Bana Alabed

Biography

Bana Alabed was a seven-year-old girl living in rebel-held East Aleppo when her mother Fatemah created a Twitter account in September 2016 to document their lives under siege. With her mother typing and translating, Bana described the terror of airstrikes, the loss of friends, the closure of her school, and her desperate desire for peace — reaching an audience of hundreds of thousands worldwide. Her tweets, raw in their simplicity, cut through the geopolitical abstractions of the Syria debate and gave the conflict a human face recognizable to people in any country: a child who loved books, feared bombs, and wanted to go back to school. J.K. Rowling, moved by Bana's tweets, sent her e-books of the Harry Potter series after Bana said she was sad because her books had been destroyed in the bombing. In December 2016, as East Aleppo fell to government forces, Bana and her family were evacuated to Turkey. Her story became a symbol of both the civilian suffering in Aleppo and the power of social media to humanize war to global audiences, drawing criticism from Syrian government supporters who claimed the account was staged propaganda, and support from humanitarian organizations that used her story to advocate for civilian protection. She later published a memoir, 'Dear World,' and met world leaders including Turkish President Erdoğan and Queen Rania of Jordan. Her story illustrates how a child's voice from a phone in a bombed apartment could command more global attention than years of diplomatic communiqués.

Key Battles