Damascus: “Cold, Uncle… cold and hungry… every day we sleep like this, since the day our father passed away,” with these words a Syrian girl choked, explaining the pain of her reality— since her father’s death.
The two girls named Saba and Elaf appeared in a video clip posted by the Emergency Response Team account on Twitter, Wednesday, December 7, 2022, a team working in northern Syria to manage crises and secure humanitarian cases.
The Emergency Response Team in the tweet, along with the video clip, also asked for donation “to buy heating materials for 500 families.”
In a video clip, a 7-year-old girl Saba spoke of the exhausting situation of her childhood that made her stop for a moment about to cry, while Elaf next to her, could not hold back tears.
Saba complains about the absence of her father, who used to provide them with protection from the cold, as he used to bring them firewood in the past, but now their house is devoid of firewood.
Saba said to an interviewer who was asking her, “Can you believe, uncle, that every night we go to bed cold and hungry. We don’t have wood [for heating]. My father is a martyr, before he died we always had wood, we were always warm when he was alive.”
She added, wondering, “Ok, uncle, what is our fault for being cold? Are all the children who have a father like this? Are they not like us?”
“Has your child slept once, just once, without food? Cold? Of course not. What fault do we have? All children who have fathers are sleeping in warmth.”
It is noteworthy that Saba’s wish was not in the end to get warmth or food, but rather to be next to her father, “Oh I wish the dad would take us with him.”
Immediately after the video was published, the users of social media platforms rushed to interact with the video clip of the two girls, Saba and Elaf, and many of them expressed their sadness and sympathy for the two girls.
Mohammad Ali Jamal from Yemen commented on the video, saying, “Life is harsh, and the hardest part is the hearts of people who trade in people’s suffering and enjoy the sounds of their moans. This image contains a huge amount of pain, sadness, oppression, poverty, suffering, and helplessness.”
Ibtisam Al-Manasiri, from Jordan, said, “The image of the little girl does not go away from my mind… How ugly poverty and wars are.”
A day after the clip was posted, the Emergency Response Team account posted a new tweet indicating “the availability of heating materials, meat and toys for 500 orphan children,” and that the two girls, “Saba and Elaf, participated in the distribution process to children in their village.”
After nearly 12 years of conflict, chronic fuel shortages in the war-torn country have intensified in recent weeks, leaving many Syrians without electricity for up to 22 hours a day and unable to heat their homes.
The displacement camps housing Syrian refugees have always suffered from oppressive conditions, especially at the onset of the merciless winter.
During the past years, international organizations have recorded many deaths of children who died due to the cold under the nets of tents, not to mention the other difficult living conditions they suffer from, including hunger, poverty, and lack of education and medical care.
