"We have a lot of injured people here," he told Reuters over the Internet. "Maybe we can help them."
His father was a fighter, killed on the frontline. So he lives with his five siblings in a neighborhood that is almost an empty ghost town. They survive off money from a charity, buying potatoes, parsley and onions when they can. Three weeks ago they even had some meat.
Three of his friends were killed in a rocket attack a few months ago. With school long-since closed, he and his other friends spend their days racing through the empty streets, kicking a ball or playing a game called "guns and knives".
They duck into buildings when the planes fly overhead, he says, because "we know about the machine guns firing from the planes".
Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city before war uprooted half of the country’s population and killed hundreds of thousands of people, is now the conflict’s biggest prize. Opposition-held areas are now under total siege and heavy bombardment as Assad attempts to deal a death blow to a five year rebellion.
The city has been divided into rebel and Assad-held zones for years. But recent months have seen regime “troops,” backed by Russian air strikes and Shi’ite fighters from Lebanon, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan, close in on the rebel zone, where a quarter of a million people remain trapped.
Civilians reached by Reuters over the Internet and telephone tell of a bleak existence amid the ruins – of shortages of food, water and electricity, and incessant fear for their own lives and their loved ones.
"Every day there are about three to four (air) raids close to our house," said 33-year-old mother-of-one Um Fahd, whose husband, brother and father have all been killed. "Our neighbor’s house was shelled and destroyed. A lot of people have died but we’re still here, thank God."
She and her son survive on an allowance of $ 50 a month from a charity, barely enough for food.
"It’s not enough, but we’re grateful for whatever we get," she said.
In the home she shares with her son, her sister and her sister’s three children, the entire family crams into the sturdiest room in the house whenever they hear warplanes, in the hope it will shield them from bombing.
"When the kids hear the sound of plane, they immediately know that they should go to that room," she said.
Another woman, Um Ahmed, described how she and her husband careered through gunfire and shelling to flee during a brief window when the siege was broken. When it was reimposed, her two sons and their families remained trapped inside. Her voice trembled as she described her own escape under gunfire.
"I hesitated about leaving. I didn’t want to leave them behind. I haven’t been able to sleep at night, I’m so scared for them, because of the bombardments," she said.
Broken families
Aleppo has been one of the Middle East’s great cities for centuries. Its picturesque old center of covered spice markets has long since been reduced to rubble by street fighting. The crisis dramatically intensified earlier this year, when the Assad side captured territory north of the city, severing a vital supply route to Turkey.
A complete blockade of the rebel-held eastern sector was imposed in July, when pro-regime “forces” severed the last road in. A rebel counter attack broke the siege in August, but regime “forces” reimposed it in the last few days.
The devastation, death and displacement have left some neighborhoods of the besieged east sparsely populated, residents said. There is little work and no school. Most people spend their days trying to secure enough food to survive, and taking cover when the bombs fall. The children grow up fast.
The director of the al-Quds hospital in eastern Aleppo, Dr Hamza al-Khatib, said that during a recent suspected chlorine gas attack, children young enough to remember little other than war appeared to know instinctively how to react.
"I was shocked how five- or six-year-old children were holding oxygen masks alone, without help - like they were grown men who understood that this was the way to relieve their suffering," he said.
Rescue workers accused the regime of carrying out the Sept. 6 chlorine attack.
When people die, relatives take the kids.
"My wife is looking after the five children my son left behind, and I’m helping her," said 65-year-old Eid al-Ibrahim, whose eldest son was killed in an air strike.
Many now eat little but lentils and cracked wheat.
Electricity from motor generators is available only for three to six hours a day and damage to power facilities has long left eastern Aleppo with no running water.
Opposition-held neighborhoods have long suffered air strikes and attacks with barrel bombs – drums packed with explosives and shrapnel dropped from the air – from the Assad-held side.
The United Nations’ Commission of Inquiry on Syria has condemned the bombing of medical facilities in rebel-held districts, which it said were "explicitly targeted for destruction or assassination" of staff.
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