Syrian dad helps little girl avoid trauma by teaching her to laugh as bombs fall

Italian screenwriter and director Roberto Benigni’s 1999 Academy Award-winning movie "Life is Beautiful" centers around a father and son who were imprisoned at a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.

In an effort to protect his son from the unbearable conditions, the father, Guido, turns the Nazi death camps into an imaginary playing field.

However, the nine-year conflict in Syria that the world has been watching live on TV and the internet is nothing like a blockbuster.

A Syrian father, who fled toward the Turkish border due to recent shelling by the Assad regime in Idlib’s de-escalation zone, turned the horrors of the bloody war into a game to protect his daughter from "psychological trauma" that he has seen other children in the community suffer from.

In a video that is breaking hearts online, Abdullah al-Mohammad and his daughter are seen bursting into laughter every time they hear a bomb explosion.

His three-year-old daughter, Salwa, thinks that the loud noise that shakes their home is a firework or toy gun.

As Assad regime forces and its allies continue to target Idlib, northwestern Syria, an area covered by a nominal cease-fire, 148,000 more civilians have been displaced in the past six days, according to Syria's Response Coordination Group.

With this latest figure, the number of displaced people in Idlib and neighboring areas since January 2019 has reached nearly two million, most of them taking shelter in areas close to the bordering Turkey, which already hosts over 3.6 million Syrian refugees.

Regime forces backed by allies Iran and Russia have been trying to capture the Aleppo countryside and parts of neighboring Idlib province, a stronghold of opposition forces in the war-torn country.

So far this month, artillery fire by regime troops has martyred 12 Turkish military personnel and one civilian contractor.

While Ankara and Moscow continue their negotiations over Idlib, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan last week said Turkey's military will drive back Syrian forces if they do not withdraw from the northwestern region.