Syrians who were wounded in a suicide car bombing that hit buses carrying evacuees from besieged government-held towns sit in a tent on the Syrian-Turkish border on April 17, 2017.
/AFP
BAB AL-HAWA, Syria — Fatima Rashid was recovering in a Syrian hospital after a deadly suicide blast when she glanced at a teenager with a bloody, disfigured face. She did not recognize her daughter.
The wounded teenager was later taken across the border to Turkey for treatment and now Rashid, like many parents caught up in a horrifying attack on Saturday, is searching frantically for her child.
“I lifted the curtain back in the emergency room and I saw a girl. Half her face was gone and she was bleeding,” Rashid told AFP, speaking at a shelter for displaced families near the Syria-Turkey border.
“I didn’t think about whose daughter she was.”
“When I woke up the next day, the doctors came to show me a picture of that girl. I remembered what my daughter Ghadir had been wearing. That was her,” she said, with tears in her eyes.
At least 68 children were among 126 people killed when a suicide car bomb tore through buses evacuating Fuaa and Kafraya, two villages in northern Syria under rebel siege.
Dozens of wounded, including 37-year-old Fatima and her children, were rushed to hospitals in nearby opposition-controlled territory, while others were taken to government-held Aleppo city.
Fatima has no news of Ghadir, her son Adel, 15, her 13-month-old daughter Rimas, or her husband Mohannad.
Only Zahra, seven, is safely at Fatima’s side.
The carnage on Saturday came as thousands gathered to be evacuated from Fuaa and Kafraya as part of a complex deal that also saw people leave Madaya and Zabadani, towns near Damascus surrounded by pro-government forces./