Aleppo Twitter girl safe after flight
Seven-year-old fell silent as family fled fighting in city
ALEPPO // A seven-year-old Syrian girl whose Twitter account from Aleppo gained international attention has fled her home amid heavy fighting – but she and her family are safe for now, her father said yesterday.
With her mother’s help, Bana Al Abed had been posting heart-rending tweets in English on life in the besieged eastern districts of Syria’s Aleppo.
But as Syrian government forces edged closer to their home in recent days, the Al Abed family fled and the Twitter updates slowed. “Our house was damaged in a bombardment,” her father Ghassan said by phone from east Aleppo, two thirds of which have been seized by advancing government forces.
“The army got really close to our neighbourhood. We fled to another part of east Aleppo and the family is doing well,” he said, adding that “the internet connection is very weak here”. Since late September, Bana and her mother Fatemah have attracted more than 211,000 followers by tweeting regular updates on battered Aleppo. Pictures of massive white columns of smoke, captioned “Aleppo right now. We are so scared”, are interspersed with shots of Bana reading or scrawling in a notebook.
The novelist JK Rowling responded to a picture of Bana reading an electronic copy of the Harry Potter series.
On November 29, Bana’s tweet included a photograph of a heavily damaged building, with the caption: “This is our house, My beloved dolls died in the bombing of our house. I am very sad but happy to be alive.”
Days later, Bana wrote that she was sick: “I have no medicine, no home, no clean water. This will make me die even before a bomb kill me.” On Sunday, Fatemah posted: “We are sure the army is capturing us now. We will see each other another day dear world. Bye.”
The account fell silent for 24 hours, prompting followers to launch a #WhereisBana hashtag. But an update on Monday read: “Under attack. Nowhere to go, every minute feels like death. Pray for us. Goodbye – Fatemah.”
In an October interview with Danish broadcaster TV2, president Bashar Al Al Assad said that footage posted by Bana was “promoted by the terrorists”.