Life in Aleppo: A young girl tweets about living in a war zone

ALEPPO (Syria) — What is life in Aleppo like now? Bombings, hospitals filled with the injured and the dying, food and water supplies dwindling, and children and babies dying. And one young girl has taken to social media to share about life in a city that is being decimated around her. 

Bana al-Abed, who is only seven years old, has been using Twitter to comment on the war in Aleppo. Since she started tweeting — with the help of her mother, Fatemah — last week, she has amassed more than 1,800 followers.

Every day, she gives her account of the horrors inflicted on her neighbours, friends and family. Her tweets offer snapshots not only of what is going on around her, but how she feels about it.

“Good afternoon from Aleppo. I am reading to forget the war,” she posted on Sep 26, while two days earlier, she posted: “I … Hate … War. And the world has forgotten us..”

“Everyone will soon dig his/her own cave to avoid bombing. But Putin is using bunker busters now, where's safe dear world? Where do we go?” she tweeted on Sept 29.

Earlier in the day, she had said: “#Aleppo is a very big daily slaughterhouse now to be honest.”

Since the ceasefire failed, Russian and Syrian government air strikes have been pounding opposition-held areas of Aleppo, where more than 250,000 civilians are trapped without food or clean water.

"Before, when Aleppo was being bombarded by the regime, people used to go to the basement to hide," Mr Kholoud Helmi, a founder of the Syrian underground newspaper Enab Baladi, told CNN. "Recently the regime is using missiles that can reach down into the basement."

One of his friends in Aleppo said that he used to tell his children they could not go into the streets to play with other kids because he feared he would have to shuttle them down to the basement to escape the bombardments at any moment.

"Since the missiles are being used to dig down and then kill in basements, he is letting his kids go play in the streets because he wants them to go have fun because they are going to die in a minute," Mr Helmi told CNN. "At any minute a missile is going to hit them either in the street or in the basement. The situation is terrible and people are dying in large numbers in Aleppo and no one is taking any further steps."

Bana has not been to school since it was destroyed in one of the bombings, joining seven million other Syrian children out of education. Fatemah, an English teacher, is tutoring her daughter using the few books they have at home.

She said she is constantly afraid, but tries to be brave for her younger brothers Noor, five, and Mohamed, three.

“Every second of the day I feel that the plane will take our souls,” she told The Daily Telegraph. “I cry all the time. I can’t sleep because of the bombing, I can’t go out. My garden was destroyed by a strike and the house is now the only safe place.”

The only time she goes outside is to get bread with her father Ghassan, who works in the legal department of the local council.

Only three years old when the war came to her city in 2012, she has very few memories of her life before. “I remember when my parents took me to restaurants and we had lunch and went to parks and to the zoo,” she told The Daily Telegraph, but she does not like to think too much about that time any more.

Her mother, Fatemah, 26, said they are surviving on the pasta and rice they had stored up from before the government-imposed siege in early August, but they are soon to run out. They have not had fruit or vegetables in more than four months and she does not remember the last time the children had treats.

“For all they have experienced, my children are still the lucky ones,” she said.

“Last year my school was bombed my friends killed injured. I was lucky to survive,” tweeted Bana recently, while one of the most haunting photos shows a burka-clad woman walking casually among the remnants of a decimated home, with the words: “This is my friend house bombed, she's killed. I miss her so much.”

This week alone, nearly 100 children have been killed in air strikes, making up more than a quarter of the victims. More than 200 other were injured or maimed.

“We’re now more likely to see children being pulled from the rubble or treated on the floor of a hospital than sat at a school desk,” Mr Nick Finney, Save the Children’s north west Syria country director told The Daily Telegraph.

While some have said what Bana is doing is akin to a modern-day Anne Frank diary, some social media users have accused her of being exploited by the rebels battling Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's regime, with one going as far as saying Bana does not exist. “So stop exploiting children for war propaganda. I bet we will never see rebel militants in your pics,” ran one comment.  

Another user called Bruno dismissed Bana's tweets as coming from “you propagandists”.

Fatemah flatly denied the allegations, telling the Daily Mail: “I've written nothing in support of rebels — only what we have experienced.”

Regime forces are now launching a new offensive on Aleppo's old quarter, home to the UNESCO-protected Umayyad Mosque, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

The military has vowed it will continue until all opposition forces in the area have been “wiped out”, reported The Daily Mail.

On Tuesday, a Russian “bunker-buster” bomb dropped on the house opposite Bana’s home in the al-Shaar neighbourhood. All five floors of the building came crashing down on the families inside. Among them was Bana’s friend.

“I'm thinking of my friend tonight,” Bana tweeted. “She went to her grandfather’s house and now I don't know if her, her brother and father are still alive. They are under the rubble of the bombed building.”

Bana and her mother do not like to talk about the politics of the conflict, saying they just want peace. “I want Syria to be okay,” the seven-year-old told The Daily Telegraph. “I love Syria and I just want to live here forever.” AGENCIES