In the early hours of September 23rd, Omar Dawood was sleeping in a second-floor bedroom in eastern Aleppo with his wife and three children when a rocket hit their building. Three of four structures housing the White Helmets, a volunteer rescue group, had also been hit that morning, and Dawood and his family remained trapped until friends climbed up the rubble and helped them out of a window. Of the three families who were home that night, only Dawood’s was spared death. “It was a smog of dust. If we had stayed inside for five more minutes, we would have suffocated,” Dawood said. No one from the apartment above Dawood’s survived.

It’s estimated that more than sixty air strikes hit rebel-held areas of eastern Aleppo that day. By the end of the weekend, that figure had climbed to two hundred, and Dawood’s family moved into his brother’s house until they could find a new place to stay. Like anyone looking for a house in that part of the divided city, Dawood and his family first reported to the neighborhood council, which brokered their stay in one of the many apartments that have been abandoned in the course of the war. When he moved in, Dawood was asked to sign a list that documented the belongings left in the apartment by the original occupants. “We moved so many times,” Dawood said. “The majority of us are refugees from one neighborhood to the next. When the air strikes intensify over one neighborhood, we move to another one. We try to move to a place that is safer, with fewer air strikes.”

Dawood grew up in eastern Aleppo, and until right before the war he worked as a paint salesman. Like hundreds of thousands of others, he joined the protests against the government of Bashar al-Assad that sprang up across Syria in the spring of 2011. As the protests escalated, the police started to harass him. In May, 2012, as a growing number of protesters were being arrested and tortured in Assad’s prisons, Dawood stopped going to work. In a matter of weeks, the Free Syrian Army, an anti-Assad rebel group, had embedded itself in eastern Aleppo and begun fighting government troops. The paint factory where Dawood worked soon shut down. At the time, Omar’s eldest child was only six. “We’d be watching television and a picture of the ocean would come up, and they would ask me, ‘What is this, Dad? What is that big basin with water in it?’ ”

LISTEN: This week, the Radio Hour is entirely devoted to the conflict in Syria. Listen here. Illustration by Rebecca Mock Illustration by Rebecca Mock

Since 2012, when the fighting reached Aleppo, the city has been bitterly contested, split between the Assad regime, in the west, and the rebels, in the east. The Syrian regime has bombed schools, apartment buildings, and hospitals, and years of fighting have hollowed out what was once the country’s most populous city. A siege that began in July, however, has made life significantly worse, after Syrian forces cut off the last road leading to the rebel-held districts. The quarter million people trapped in the city are confined to neighborhoods of tightly packed apartment blocks, only able to move from one battered apartment building to the next, under continuous air strikes.

Dawood survived air strikes before the siege, but this was the first time his house had been hit. “I have felt close to death so many times before,” he said. Dawood described one such time: a year and a half ago, he was on his way with a few friends to the countryside outside Aleppo to pick up medicine and first aid for a relief organization that he co-founded when four helicopters began following them overhead. “We lived four hours of complete terror,” Dawood said. “The barrel bombs were falling everywhere around us, anywhere we tried to go. We were surprised none of us got injured. The route was being bombed, and it’s like the regime was following us. One barrel would fall in front of us, and the other right behind us.”

But daily life resumed. “A rocket would fall in one place and several people would die, and the next day the grocery store would reopen and even the grill shop would reopen,” Dawood explained. “But since the siege blocked access to medicine and aid, or even to fruits and vegetables from the countryside, life has dried up.”

Dawood used to go once a month to pick up his family’s aid rations: rice, lentils, chickpeas, bulgur, sugar, and salt. But aid is now becoming more difficult to count on. Late in September, during a weeklong ceasefire agreed upon by the United States and Russia, a thirty-one-truck Red Crescent convoy was hit as it lingered on the outskirts of Aleppo, killing the local chief of the Red Crescent, along with twenty civilians. Eighteen of the trucks were destroyed, and the U.N. temporarily suspended all aid convoys to the country. Days later, speaking to reporters in Geneva, the U.N.’s deputy special envoy for Syria, Ramzy Ezzeldin Ramzy, announced that just fourteen thousand food rations remained in eastern Aleppo, enough for only a quarter of the population. Dawood picked up his last ration, earlier in September, from the stocks that remained with the city’s neighborhood councils, but he thinks it may be his last. “Right now I would tell you that death is our closest option, whether by an air strike or starvation,” he said. At this rate, the U.N. special envoy to Syria, Staffan de Mistura, warns that eastern Aleppo may be completely destroyed by Christmas.

At around 3 P.M. on October 23rd, Omar and his wife were working at the relief organization he co-founded when he got a notification on a walkie-talkie app on his phone, sent by volunteers in the countryside who take shifts monitoring the skies and notifying their besieged neighbors if military aircraft are heading their way. It announced that planes had taken off from the Russian airbase Khmeimim, near Latakia, and were headed toward Aleppo. But there was little to be done, because Russia has started using bunker-buster bombs that destroy even the underground shelters. Fifteen minutes later, Omar heard loud noises overhead, and then was blinded by dust. He found his wife and ran outside with his colleagues. Only then did they realize that their building had been hit.

“I have been close to death so many times,” he said. “I have outlived my own life. I should have died six years ago, when the regime was shooting us with bullets, and we were bare-chested in front of them, just shouting for our freedom, six years more than we were meant to live—not just me but all other Syrians who live around here.”

Listen to Omar Dawood in conversation with Adam Davidson on the October 28th episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour, online or on iTunes. That special episode, entirely devoted to exploring the war in Syria and its consequences, also features The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins and Robin Wright, and David Remnick interviewing Ben Rhodes, a foreign-policy adviser to President Obama.