‘I need peace’: seven-year-old tweets her life in besieged Aleppo

When seven-year-old Bana al-Abed woke up from her evening nap, she asked her mother if it was morning already. Light was streaming through their window. But this was no natural illumination: their neighbourhood was ablaze with the fire of phosphorus bombs.

“When those bombs strike, our hearts shake before the buildings do,” said her mother, Fatemah, speaking on Skype with her daughter nestled next to her in their dimly lit room, the sound of machine gun fire clearly audible in the background.

Over the past 11 days, bombs have rained down upon the ruins of eastern Aleppo – the besieged districts of Syria's largest city. Unrelenting carnage perpetrated by Russian and Syrian warplanes has left hundreds dead and more than 1,000 wounded, overwhelming the few hospitals still in operation, which are themselves repeatedly bombed out of service .

A brief one-week ceasefire negotiated by Washington and Moscow fell apart in mutual recrimination when Russian or Syrian jets bombed an aid convoy to opposition-held areas that had been approved by Damascus. Since then, an arsenal that includes powerful bunker-buster bombs , barrels filled with explosives, phosphorus and cluster munitions have been deployed on civilian neighbourhoods in an apparent bid to force their surrender ahead of a ground operation.

Last Wednesday, Unicef said nearly 100 children had been killed in the violence, a number that has since risen.

Bana and her mother have survived so far, and have used social media to chronicle their life under siege. On their Twitter account, @alabedbana, which now has more than 26,000 followers since they began tweeting on September 24th with the singular message: “I need peace,” Bana and Fatemah offer snippets of life under the bombs, and images of the carnage in their city interspersed with videos of Bana drawing with her friends or learning English.

Constant bombings

The tweets are often in the basic English of a child struggling to express herself, the ones signed by her mother more rhetorical. At one point she live-tweets the destruction of a building close to hers, and efforts to rescue civilians trapped in the rubble.

“Bana asked me why is the world not hearing us? Why is nobody helping us?” said Fatemah, when asked why she thought of using Twitter to document the destruction around her.

Bana and her little brother (5) no longer go to school. Once, her mother crossed the frontline to go to university, but as the road grew more fraught she opted to stay home and help teach. She took Bana with her to a local school, but that was bombed last year, and the remaining ones were too far away to risk sending her amid the constant bombings. When asked why she couldn’t go to school, Bana straightens up from leaning against her mother.

“Because it was destroyed,” she said. Fatemah had decided to stay in Aleppo, though, thinking the war would last only a year or two, and because the city was her world.

“You can’t leave your own skin,” said Fatemah. “This where our parents lived, it’s our country, our home, our breath.”

Life is quite difficult for Bana and Fatimeh. There are no fruit or vegetables left in the markets, a symptom of the siege that has lasted for three months now, only briefly broken by a rebel offensive that barely got any supplies through their corridor.

There is very little diesel fuel to power the generators that keep the lights on, so the family has set up solar panels that keep the power on in their home.

Bana herself has changed much, her mother said. All she has known for most of her life is conflict and war, and she has grown withdrawn and distracted: four hours of sleep a night for her is a miracle under the bombs. She wants to go outside and go to school, but can do little except sit at home and draw, and play with the neighbours’ children.

The seven-year-old again pipes up: “We are children. We love life. We want the world to hear us.”

As for her mother, she said all she wants for her children is normality, a life where they can go out to school and play with their friends so they can feel like children again. That is why she took to Twitter to document their daily life.

“We had a lot of dreams for ourselves and our children,” she said. “We want to protect them. We lived part of our lives, but our children haven’t.”

The war has “eliminated everything called life”, she said, and now they are left wondering if they will survive until the next day. A few moments later, the sound of a plane in the air is clearly audible over Skype. In a few minutes it will probably reach the neighbourhood, she said.

“They think those besieged are terrorists, and as you can see we are just normal people,” she said. “We are Syrians, we are the people of Aleppo.”

Guardian service