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Wednesday March 26, 2025

Syrian child depicts life in Aleppo

By our correspondents
November 25, 2016

ALEPPO: Her hair tied into pigtails by matching pink ribbons, seven-year-old Bana Alabed inspects the rubble in her home town of Aleppo, before walking to face the camera.

"I am sad. It´s so bad," she tells her audience in English in a clip posted on Twitter.

She is later seen holding a banner reading: "Stand with Aleppo. Please stop the bombing and end the siege."

The video, posted on Tuesday and accompanied by the text "checking in the morning after a night of bombing" is the latest the young girl has shared with her nearly 94,000 Twitter followers depicting life in the war-torn Syrian city.

Her account gives a poignant human face to a nearly six-year conflict pitting President Bashar al-Assad against rebels seeking to oust him, in which hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and millions forced from their homes.

Renewed air strikes, after a pause that lasted several weeks, have worsened conditions in Aleppo´s rebel-held east, where residents are short of food, medicine and fuel.

On her Twitter account, which is managed by her mother, Alabed shares pictures of the city´s bombed buildings and of herself at home. "Good afternoon from #Aleppo I´m reading to forget the war," she said in one post showing Alabed with a book and a doll. A picture posted on Thursday of smoke in the sky had the caption "Good morning from #Aleppo. We are still alive."

"Asked about what they hoped to achieve, Alabed´s mother Fatemah, told Reuters via Twitter in English: "Effort to show people our (lives) so they can act.