Seven years after the war began, the horrific images and videos being posted online from Syria show no sign of stopping. But is anyone still paying attention?
From an almost pitch black underground shelter mostly safe from the bombs, as kids scuffled in the background, 22-year-old Nour Adam filmed himself. “Children eat here, sleep here, and have their life here,” he said. “They don’t have any place to get out. The airstrikes are still in the sky, hitting the buildings and the towns.”
Later, as he has to do every time he wants his videos to be seen by the wider world, he braved more shells to scramble to the roof of the building to get signal and post the video to Twitter, in a process he has repeated hundreds, possibly thousands of times. He hashtagged his tweet “#IAmStillAlive.” Adam lives in Douma, Eastern Ghouta, which has been under siege for five years. As the seven-year anniversary of the Syrian civil war approaches, he is asking himself: Is anyone out there still watching?
Global interest in the conflict is waning, and analysis by BuzzFeed News shows the number of shares on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites of the most-read stories about Syria in the past two months were a 10th of what they were just over a year ago.
“When I take a photograph or a video and post it on my Twitter I really hope that someone will really help us, and really see what is happening here in Ghouta,” Adam, a journalist and activist said, speaking to BuzzFeed News from a roof in the city of Douma. “I work so hard to try and post videos, but no one cares. I don’t know what to say. They just see the article or report, and just say: ‘Oh, that’s really sad.’ And after that they turn the internet off and go and live their lives.”