Aleppo ‘Twitter girl’ safe after family flees army advance

ALEPPO, Syria: A seven-year-old Syrian girl whose Twitter account from Aleppo gained international attention has fled her home amid heavy fighting, but she and her family are safe for now, her father told AFP on Tuesday.

With her mother´s help, Bana-al-Abed had been posting heart-rending tweets in English on life in the besieged eastern districts of Syria´s Aleppo.

But as Syrian government forces edged closer to their home in recent days, the Abed family fled and the Twitter updates slowed.

"Our house was damaged in bombardment," her father Ghassan said by phone from east Aleppo, two-thirds of which has been seized by advancing government forces.

"The army got really close to our neighbourhood. We fled to another part of east Aleppo and the family is doing well," he said, adding that "the internet connection is very weak here."

Since late September, Bana and her mother Fatemah have garnered more than 211,000 followers by tweeting regular updates on battered Aleppo.

Pictures of massive white columns of smoke, captioned "Aleppo right now. We are so scared," are interspersed with shots of Bana reading or scrawling in a notebook.

The account captured the attention of novelist JK Rowling, who responded to a picture of Bana poring over an electronic copy of the "Harry Potter" series.

On November 29, Bana´s account tweeted a photograph of a heavily damaged building, with the caption: "This is our house, My beloved dolls died in the bombing of our house. I am very sad but happy to be alive."

Several days later, Bana wrote that she was sick: "I have no medicine, no home, no clean water. This will make me die even before a bomb kill me."

Many of the tweets have included cries for help, but the messages grew increasingly desperate at the weekend.