Young Bana’s Twitter account depicting Aleppo horrors goes silent

Bana al-Abed is a 7-year-old Syrian girl who has captured the world’s attention for the past three months with heartbreaking tweets depicting the misery in Aleppo.

She disappeared from social media on Sunday.

Her online silence coincided with the progress of the regime forces in the Qatarji neighborhood where Bana lives, raising concerns among her 200,000 followers.

The hashtag #whereisBana trended on Twitter, with thousands wondering about her fate and that of her mother.

It is not clear yet whether Twitter management has closed the account or Bana did so on her own or under pressure.

However, the last tweet of Bana’s mother expressed fear, as she wrote: “We are sure the army is capturing us now. We will see each other another day, dear world.”

Bana’s house was bombed a week ago, but the girl survived and tweeted part of what she witnessed under the rubble; she attached a photo of her, with the dust covering her innocent face.

Even as Bana went silent on Twitter, her tweets - narrating the carnage experienced by Aleppo’s children - haunted the minds of her followers.

Bana’s tweets had also caught the eye of the world-famous British writer J.K. Rowling, who sent her eBooks of the entire Harry Potter series after the young girl posted that she likes the fantasy novels.