Aleppo Activists Share Their Tormented Goodbyes Online

2993543 12/13/2016 Refugees in the liberated district of eastern Aleppo. Михаил Алаеддин/Sputnik via AP
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BEIRUT (AP) — First came the distress calls from doctors in underground shelters and morgues. Then, residents under relentless bombardment in the few remaining blocks under rebel control in Aleppo began posting emotional goodbyes on social media and in widely circulated messages.

The trapped activists wanted to have the final say in this merciless war.

“There is a problem with this planet,” said Monther Etaky, a 28-year old graphic designer. “This planet doesn’t want people to live as free or to live as humans.”

The world’s view of the Syria conflict has been largely driven by YouTube, Twitter and Facebook— making it one of the world’s most documented wars through amateur videos and coverage. This has given the activists the biggest role in chronicling the war in detail, and in lobbying for the world’s response.

Nearly six years into the conflict, they complained the world has been looking the other way.

“Why is this silence? People are being eliminated,” tweeted Abdulkafi Alhamdo, another resident activist and English teacher. Then, he wrote: “The last (message). Thanks for Everything. We shared many moments. The last tweets were from an emotional father. Farewell #Aleppo.”

Alhamdo later went live on the video-streaming Periscope to say government troops were approaching.

“This is the last space,” he said. “I hope you can remember us.”

Another activist who gave only his first name, Omar, sent an emotional recorded message that was widely shared on Whatsapp.

“The government forces are at the end of the street. Forgive us,” he said in a tormented apology for failing to protect the rebel enclave, once seen as the jewel of Syria’s rebellion.

After four years of holding onto nearly half of what was once Syria’s largest city and commercial center, thousands of residents of rebel-held Aleppo had been cornered in a one-square-mile sliver of land for days as Syrian government troops, backed by Russia, resisted calls for a cease-fire, pushing into the territory as rebel defenses crumbled. Hospitals were knocked out and civil defense vehicles were bombed. Thousands fled to government areas, but thousands more, likely die-hard government opponents, squeezed with the rebels into the ever-shrinking enclave.

Etaky said the fast buckling of rebel defenses first shocked him.

“But when I turned on my brain and thought about what is happening and the cause of what is happening I knew,” he said.

After months of siege— imposed since July— the rebels had no more power to go on, he said. With their families trapped with them, many fighters left the front lines to tend to their relatives’ safety. But most importantly, he said, “it was the world silence.”

Speaking to The Associated Press shortly before a cease-fire was announced Tuesday, Etaky said he thought he had lost his emotions years earlier as a witness of the grueling war. He moved in 2012 to the rebel-held sector of Aleppo, because he was threatened with arrest as a protester and government critic. He had since lost about 50 of his friends.

“Yesterday when I was saying the last goodbyes to my friends, this (was) the first time I was affected because it was the last time,” he said.

He said he was proud of his role in documenting the war. There was no record, he said, of previous government crackdowns, including in the 1980s in Hama and Aleppo.

“If my son grows up and just explores the internet he can see his father, and what he was documenting and be proud that his father was a hero,” Etaky said, choking back tears.

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Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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