“I Have Outlived My Own Life”: Living Under Siege in Aleppo

In the early hours of September 23rd, Omar Dawood was sleeping in a second-floor bedroom in eastern Aleppo with his wife and three children when a rocket hit their building. Three of four structures housing the White Helmets, a volunteer rescue group, had also been hit that morning, and Dawood and his family remained trapped until friends climbed up the rubble and helped them out of a window. Of the three families who were home that night, only Dawood’s was spared death. “It was a smog of dust. If we had stayed inside for five more minutes, we would have suffocated,” Dawood said. No one from the apartment above Dawood’s survived.