Can world help Bana of Aleppo to stay alive?
Every morning, after the children go to school, I turn on my computer to check that Bana Alabed is alive and unharmed. I do the same at night. I have never met Bana. She is a sweetfaced, skinny seven-yearold girl who tweets from rebel-held east Aleppo with the help of her mother, Fatemah, an English teacher. Last weekend, as the Syrian government, Russian and Hezbollah forces took over northeastern Aleppo amid heavy bombardments, Bana tweeted: “Tonight we have no house. It’s bombed and I got in rubble. I saw deaths and nearly died.” As she and her family contemplated their rapidly narrowing options, Bana wrote to her increasing number of followers: “I want to live, I don’t want to die.”
At first Bana’s account showed her daily life with her mother and two younger brothers in Aleppo’s Al Shaar district. She thanked Twitter friends for their good wishes. The next tweet, however, might show a nearby explosion or its catastrophic aftermath. Recently Fatemah tweeted the author J.K. Rowling, asking how Bana could read the Harry Potter books. Rowling sent them in ebook form, and Bana responded with a picture of herself holding up a thank-you sign.
Bana is good at making signs. In one video, she walked down a former street, now piled high with grey-white rubble and twisted metal, and held up a multicoloured placard saying: “Stand With Aleppo. Please Stop The Bombing And End The Siege.” Following Bana is an exercise in powerlessness.
From 2012 until last weekend, Aleppo had been divided between the regime-held west and the rebel-held east, which became fully encircled. The last stocks of food and medicines in the east were running out, and all the hospitals had been bombed to destruction. The rumour mill said that the assorted east Aleppo rebel groups, ranging from the more moderate Free Syrian Army to factions linked to Al Qaeda, were stopping civilians from leaving to regime territory, or that civilians were frozen from terror of what horrors await them among regime forces. The two explanations, of course, need not be wholly exclusive. David Nott, a British surgeon who has worked in Aleppo, said that his doctor friends there no longer talk to the media.
Last week I checked Bana’s account and there was a picture of a young girl, dead. Bana wrote: “This is my friend killed in a bomb tonight.” It feels shameful to gaze at such an image from a place of safety.
Western journalists, too, have shrunk from Syria’s chaos. It falls to trapped citizens and local freelance journalists to get the word out. There is footage from Aleppo of a small boy being dug out of rubble, still alive but with the back of his head sheared off.
Pro-regime critics acknowledge that Bana exists, but argue that she is a social media puppet controlled by jihadis. The PR war has gone right to the top. President Assad, asked by a Danish journalist if he trusted Bana as a source, said: “You cannot build your political position or stand, let’s say, according to a video promoted by terrorists. In some areas, the terrorists use civilians as a shield, but we have to do our job to liberate them.”
A Twitter account called Banana Alabed, which ridicules that of Bana, conflates her with Anne Frank, dubbing both girls fakes. For Bana, even though openly assisted by her mother, does indeed remind us of what Frank reminded us: that the deliberate destruction of children is an obscenity even in time of war.
Her repeated message has been simple: stop bombing civilians, stop denying food and medicine. Bana Alabed is not more important than the other children of Syria but she represents them, as one whose voice has travelled beyond the country’s borders. At the time the wider world didn’t know about Frank, writing in secret from her hiding place. But we do know about Bana, and the important thing to remember is that Bana doesn’t want to be our new Anne Frank. What Bana really wants is to stay alive.