Before
the civil war tore their country apart, Mohammed Alaa Al-Jaleel and
Doha Al-Mohammed lived ordinary lives: He as an electrician, she as a
schoolgirl.
Now
Al-Jaleel volunteers with an emergency response unit in Aleppo, pulling
people out of the wreckage after airstrikes hit the city.
That's how he met Doha.
She
and her brothers and sisters were at home with their heavily pregnant
mother and their father when an airstrike hit their neighborhood, Al
Haydariya.
"I
remember that there was a plane striking when I was peeling oranges for
my siblings," the 10-year-old says. "After that all of a sudden the
house was blown up."
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| Syrian girl |
Doha, 10, was blown off the balcony of her family home in Aleppo by a barrel bomb blast.
"The
plane dropped barrel bombs," Al-Jaleel remembers, gazing out of the
cracked windscreen to the wrecked city beyond. "We knew the area that
was targeted was a residential area, where civilians live."
"We were running, looking around, when we found the children who were thrown off the balcony into the street."
Covered in blood, dust
Al-Jaleel
and his team had already loaded several youngsters into the back of
their makeshift ambulance, tenderly scooping their limp, dust-covered
frames up from the road.
They were
about to head for the hospital when he glanced back and spotted Doha,
who had gone unnoticed in the chaos outside the shattered apartment
building.
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| Fire burning as the bombing going on and on |
The challenges of getting aid to Aleppo 01:50
"I
looked back and saw Doha on the ground," Al-Jaleel says. "I don't know
what it is that drove me to look again. She was covered in rubble, you
could not see her there, but then I noticed her moving her shoulder."
"I
was really afraid," Doha says. "My body was really hurting me from all
the debris that fell on me. Then someone came and carried me. I was
crying a lot, and bleeding."
"I
carried her running to the ambulance as fast as I could trying to save
her life," Al-Jaleel says. "I felt she was still alive."
Footage
of the rescue shows him urging her to "stay strong!" as he lays her on
the floor of the white van, bloodied and drifting in and out of
consciousness.
Emergency surgery
Doha and her siblings were taken to hospital, where doctors were able to operate on her abdominal wounds and stabilize her.
Her five-year-old sister Yasmin, who suffered more serious injuries, had to be taken across the border to Turkey for treatment.
Miraculously, nobody was killed in the blast.
But
five months after the airstrike in April 2016, Yasmin is still in
Turkey, living with her grandparents who fled Syria two years ago.
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| image source ,google |
Doha and her brothers and sisters keep in touch with Yasmin through video calls.
The
family keeps in touch via Facebook Messenger. On a video chat, Yasmin
tells the rest of the family: "I don't want to come back."
Her brother, eight-year-old Abdullah, asks why not.
"Because there are airstrikes," she says, pleading with them: "You come here and join me."
Family's life in pieces
Right
now, that is not an option: Turkey only opens the border for medical
emergencies like Yasmin's, which means many families like the
Al-Mohammeds are stuck in Syria.
Doha's
father Abu, a tailor who suffered back injuries in the attack and has
been unable to work since, says he would like to get his wife and
children out of the country.
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| source -google |
Moment of joy for Aleppo's children 00:50
Until
then, he has moved the family to a suburb of Idlib, where they are
living in a house belonging to friends. It is marginally safer there, he
says: the airstrikes aren't as bad, and healthier food is available for
the children.
Doha says that, far
from their ruined home, she feels lost, her life in pieces: "Now I don't
have a room, no bed, no mattress. They were all destroyed by the
bombing."
But thanks to Al-Jaleel,
the man who saved her, she can laugh again: he has built a playground
and cat sanctuary for children trapped by the bloodshed going on around
them.
"I
felt like she was my own daughter, my own child, that I would all my
life care about her," he says. "That's why every now and then I check on
her and I bring her here to my garden."
This
place, tucked away among the ruins of a once-beautiful city, offers
Doha and others like her the chance to steal a few moments of joy amid
the heartache of war.
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