Tue 18 February 2020:
Salwa, a three-year-old Syrian girl, has only ever known war. But now, when she hears the sound of falling bombs, she laughs.
In a video that has been widely shared on social media, the toddler stands on a sofa, leaning against her seated father, Abdullah al-Mohamed, and they play a bittersweet game they seem to have played many times before.
As a rumbling sound grows louder, al-Mohamed asks Salwa: “Is that a plane? Or is it a shell?”
“A shell!” Salwa responds, proud to have guessed right. “It’ll fall now, and we can laugh.”
As the blast sounds, the toddler jumps a little then starts laughing loudly as her more subdued father encourages her, laughing along and saying: “That’s funny, right? A shell?” His smile falters at the end of the video, when Salwa looks away.
The video was filmed in Sarmada, a small town near Syria’s border with Turkey where the family has sought refuge amid a renewed offensive by Syrian government forces and their allies on rebel-held northwestern Syria.
İdlipli bir arkadaş ailesiyle birlikte sınır kasabası Sarmada’ya sığınmış. 4 yaşındaki kızına uçak ve bomba seslerinin bir oyun olduğunu öğretmiş. Her ses geldiğinde ailecek gülüyorlar oyun bozulmasın diye. Suriye insanlığın ağır çekim mağlubiyeti oldu. Çok büyük kalp ağrısı.
— Mehmet Algan (@alganmehmett) February 16, 2020
The family were forced to flee their home in Saraqeb, a strategic town in Idlib province that fell to government forces earlier this month, when the air raids became too “intense” to handle, al-Mohamed told Al Jazeera.
The 32-year-old said he devised this private game to help Salwa, his only child, overcome her fright as the attacks on Saraqeb intensified in December.
“Children in our neighbourhood used to play with bang snaps. One time during Eid, they threw them around to celebrate and Salwa was frightened by the noise,” he said, referring to the religious Muslim holiday.
“I took her out to the balcony to show her that it was just a toy, a game kids play to celebrate Eid and whatnot,” al-Mohamed added.
“I tried to use the same pretext to convince her that this was just a game, that she shouldn’t be scared,” al-Abdullah said. “I needed to remove the fear from her heart,” he said. “I wanted her to associate these loud, frightening sounds to something that is light and amusing.”
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