Too bad

The children of Syria’s
bloody Civil War Yahoo News - 10 hrs ago Five-year-old Sara dreams nearly every night
that she is slowly surrounded by snipers who
then open fire, shooting her again and again
until she finally dies. Her older sister Farah, just
eight years old, can calmly tell the difference
between a rocket and a tank shell, based solely on the sound it makes when fired close to her
home. The sisters—featured in a documentary called
“Children of Aleppo” airing on Frontline Tuesday evening—live in a rebel-controlled part of the ancient Syrian city that is under near
constant siege from dictator Bashar al-Assad’s
regime. More than 11,000 children have died in
Syria’s bloody civil war, which is stretching into
its third year, and another million have been
driven from the country as refugees. Assad is fighting both moderate rebels who
want to set up a Democratic society and al-
Qaeda linked terror groups who have co-opted
the revolution from the original rebels. The first
segment in the two-part Frontline documentary, called "Syria's Second Front," focuses on how the jihadis have taken over much of the north of
the country, terrorizing civilians. The United
States resumed delivering non-lethal aid to the
rebels this December, but stopped short of
providing weapons or body armor. Photojournalist Marcel Mettelsiefen, who’s
traveled to the front lines of the country more
than 20 times since the conflict began in 2011,
filmed Farah and Sara and their family for three
days last September, as a way to spotlight the
plight of children there. The children live in a once middle class suburb
that now is bombed out and barren, filled with
piles of shrapnel and abandoned homes. Their
father, Abu Ali, commands a regiment of 300
rebel fighters who are working to topple the
Assad regime. The family lives just two blocks away from the regime-controlled part of the city,
and are thus at the front lines of the fight. The
children’s mother, Hala, said she at first gave
her children cough syrup so they would sleep
through the constant shelling. Then, she told
them the bombs were fireworks. Finally, she just told them the truth. Now, her four children—Sara, Farah, 13-year-
old Helen, and 14-year-old Mohammed—are
used to beating a hasty retreat inside their
apartment when the shelling sounds get louder
or their father tells them to. They even help
their father make bombs. “When they threw a missile on that house over
there, I died a big death,” five-year-old Sara
tells Mettelsiefen. “I died and then lived again.” The sound of a rocket launch interrupts her
sister Farah describing what it was like to see
the corpse of a fighter in the street by her
house. “That was close by,” Farah says, fear in
her eyes. “It didn’t explode. It didn’t explode.
That was a rocket. No, a tank shell. But it didn’t explode.” Their older brother, Mohammed, tells the
filmmaker that he doesn’t have “any feelings left
anymore.” Mettelsiefen said in an interview with Yahoo
News that he was touched by the children’s
resilience. “Children are children in every environment,”
Mettelsiefen said. “They have a tremendous
way to adapt and cope.” But it was easy for him to see that these four
children were being changed forever by the war
raging around them. “You could tell by the things they say, the
dreams they have,” he said. “I think the real
effect and outcome of this trauma will be seen
in a couple of years.” The children seem to have more hope than
their parents that the conflict will end one day.
In one poignant scene, the sisters sweep and
clean a besieged and abandoned home, in
case peace is ever restored and the occupants
return. It’s been difficult and extremely dangerous for
journalists to travel to the country and report on
the conflict. The Committee to Protect
Journalists estimates that 30 journalists are
currently missing in Syria, many believed to be
kidnapped by al Qaeda-linked rebel groups. Mettelsiefen was only able to film the girls for
three days in September, before it became too
dangerous for him to stay. One of the subjects
he was filming—the older brother of a young
rebel activist—was kidnapped by terrorists just
days after Mettelsiefen was with him. The filmmaker described the family at the heart
of the documentary as “tremendously liberal.”
They named their three daughters Farah, Sara
and Helen to represent Islam, Judaism and
Christianity. The jihadis in the country, who
have co-opted the largely secular and democratic uprising against Assad, have stolen
the attention away from the moderates, he
says. He wanted to correct that in a small way
by telling this family’s story. “This revolution is not a revolution any more; it’s
a civil war,” Mettelsiefen said. “The ones who
are suffering most are civilians.