An image captured by AP photographer HassanAmmar5 shows a dust-covered girl carried against a man's shoulder, a gash bleeding from her forehead. The image has come to symbolize the devastation of the Aug. 4 blast at the Beirut port, zkaram reports.
“It was always bad even before the explosion, but we were getting by,” said Mahmoud, the girls’ older brother. “Now, life is unbearable.”Ali Kinno, 45, moved from the Aleppo region of Syria to Lebanon in 2008 to find work, determined to provide a better life for his family. The residential tower facing the port was still under construction then, and he soon got a job as a concierge.
Ali was so protective and scared for his children, especially the two girls, that he didn’t let them go to school, despite Sedra’s pleas. Cooped up in their tiny apartment, the children grew closer. The girls became inseparable. Because their mom suffered back pain and asthma, they took care of the apartment, especially Sedra.“She cooked, made tea, she looked after her younger brother Ahmad, gave him his bath. She was everything,” said Ali’s wife, Fatima, choking on the last sentence.
Alarmed, Ali’s wife called for them to go inside the apartment. That’s when they heard the first explosion. But it was the second blast seconds later that seemed to lift the earth under the port and throw it in their direction.In a flash, the middle-class neighborhood housing the headquarters of one of Lebanon’s most famous fashion designers turned to a hell on earth, tossing everyone and everything in the air and showering them with debris.
That was the scene Mustafa saw when he arrived from across town and carried Hoda away. Another of Ammar’s photos captured Sedra’s dead body, in a long flowered dress, carried by her older brother Qoteiba and brother-in-law Fawaz. Later that night, a Syrian man sat on the pavement in tears outside the hospital where Hoda was initially taken. He said one of his sisters was killed, another sister’s neck was fractured. He didn’t know where his injured mother and father were taken and was making calls trying to track them down. It was Mahmoud, Ali and Fatima’s eldest son.
Hoda, wearing a neck brace, barely speaks. She says she doesn’t remember the explosion and its aftermath.
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