Aleppo's Bana Al-Abed goes silent

In the past two months, seven-year-old Bana Al-Abed has shot to fame all over the world for her tweets from besieged East Aleppo, which is today under a ferocious assault from the Syrian regime of President Bashar Al-Assad and Russia, as well as from Iraqi, Lebanese and Iranian militias allied with Al-Assad. Hundreds of people have been killed in the past week and, according to her Twitter account, Bana’s house was destroyed on 27 November. She has also seen other people, including one of her friends, killed.

Image of Bana Al-Abed

Bana’s account, twitter.com/AlabedBana, managed by her mother, Fatemah, which had nearly 200,000 followers, has now been deactivated. The account was verified by Twitter and received a great deal of supportive interaction. Harry Potter author JK Rowling sent Bana electronic copies of her books on learning that she was a fan. However, this seven-year-old girl whose life is at constant risk from airstrikes and the ground assault of Bashar Al-Assad’s army and allied militias, has been subjected to constant trolling from supporters of Russia and the Assad regime. The trolling attacks on Bana’s account come in various forms, ranging from crude death threats to accusations of forgery. Another account has even been set up to parody it.

When the Syrian revolution broke out in March 2011, social media became one of the most important tools in the hands of pro-democracy activists. They would use Facebook, Twitter and video-sharing sites to organise protests and upload images, bypassing government censorship of the media. The videos they took were broadcast by major international news networks.

In response, the Assad regime set up the Syrian Electronic Army, which carries out various activities online such as defacement of websites critical of the regime and spamming of social media pages with pro-regime comments. The Russian state has established a much stronger organisation, the Internet Research Agency, which uses social media accounts and fake videos and photographs to spread disinformation across the internet. In 2015, for example, it staged a fake Daesh attack on a chemical plant in the United States using tweets from hundreds of seemingly genuine Twitter accounts in an attempt to create panic.

Given the nature of the attacks on Bana’s account it is more than likely that she has been the victim of an organised trolling campaign by the same regimes which are bombing her city today.

On 30 November, a desperate appeal was sent from Bana’s Twitter account to US President Barack Obama, who has been criticised for his inaction over Syria, signed by her mother: “Dear @POTUS we are a family suffering along with many others in East Aleppo. Any help to get us far away from the battlefield? – Fatemah.”

In response Ali, a regime supporter living in Tartus, tweeted the following threat:

https://twitter.com/Syrianali_/status/804033361966755840

He followed this up at least twice saying:

https://twitter.com/Syrianali_/status/804403526327795714

https://twitter.com/Syrianali_/status/804021517508112384

A Twitter user calling himself JM25 tweeted to Bana:

https://twitter.com/LosFotzos/status/803622442971398144

in reference to a 1990 report, later proved false, that Iraqi soldiers were removing Kuwaiti babies from incubators in hospitals following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. In an attempt to prove this, he tweeted photos of a Syrian opposition activist calling himself Mr Alhamdo who he said was behind Bana’s Twitter account.

Bana’s Twitter account was verified by Eliot Higgins, who runs a blog about the weapons used in Syria since 2011. He tweeted: “We’ve looked into this account, it’s certainly posting images from a specific location in Aleppo, so seems genuine,” adding:

The horrible thing about verifying this account is we can't, for her family's safety, publish our findings until she is a refugee, or dead https://t.co/USbT0ipnNZ

— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) December 2, 2016

Following the destruction of her house, Bana tweeted photos of it:

The latest tweet from her account read: “I am sick now, I have no medicine, no home, no clean water. This will make me die even before a bomb kill me. – Bana #Aleppo”.

In response a Twitter user calling himself Ice tweeted:

.@AlabedBana your mother is a evil, she should take you to West Aleppo, there are russian doctors and hospitals

— Ice (@Icebramovich) December 1, 2016

Every single hospital in East Aleppo was destroyed by Russian bombs one week ago and activists who have spoken out against the regime are in danger of arrest, torture and execution if they fall into regime hands.

Another Twitter user Ivan Vitjaz responded: “’She’ is sick, ‘she’ has no home, but ‘she’ has internet in destroyed city and ‘she’ has time to write s***ty propaganda twits.”

Bana’s ability to access the internet from Aleppo was a common theme among those seeking to prove that her account was false. In actual fact, people in besieged and bombarded Aleppo have always been able to access the internet through a variety of means including 3G, satellite internet and wireless networks supplied from Turkey. Bana’s mother recently gave an interview saying that she could access the internet with a “poor 3G connection” from her smartphone.

Also following the destruction of her home Bana tweeted: “We give up on life”. In response, a Twitter user calling himself @skeptical_arab7 tweeted an image:

https://twitter.com/skeptical_arab7/status/804395091024551936

When it was pointed out to @skeptical_arab7 that her mother was writing for her, he responded: “Same thing.”

it's her mom tweeting.

— mateus (@mateusprnt) December 1, 2016

https://twitter.com/skeptical_arab7/status/804395543871057920

Trolls attacking Bana only made up a portion of those interacting with her Twitter account. There continues to be an outpouring of sympathy for the young girl trapped in a city which is experiencing unrelenting bombardment.

In response to Bana’s tweet saying she was ill and homeless Twitter users such as Shaylla Christine expressed their concern and their willingness to help:

how can we help?! Don't give up! #staystrong we are all praying!

— Sheylla Christine (@SheyChristinee) December 1, 2016

However they were met with responses such as those from Not_MSM_News who told them it was all lies:

You all no this is straight up BS yeh?

— Michael (@Michael091002) December 1, 2016

This is only a small sample of the many attacks on Bana’s account from supporters of Russia and the Assad regime. In addition to the disturbing fact that a young girl and her family can receive this kind of abuse simply for trying to show the world the conditions they are living under, the attacks show the power that autocratic regimes have gained over a medium which was once used to provide people with a voice against them.