Seven-year-old Bana al-Abed and her mother, Fatemah, have gathered thousands of followers over the course of a week for their simple and poignant tweets about the war in Aleppo.
Fatemah is a teacher, and has helped Bana write the tweets in English, often with pictures of their life of horrific scenes around them. Bana is also hoping to become a teacher one day.
UNICEF has reported that nearly 100 children have died in Aleppo in the violence following a failed ceasefire in the Syrian city.
Fatemah and Bana started tweeting from @AlabedBana on September 24, after they decided it would be the best way for them to get their voices heard.
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“Bana asked me why is the world not hearing us? Why is nobody helping us?”, Fatemah told The Guardian.
They have since tweeted short, simple messages like “I… Hate… War. And the world has forgotten us.. Aleppo”.
Fatemah told The Guardian about how the war had impacted the lives of children and their parents.
“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.”
“They think those besieged are terrorists, and as you can see we are just normal people,” she added. “We are Syrians, we are the people of Aleppo.”
Media such as these tweets and the viral photo of the Aleppo boy have allowed people to better understand what is happening at a ground level in this war, but there is still much more to be done.
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The Australian Government has put together a guide to how you can help the people of Syria in this time of crisis.
