Eight-year-old Abbas should be out playing with his friends. Instead he’s mourning his three younger sisters, who were all killed in an airstrike last month.
Two were babies and the third was seven years old. Although Abbas was pulled from the rubble alive, he sustained injuries to his head. His father and two older brothers were also injured in the attack.
“I was sitting in the room, and I didn’t feel anything. The missile fell on us,” Abbas tells a doctor. “It became dark and missiles started hitting... I was with my sister, I told her, come Fatima, sit next to me.
“It was all dark, we couldn’t see anything.”
The video, sent to Huffington Post UK by Save The Children, is the latest footage showing the effect the Syrian war has had on the country’s children.
“The emergency room was very crowded with injured people and medics, everyone was so busy when three sisters arrived,” the doctor who treated Abbas’ family explained. “They just brought them from under the rubble of their own home, two of them were less than a year old and one seven years old.
“Everyone tried to help as they were in a very bad condition, we did everything we could to save them but it was just too late.
“When we realised that they are gone, we all went into state of stillness, not a single sound, the death of three sisters was bigger than the room,” he continued. “Their father was there but he was also injured, we didn’t want to look into his eyes. When he realised and started crying we couldn’t stop ourselves from crying, everyone in that room was crying.
“It was more than anyone could take, even though we see so many cases like this every day, but we can’t get used to it, it’s very painful.”
It has been a week since the haunting image of five-year-old Omran Daqneesh emerged. The image, of a stricken and bloodied boy sitting in a paramedic’s chair, once again brought the crisis in Aleppo to light. However there has yet to be a ceasefire in the city.
“In that week, dozens of children are estimated to have been killed in Syria and many more injured,” says Save the Children’s Syria director Sonia Khush.
“The situation is growing more desperate in Aleppo by the day, with aid workers reporting severe shortages of fuel for ambulances and hospital generators, fresh food and drinking water.”
The charity is calling for weekly safe access for humanitarian convoys to besieged areas, as well as immediate evacuation for those who need urgent medical treatment.
“Children who have been injured in airstrikes and shelling – often complex head injuries and severe burns – cannot be removed for help,” Khush continued.
“And yet the world does nothing.”