Seven-year-old Bana tweets her life in besieged Aleppo

A screenshot of Bana's twitter

  Over the past days, bombs have rained down upon the ruins of eastern Aleppo – the besieged districts of Syria’s largest city. Negotiationed by Washington and Moscow, a ceasefire fell apart in mutual recrimination when Russian or Syrian jets bombed an aid convoy to opposition-held areas that had been approved by Damascus. Since then, an arsenal that includes powerful power buster bombs, barrels filled with explosives, phosphorus and cluster munitions have been deployed on civilian neighborhoods in an apparent bid to force their surrender ahead of a ground operation. Seven-year-old Bana al-Abed broadcasts her daily life on her and her mother's Twitter account, @alabedbana, which now has more than 4,000 followers since they began tweeting on 24 September with the singular message: “I need peace,” Bana and Fatemah offer snippets of life under the bombs, and images of the carnage in their city interspersed with videos of Bana drawing with her friends or learning English. After reading the tweets and seeing the pictures of the family, Matt Pugh had comments on the issue: "It's easy to forget that these big political decisions affect real people and seeing how people react really puts you in their shoes."

Lauren Reed, Senior