Drowning the sound of death with laughter
In Syria's Idlib, there's no escaping the war, so Abdullah al-Mohammed says the only way he found to reassure his daughter Salwa was to turn the shelling into a game.
A video in which she laughs every time an explosion goes off was widely shared on social media in recent days as a heartening but grim reminder of Idlib residents' daily lives.
"Is it a plane or is it a mortar?", he asks, as a whizzing sound grows in the background.
"A mortar," the three-year-old answers. "When it comes, we will laugh."
In another video, Salwa is standing on her father's lap in their living room and her hearty laugh is set off by the sinister thunder of a bomb dropped by a warplane.
"Tell me Salwa, what did the plane do," the father asks his daughter.
"The plane came and I laughed a lot. The plane just makes us laugh, it tells us: Laugh at me, laugh at me," she says.
Mohammed explains that when Salwa was still 12 months old, she started crying when she heard fireworks in the neighbourhood.
He had to explain that it was only the sound of children playing for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Fitr.
"After that, whatever was coming to us from the air, I would take out my phone and tell her: 'Come, let's laugh together, these are children playing for Eid," he says.
"I try not to show her that what is happening as a bad thing but rather show it as something funny," he explains.
"One day, she will know that this is a sound of death but by then, she will have understood who we are and what our story is," Mohammed says.
The north of the province of Idlib is a dead end for hundreds of thousands of civilians displaced from other former rebel bastions across Syria.
It has been described by aid groups as the world's largest de facto open-air displacement camp.
Hundreds of people, many of them children, have been killed in recent weeks as pro-regime bombardment spares nothing, from homes to hospitals.
According to the United Nations, 900,000 people have been forced to flee their homes and shelters since December alone. More than half of the displaced are children and at least seven of them have died from the cold and the bad living conditions.
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