfolded during the past 12 months.

“It feels as though the ground has fallen away from beneath our feet,” was how Ines Gyger, an elderly Swiss woman, summed up the trauma she personally underwent and which manifested itself in the lives of so many others last year.

It was during France’s Bastille Day holiday celebrations, that Gyger lost both her daughter Elizabeth and granddaughter Kayla when a truck driven by Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, bore down on them last July on the beachfront promenade in the city of Nice killing 86 people.

Once again Islamist inspired terrorism and those affiliated with it, had indelibly stamped their presence on 2016. From Brussels, Berlin and Baghdad to Orlando, Paris and Kabul the gunmen and bombers brought their own brand of fear and loathing.

Europe itself spent the year coming to grips with this terror threat, one likely to stalk the region for years to come.

Against this spectre of fear and paranoia, the security services searched for suspects amid the hundreds of thousands of refugees who had arrived in Europe from the Middle East over the past year.

They looked too for ‘lone wolves’ and those ‘homegrown’ jihadists radicalised within our own society, whose presence only added yet more suspicion and acrimony.

As the terrorists themselves no doubt intended, their outrages helped foster a political climate in which division and enmity flourished. An environment where anti-immigrant groups took advantage of terrorist murders so they themselves could politically target the stranger, foreigner, outsider, refugee and migrant.

In Germany, the refugees’ top destination, the Alternative fuer Deutschland (AfD) an explicitly anti-Islam party, has become the strongest recent challenge to the established order in the country’s postwar history.

Elsewhere across Europe and undeterred by UN warnings against fuelling “fear and xenophobia,” measures that up until recently would have been unthinkable, were passed into law with barely a murmur of public disquiet or outcry.

In Denmark they even introduced a law authorising the confiscation of jewellery and cash from asylum seekers to pay for their care. The loathing it seemed had no bounds and still the public was largely silent. Add to this combustible mix the politics of populism, and many observers began drawing discomfiting parallels with the pre-Second World War climate of the 1930’s.

In France Francois Hollande decided not to run for a second term as president as polling showed that the far-right National Front’s Marine Le Pen would beat him to the run-off.

Francois Fillon meanwhile won the centre-right’s primary and leads the race that will play out in the equally turbulent year that likely lies ahead. In Hungary and Poland too, populist governments thumbed their noses at the EU, and even in the far off Philippines the populist surge gave rise to the monster that is President Rodrigo Duterte. Here was a man who throughout 2016 preyed mercilessly on fear and loathing for his political ends.

Elected after promising to kill criminals and urging people to attack suspected drug dealers, so far close to 6,000 people have been lynched since Duterte took office.

The president himself has even admitted helping police kill three suspected kidnappers in the first of his several terms as mayor of the city of Davao.

In Turkey the ‘populism’ of another political hardman, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, appears to have saved him from a coup attempt that came out of nowhere last year.

With an ongoing crackdown on opposition and dissent that daily intensifies, Erdogan is now seeking majority support for a constitutional reform package that could see the most radical restructuring of the state since Turkey’s founding as a secular republic almost a century ago.

Critics say the shift could break already fragile democratic institutions, but his supporters say it would help stabilise the nation as it faces terrorist and other national security threats at home and abroad as well as economic ills.

While Turkey and the Philippines continue to twist in the maelstrom of political instability and violence, nowhere did the triumph of populism lay down its global political marker more profoundly than in the realm of ‘The Donald’.

Perhaps not since 9/11 can so many people recall such a sense of shock and fear when the results of the US presidential election became clear on November 9.

This was a day when history was made. A day when the poll-defying election of Donald Trump as America’s president left some full of hope and others full of, yes you guessed it, fear. As for loathing, there was no shortage of that either across America.

From rancour in the rustbelt, to the movement Black Lives Matter, rarely has the United States witnessed such political polarisation. Racial, gender and sexual intolerance became the backdrop to a presidential contest that caused terrible hurt to many Americans.

Trump’s vicious no holds barred presidential campaign might have been victorious by tearing up the rulebook, but the country paid a price in seeing many of the values of which it can be proud left in shreds.

In rising to become president, facts were at best worthless and at worst a liability for Trump.

In a year when the phrase "post-truth" entered the Oxford Dictionary, and fake news helped win the White House, the Kremlin was said to have taken advantage of America’s political turmoil to influence the outcome of events. Russian president Vladimir Putin’s visceral dislike of Trump’s rival Hillary Clinton was only part of the story.

During the Soviet era the KGB used what it called active measures to destabilise its capitalist enemies. As 2016 showed, cyberspace offered new global opportunities for old tactics.

Few security experts now doubt that two Kremlin-connected groups were behind the hacking of US institutions during the presidential campaign.

One was from the FSB spy agency, the other from Russian military intelligence.

In all, it was an intelligence operation that offered the icing on the cake for Putin in an international year that also saw elections bring victory to pro-Kremlin leaders in Bulgaria and Moldova.

Few global leaders do fear and loathing as convincingly as Vladimir Putin.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in his uncompromising strategy in Syria’s civil war. This past week the flight data recorders of a crashed Russian military airliner were found that might reveal the cause of the accident that resulted in the death of 92 passengers and crew en-route to Syria

That the plane was carrying members of the Alexandrov Ensemble or official army choir of the Russian armed forces is without doubt a tragedy. The deaths though are but a fraction of those fatalities, military and civilian, now associated with the war in Syria.

A week or so ago the Alexandrov Ensemble were not the only ‘Russians’ boarding flights for Syria. Barely days after the plane carrying the choir crashed, dozens of Russian-created special military units in red berets lined up in the sun, waiting for the aircraft to transport them to what they gently referred to as “Shama” which in their Chechen mother tongue means the Holy Land in Syria.

According to the Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, Chechen commanders have been recruiting soldiers for the “Syrian” special units for several months. All of which points to a war in 2016 that was ugly now getting even uglier in the year ahead.

“This year ends in the best way for Moscow, beyond its wildest dreams,” Sergei Markov, a Russian official and adviser to the government, said.

“President Putin has won his battles on many fields, including Syria’s Aleppo, America and the EU. More and more people agree that he is right, that Russia’s power and rightness is growing.”

This of course is a view many would refute. Not least many of those Syrians who have struggled to survive the bombardment by Russian warplanes and military blockade to the point of starvation by ground forces in eastern Aleppo.

If 2016’s terrible leitmotifs have been fear and loathing then perhaps nowhere on the planet were they stamped with more authority and brutality than on Aleppo. But Aleppo is far from the end of Syria’s civil war, and it remains an open sore for the international community.

“All the world has failed us,” a resident of the Syrian city told the BBC via a WhatsApp audio message towards the end of the siege last month. Few would disagree with such an observation.

If fear was to be found in many places across the world during 2016, the global institutions designed to keep us safe were no exception. In these ‘corridors of power’ it was as if a compulsive timidity had taken hold during the course of the year.

"I have said before that we have collectively failed the people of Syria," UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon openly admitted as Aleppo burned.

"The Security Council has not exercised its pre-eminent responsibility with regard to the maintenance of international peace and security."

That the Security Council was effectively paralysed was down to the fact it was virtually held hostage by Russia’s power of veto, ensuring Putin and Syria’s President Assad got their way.

If this collective cowing over Syria by the Security Council cast a terrible shadow over its role in 2016, then at least it went out on a high note at year’s end.

As might be expected the refusal by Barack Obama’s outgoing US administration, to veto a Security Council resolution demanding a halt to all Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories did not go down well with the Israeli government.

What it showed however was just what can be achieved when the political will is there. That UN resolve is sure to be tested regularly in the year ahead. If fear and loathing were hallmarks of 2016, then danger and uncertainty will lie behind many of the big foreign affairs stories of the next 12 months.

I for one certainly hope to pick up where I left of reporting the yet unfinished battle for Mosul. When the city is finally rid of its heinous rule by IS jihadists, then their self-proclaimed caliphate would be all but over. Their threat however will remain in the region and beyond.

The fear and uncertainty I saw on the face of that little Iraqi girl a few months ago, as she and her family fled around Mosul, is sadly sure to be repeated. The coming year in the Middle East at least will most likely be even more tumultuous than the one just gone. If one thing is certain though, it’s that the innocents will suffer most.