WHEN you saw Qusai Abtini on his TV sit-com, “Umm Abdou the Aleppan”, he appeared as the typical father-figure of a struggling Syrian household. Dressed in greasy blue overalls, he would trudge home from his workshop and throw a bag of shopping at his wife, Umm Abdou, ordering her to cook supper. More mellow afterwards, he would lounge in his white cap and dishdasha on the sofa, picking his teeth and patting his stomach while his wife served up his glass of coffee. As she carried on (for Umm Abdou, played by his 11-year-old schoolfriend Rasha, was wilful, beautiful, full of half-crazed ideas, and never stopped talking), he would keep a lordly silence, occasionally stroking an imaginary beard. Then, after an affectionate put-down, he would waddle off. Everything was exactly observed; and only the occasional too-broad bucktooth grin, or an unprofessional glance to camera, would betray the fact that patriarch Abu Abdou was a child.

He was one of around 100,000 children, roughly one-third of the population, in the eastern part of Aleppo, which for months and years has been fought over by the forces of Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian rebels. Thousands have died. With the arrival of the Russians on the government side, fighting has intensified to break the rebel hold on the east of the city. Qusai was one of those for whom school had become intermittent and street football too dangerous, with days spent inside instead, watching TV when the power was on, or reading by candlelight when it went off. A lot of time was spent queuing for bread, and too much time dreading the barrel bombs that would bounce down across the blue sky. In June his house was hit by rockets, and his father badly wounded.

This war zone was the background of his sit-com, made by opposition activists and aired on the rebel channel Halab Today TV. Qusai and the other children had been recruited from the Abdulrahman Ghaafiqi school, where he had started acting in the seventh grade. All the filming took place in Aleppo’s Old Town, through ancient archways and narrow streets with cast-iron grilles. But the child-actors also scurried past piles of rubble and burned-out cars, sometimes ending at half-bombed buildings that seemed ready to fall about their ears. Abu Abdou’s “home” seemed cosy enough, with rich carpets draped on an ornate sofa and, in one episode, even fresh apples and carrots for him to gorge on. But a closer look showed wires dangling, paint peeling, the potted palms thick with dust and bullet holes in the walls. The sound of shelling, and sometimes of close explosions that made everyone jump, rumbled behind their chatter.

Qusai’s job, and Rasha’s, was to entertain Aleppans despite it all. Umm Abdou was forever complaining about the lack of power, lack of water (which meant she had to do all the washing by hand in a plastic bowl), lack of a signal for her large mobile phone, the state of the city, the Assad regime and the way no one seemed to be filming the bloodshed properly, “so that other countries can’t see what’s happening to us”. Abu Abdou was lazier and more stoical. Umm Abdou wanted to start a women’s rebel army; he deterred her by pretending to see a mouse under the sofa, reminding “you woman”, as he loftily called her, how easily terrified she was. When he briefly joined the rebels himself, he was ambushed by Assad’s men and limped home with a bandaged head—all his wife’s fault, for gossiping about his sortie to the neighbours.

The face of defiance

Qusai already had half a foot in that world. He joined his first street protests when he was eight, sitting shouting on the shoulders of his elder brother Assad. In later demonstrations he strode fearless at the front, the fresh, cheeky face of Aleppo’s defiance. Assad joined the Free Syrian Army; Qusai signed up to a first-aider course at Jerusalem hospital. His acting career included video tours lamenting the state of ruined Aleppo, and school plays in which he played a rebel soldier in full fighting gear, drawing cheers from the parents for his speeches. In one theatre show he was “killed” by a sniper outside a bar and draped by his “mother” with a Syrian flag, the proper rites for a martyr.

By this year he was getting too old to play a child playing a man. The second series of the sit-com, made in June, starred a boy called Subhi in the part of Abu Abdou instead. Qusai was getting tall, and his schoolteacher noticed that his ambitions were growing with him, to be a serious actor and a star in his own right. Offstage, he went around in camouflage trousers and a hoodie that helped to disguise how young he was. Looking in the mirror, brushing his thick hair and practising a slighter, poutier smile, he was beginning to see the face of a celebrated fighter or a juvenile lead.

It was not to be, because as the battle worsened and Aleppo fell under siege his father decided to get him out. Subhi, his replacement, had already fled to Turkey with his family. By July, only one “humanitarian route” remained open out of the city. They took it, but a shell or a missile hit the car. His father survived; he did not.

He was mourned as the “little hero” who had made Aleppo laugh. His hopes had been for much bigger things, when he was really a man.