Syrian father teaches his daughter to laugh at bomb

SARMADA: In Syria’s Idlib, there’s no escaping the war, so Abdullah al-Mohammed says the only way he found to reassure his daughter Salwa was to turn the shelling into a game.

According to the sources of AFP, A video in which she laughs every time an explosion goes off was widely shared on social media in recent days as a heartening but grim reminder of Idlib residents’ daily lives.

“Is it a plane or is it a mortar?”, he asks, as a whizzing sound grows in the background.

“A mortar,” the three-year-old answers. “When it comes, we will laugh.”

In another video, Salwa is standing on her father’s lap in their living room and her hearty laugh is set off by the sinister thunder of a bomb dropped by a warplane.

“Tell me Salwa, what did the plane do,” the father asks his daughter.

“The plane came and I laughed a lot. The plane just makes us laugh, it tells us: Laugh at me, laugh at me,” she says.

Abdullah ve güzel kızı Selva. Yukarıda durumlarını paylaştığım baba kız. Ve yine tekrar eden o kahredici oyun. Anlamak için Arapça bilmenize gerek yok. pic.twitter.com/wUwKAcLzWE

— Mehmet Algan (@alganmehmett) February 16, 2020

An AFP reporter met the 32-year-old father in Sarmada, a town in Syria’s last rebel pocket, which Russian-backed regime forces are trying to crush.

He and his family fled from Saraqeb, another town in Idlib which has already been retaken by regime forces and has been partly levelled by air raids.

Mohammed explains that when Salwa was still 12 months old, she started crying when she heard fireworks in the neighbourhood.

He had to explain that it was only the sound of children playing for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr.