A ten-year-old girl who was left for dead after her home in Aleppo, Syria was destroyed by a bomb was miraculously saved by a quick-thinking rescue worker, dubbed her "Syrian savior."
"I was really afraid, my body was really hurting from all the debris that fell on me," the little girl, named Doha, said in a heart-wrenching video of the event, translated by CNN. "I was covered with dust, then someone came and carried me.
Just moments after Doha was buried by the remains of her former home, a rescue worker quickly dug through the rubble, pulling out the bloodied little girl.
"I carried her to the ambulance as fast as I could, trying to save her life, as I felt she was still alive," he said. "I tried not to lose the child, I tried to get the hospital as fast as possible, and I did."
While their home was destroyed, Doha's entire family survived the traumatizing ideal. However, her little sister, Yasmin, was injured so badly she was sent to Turkey.
Today, the family lives in a nearby town, and Doha and her hero share a special bond: "I felt like she was my own daughter, my own child, that I would all my life care about her," her rescuer said. "That's why every now and then I check on her and bring her here to my garden."
Aleppo, in northern Syria, has been besieged for years during that country's five-year civil war. While Doha's story had a happy ending, thousands of other children in Syria haven't been so fortunate: According to statistics from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 142 children have been killed in Aleppo in August alone, and around 50,000 children are believed to have died across the country during the last five years of fighting. Currently, 1.5 to 2 million people still remain in Aleppo, now divided into rebel-held and government-held areas.
Last month, the world was stunned by video footage of 5-year-old Omran Daqneesh after he was pulled from the rubble following an airstrike in Aleppo's rebel-held district of Qaterji. Images of the bloodied, dust-caked child went viral, and refocused international attention on the horrors of the country's civil war.
However, the doctor who treated him said his injury was slight compared to the others wounded in the bombing: "The truth is that the image you see today is repeated every day in Aleppo," said Mustafa al Sarouq, a cameraman with the Aleppo Media Center, who filmed the video of the little boy.
"Every day we cover these massacres and these war crimes in Aleppo. When we go to the places that have been bombed, regime planes circle around and bomb it again to kill rescue workers that are helping civilians. They kill these people who are trying to rescue people."
Earlier this month, 15 of Aleppo's remaining doctors wrote an open letter to President Barack Obama pleading for help, drawing attention to the fact that there are 42 attacks on medical facilities in Syria in July - or one every 17 hours.
Sarouq added, "The whole world is silent to these crimes in Aleppo against women and children...There are thousands of children like Omran who are being bombed daily, killed daily... Everyday this city is hit with every type of weapon, with every type of crime. The living conditions are terrible. The only route out of the city is totally unusable, it is shut. We call on the whole world this regime and these militias that are killing children and specifically the children of Aleppo. These crimes must be stopped in Aleppo."
