Middle East

Live-tweeting 7-year-old from Aleppo Meets Erdogan

Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, embraces Bana Al-Abed, 7, from Aleppo, Syria, at his Presidential Palace in Ankara, Dec. 21, 2016.

Bana Alabed, a seven-year-old Syrian girl who has been tweeting from war-torn Aleppo, met Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan at his palace Wednesday in Ankara.

Bana also tweeted the experience and the same photos, a stark difference from the rest of her feed, which has shown devastation and survival in Eastern Aleppo during the past three months. She said she ws "very happy to meet with Mr Erdogan."

Bana and her mother, an English teacher, have been tweeting since September 26 from their home in a rebel-held district in Syria's largest city, appealing for help and posting video footage of neighboring houses demolished in the unrelenting airstrikes.

Despite being trolled and attacked on social media by supporters of the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and his backer Russia, mother and daughter have maintained, electricity and internet permitting, a stream of tweets recording the devastation and suffering they are witnessing.

Syrian Bana al-Abed is filmed by her mother as they prepare to post on Twitter in English about life in the besieged eastern districts of Syria's Aleppo, Oct. 12, 2016.



Their meeting with President Erdogan comes two days after the Russian ambassador to Turkey was shot by a man who yelled "Don't forget Aleppo! Don't forget Syria!"

Final evacuations of the ravaged city of Aleppo are underway.Though Bana and her mother made it safely to Turkey, they have continued to tweet to their hundreds of thousands of followers that they will not be happy until the rest of Eastern Aleppo is evacuated.