Last September, a 7-year-old Syrian girl, Bana Alabed, weary from war and frustrated that no one else in the world seemed to care, took to Twitter to write a simple plea: “I need peace.”
Later that night, in the simple but evocative language of a child, she wrote: “I can’t go out because of the bombing please stop bombing us.”
With those tweets, Bana, who learned English from her mother, Fatemah, became the young face of the Syrian civil war. A modern-day Anne Frank, the child offered an unadulterated view into the horrors of life on the ground in Aleppo. With so few journalists allowed to access the city, her tweets not only evoked sympathy worldwide; they also filled an important journalistic void, shaming Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad and serving as a daily reminder to the global community of the atrocities that civilians, including children, were subjected to daily while the fighting raged around them. Bana’s tweets soon became the subject of news stories around the world (she was also relentlessly trolled by pro-Assad loyalists, who labeled her tweets as propaganda.)
Now, just a year after she began tweeting, she has published a book, “Dear World,” out Tuesday, that tells the story of a young life circumscribed by war — a life where schools are bombed, friends die, parents are taken away for days at a time, food and water are scarce (if available at all), and a trip to the playground is a distant memory.
Bana would often tweet from her handle @AlabedBana while in the basement of her family’s home as she waited out another round of bombing from above. The supportive messages she got back from her now 360,000 Twitter followers were a lone bright spot in her terrifying existence.
She describes the first bomb she ever heard, when she was just 3 years old.
“I didn’t know what it was when the first big bomb came. It was just a regular day,” she writes in the book. She was sitting on the floor playing with her dolls, making them “talk in a funny voice” when “suddenly there was a BOOM! It was the loudest noise I had ever heard in my life, a noise so big you could feel it in your body, not just hear it. The sound and the surprise made my body feel like jelly.”
She writes unflinchingly about war — describing with military precision the difference between a cluster bomb and a phosphorous bomb — partly because it’s the life she knows best.
“There are no children in a war-torn country,” says Christine Pride, the Simon and Schuster editor who helped Bana, along with her mother, write her story. “For better or worse, this book is a very matter-of-fact child’s account of what happened during the war. She’s very straightforward, there’s no subtext or pretense.”
Some tweets, like the one on Oct. 27, 2016, describe normal childhood moments: “Good afternoon, I am happy today because of guess?” she writes in one, a big smile revealing a fresh hole in her smile where a tooth once was. Later she writes: “The tooth fairy is afraid of the bombing here, it run away to its hole. When the war finishes, it will come.”
But another tweet from that same month shows a photograph of a child’s severed arm, holding onto a book bag.
In the book, Bana describes her idyllic pre-war childhood — a world that became smaller and smaller as the country descended into chaos. When protests erupted in Syria during the Arab Spring, Aleppo, a center of culture and finance and one of the world’s oldest continually inhabited cities, was at first spared. But by July of 2012, the clash between rebel forces and those loyal to Assad had reached the city, a World Heritage Unesco site and considered the Jewel of Syria for its famous medieval mosque and an enormous covered market filled with spices, soaps, jewels, olive oil and handmade clothing. Bana’s family had lived there for generations. As the fighting increased, Bana writes how she stopped visiting her grandparents because traveling was too dangerous, how she stopped going to school, because the building had been bombed. How both hospitals and bread lines were targets of air strikes, how food and water were hard to find, and how eventually there was little for her to do but play with her two brothers, Mohamed and Noor, now 5 and 3, read, write, and try to stay alive.
‘I couldn’t play the rest of the day — all I could do was see Yasmin and all the blood on her in my mind’
- Bana Alabed
During the fall of 2016, rebel forces tried to hold onto the city from below and the government and their allies, including Russia, pummeled the city from the sky. Meanwhile, more than 250,000 civilians were trapped, unable to flee. By then Bana had grown so weary of war and simply couldn’t understand why the world wasn’t doing anything to help her and her friends. “I was so sick of the siege and the bombs. To be scared all the time and to see people getting hurt and dying while also trying to have hope makes you so tired. I didn’t think life would ever go back to happy times like before; it was only getting worse,” she writes. Even so, her father, Ghassan, had worked magic to somehow find her an iPad for her 7th birthday. On the night of Sept. 24, she sent her first tweet asking for peace followed by 17 more, including the missive: “200 died yesterday and today who’s next? I’m very afraid Tonight #Aleppo.”
Her pleas were heard almost instantly. “We started getting messages right away from grown-ups and kids all over the world,” she writes in her book. “I couldn’t believe that people were listening. And they wrote back such kind things. Mummy and I would read messages when we had to hide in the basement for hours and hours. When I read the messages, it made me feel like people cared about us, that we weren’t all alone. That maybe someone would do something before it was too late.”
One of her most shocking tweets came in November, when bombs fell on the building next door. She saw her best friend’s mother crying nearby. “[Her] black hair was completely white with dust like she was old. The only place she didn’t have dust was on her cheeks, where tears were running down her face,” Bana writes. People began digging under the rubble, and soon, the body of her friend, Yasmin, was found. “She was floppy like she was asleep, and a had a lot of blood and dust on her. I couldn’t move or breathe because I was so scared seeing my friend like that … I couldn’t play the rest of the day — all I could do was see Yasmin and all the blood on her in my mind.”
Later she tweeted “Oh dear world, I am crying tonight, this is my friend killed by a bomb tonight. I can’t stop crying,” along with a photo of Yasmin’s bloody and dusty face, bringing her followers into her world in an immediate and devastating way.
Shortly thereafter, Bana’s house was hit by an airstrike — miraculously her whole family emerged unscathed — but with nowhere to go. She tweeted a picture of the shelled building with the words: “This is our house, My beloved dolls died in the bombing of our house. I am very sad but happy to be alive.” The Alabeds fled to an empty building on the edge of Aleppo in an effort to outrun the fighting, but they had nothing — no food or water or heat or furniture there. “I had never felt worse inside before,” writes Bana. “Hungry and thirsty and tired and scared and sad and freezing cold, since we had no heat or blankets. My ears were still ringing from the bombs too. It was so many bad feelings at the same time that I didn’t know what to do. I just laid in Mummy’s lap and tried not to think about anything at all.”
In December, as the fighting intensified, she tweeted: “My name is Bana, I’m 7 years old. I am talking to the world now live from East Aleppo. This is my last moment to either live or die.”
A few days later, the civilians in the rebel-held territories were finally evacuated through a humanitarian cease fire. Families waited for days to board buses, which took them to the Syrian border, where planes were waiting to take them to Turkey. Thanks to her famous Twitter feed, Bana and her family were invited to meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In May, she became a Turkish citizen, along with her family.
“We all love it here because it is peaceful,” she told The Post via email. “It’s sweet and you feel happy. Peace is very sweet.” But the trauma of what she lived through is never far behind. “Sometimes if I hear a loud voice, I still start running because I feel like it is a bomb,” she wrote.
She started school last month and her favorite classes are English and math. “I am happy because I can go to school again now and I can play. But I am still missing my school in Syria.” She keeps up with some of her friends from home, but others she has lost contact with. “Some of my friends are ok. Other friends I still don’t know, it is sad and hard.”
As a result of her online fame, Bana caught the attention of JK Rowling, who followed her Twitter feed, shared her tweets and sent electronic copies of her Harry Potter books for Bana to read on her iPad. She also e-troduced Bana to her literary agent, who helped sell Bana’s book to Simon and Schuster.
Bana tweets less now, but her latest photos show a smiling little girl on the first day of school, a pink backpack filled with books and pretty braids down her back — a stark contrast to her posts from last year. Still, she hopes that her Twitter feed might have made a small difference. “I hope it helped and many more people are now the friends of Syrian children,” she wrote to The Post. “But the war must stop first.”