Without warning, their house was blown to smithereens and Doha Al-Mohammed, a 10-year-old Syrian girl, found herself bleeding and buried in rubble.
The disaster happened in April when a plane suddenly dropped barrel bombs on a residential neighbourhood in Aleppo, Syria, destroying houses including that of Doha and her family, CNN reports.
Miraculously, no one was reported killed in the airstrike.
But Doha nearly did get killed. Fortunately, Mohammed Alaa Al-Jaleel, a member of the city's emergency response unit, spotted Doha amid the rubble and rescued her.
Dubbed as Doha's "Syrian saviour," Al-Jaleel says he and his team had already loaded several wounded youngsters into the back of their makeshift ambulance and were about to head for the hospital when he glanced back and saw Doha, who other rescuers failed to notice because she was mostly buried in the rubble outside the destroyed apartment building.
"I looked back and saw Doha on the ground," Al-Jaleel says. "She was covered in rubble, you could not see her there, but then I noticed her moving her shoulder."
"I carried her running to the ambulance as fast as I could trying to save her life," Al-Jaleel says.
A video of the rescue shows him urging Doha to "stay strong!" as he places her on the floor of the van, dazed and bloodied.
Doha says she still remembers everything. "I was really afraid. My body was really hurting from all the debris that fell on me. Then someone came and carried me. I was crying a lot, and bleeding," she recalls.
Doha and her siblings were taken to a hospital, where doctors treated her abdominal wounds.
Her five-year-old sister Yasmin suffered more serious injuries and had to be taken across the border to Turkey for treatment.
Thousands of other Syrian children were not as lucky as Doha. According to statistics from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, 142 children have been killed in Aleppo in August alone, and around 50,000 children are believed to have died across the country during the last five years of fighting, according to the Gospel Herald,
Currently, 1.5 to 2 million people are still trapped in Aleppo, which is divided into rebel-held and government-held areas. The city has been under siege since civil war erupted in Syria five years ago.
