Anxious wait to hear from Syria’s Bana
ALEPPO: The harrowing farewell message came on Sunday, just three short sentences. “We are sure the army is capturing us now. We will see each other another day dear world. Bye.”
It was signed “Fatemah”, the mother of Bana al-Abed, a 7-year-old Syrian girl who amassed more than 200 000 Twitter followers as she and her family documented their struggle to survive in war-ravaged Aleppo. Fatemah indicated the Syrian army was closing in on the rebel-held neighbourhood where her family had fled after their house was destroyed last week in a bombing.
And then, Bana’s Twitter account was abruptly deleted.
Horrors
Her mother started the Twitter account in late September, and Bana – a petite child with long dark hair, big brown eyes and a lilting voice – quickly became the newest symbol for the horrors unfolding in Syria. She shared her fear of the nightly bombings, tweeted photos of obliterated buildings and chronicled the quiet moments spent with her little siblings. Social-media users and international media outlets quickly took notice.
On October 4, she stood beside a garden piled with rubble.
“This is our bombed garden. I use to play on it, now nowhere to play,” she said.
On October 14, she sat with one of her two little brothers on the floor of their home, scrawling words in blank notebooks.
“We are writing to forget the war,” she tweeted.
Four days later, she stood in the middle of a ruined street, holding her arms up to the sky, grinning in her white hooded sweatshirt. “I’m very happy because it’s raining,” she wrote.
Here’s what we know about Bana:
She misses school. She would love to write a book. She recently lost a baby tooth, which she held up to the camera, grinning. She has also lost friends. “This is my friend house bombed, she’s killed,” she tweeted in late September, alongside a photo of a demolished home. “I miss her so much.”
She loves reading. And she is, by all accounts, real.
A handful of journalists have made contact with the family; in October, NBC filmed them in Aleppo, and Bana and her mother did a video chat with the BBC. Fatemah maintained they were not part of a political group’s media outreach, just a regular family trapped in a war zone.
When Bana’s online presence suddenly vanished on Sunday, her followers tweeted anxious messages under the hashtag #WhereIsBana.
Was this the end of her story? There was a sense of urgency and helplessness. Then, on Monday afternoon, the account suddenly reappeared, posting another dire message: “Under attack. Nowhere to go, every minute feels like death,” Fatemah tweeted. “Pray for us.” They were alive; their story continued.
On Tuesday morning, another message, more hopeful this time: “Hello my friends, how are you? I am fine,” Bana tweeted. “I am getting better without medicine with too much bombing. I miss you.”
It was a fleeting assurance. Then hours passed, and Bana’s account was silent. The world was still watching on screens yesterday, waiting and hoping for her name to reappear.