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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Aleppo family reunited after months separated by war

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JIBRIN, Syria: Jomaa al Qassem fell to his knees and burst into tears on the muddy floor outside a reception point for Syrians pouring out of war-ravaged eastern Aleppo. Amid hundreds of people at the government-run centre outside the city, he had just spotted his 17-year-old daughter Rasha for the first time in a year and a half.


He scrambled up to hold her hand, kissed her and helped her lift her two small children. “I thought I would never see her again, as we were so far apart,” he said. “I dreamt of seeing her face even for a few moments before I die, and now my dream has come true.”


Rasha was among tens of thousands who fled rebel-held east Aleppo in recent days as the army pressed a fierce assault aimed at retaking the whole of Syria’s second city.


After opposition forces overran Aleppo’s east in 2012, Rasha and her parents were displaced multiple times by fighting or skyrocketing housing prices.


When Rasha got married two years ago, she moved to the rebel-held east while her parents stayed in the government-controlled west.


Travel across the front lines was difficult but possible — until early 2015, the last time that young Rasha saw her mother and father.


On Thursday, she walked hundreds of metres under the pouring rain from rebel-controlled Karm al Maysar district to a regime checkpoint in Al Naqqarin.


From there, she boarded a bus to Jibrin, about 10 kilometres east of Aleppo, where she had her tearful reunion with her father.


As soon as he saw his daughter, Qassem, 51, took off his worn black jacket and wrapped it around her drenched shoulders.


Barely hiding his tears, he helped his daughter and her two sons board a bus that would take them to the room where her mother was staying in an abandoned ironworks on the northeastern edge of Aleppo.


“I didn’t have any way to contact my daughter except by phone,” said Rasha’s mother Miriam, gazing at her daughter across the dimly lit room.


“I could hear her voice but the road between us was cut. My eyes melted from crying... I couldn’t reach her and she couldn’t reach us.” — AFP


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