ALEPPO, SYRIA—With enough oil to export, Syrians used to get their fuel cheap, and a mother warming her child by a diesel space heater had nothing to fear.

Now there is nothing simple about surviving to see the next day.

On Jan. 26, Syria’s civil war turned one of the most basic human needs, the want for heat against the cold, into a weapon that seared 9-year-old Aya Mohammed al-Hussain deep into her soul.

She was sitting alone in her one-room house around 3 p.m. when dictator Bashar Assad’s forces randomly lobbed three mortar bombs into their neighbourhood.

Aya’s mother, Fatemah Sheikh Omer, ran in from the street to take cover.

When the second mortar struck, just outside the front door, the explosion shook the house and blasted a piece of red-hot shrapnel, slightly bigger than a large coin, through the wall.

Like an incendiary bullet, the jagged metal struck a metal vessel shaped like a soccer ball that dripped fuel down a long, thin pipe to a flame at the base of the space heater.

The fuel container was filled with gummy crude oil, a dense black liquid pumped from the ground in Syrian oil rigs. Street hawkers sell the crude, as black as molasses, in old plastic water and soft drink bottles

Aya’s mother had blended in a few drops of kerosene in the hope that the heavy oil might burn cleaner, with less sooty, throat-scorching smoke.

The concoction is a common substitute for heating diesel in Aleppo. Refined fuel must be smuggled in from the government side. Real diesel costs 20 times what it did just a year ago, far beyond Omer’s means.

Aya was about two metres from the space heater when the shrapnel blew it up, spewing crude oil across the room, soaking the girl with a thick, flaming ooze that coated the right side of her face, shoulder and arm.

“I tried to put out the fire with my sleeve and hands but I could do nothing,” her mother told me. “It was very thick, especially around her ear.”

Frantically trying to douse the liquid fire, Omer only smeared it across Aya’s soft skin. The scorching goo melted deeper into Aya’s flesh and dripped into one ear, almost severing it.

It was as if Aya had been napalmed in her own home.

Aya, once as talkative as any girl her age, now lies mostly silent, too traumatized to speak more than a few words.

They come rarely, in faint whispers. But when nurses come to clean her dressings, Aya fills the small hospital’s halls with screams of pain.

Her burns are caked with a thick coating of silver sulfadiazine cream, an antimicrobial drug sold to fight infection in second- and third-degree burns.

Nurses squeeze out tube after tube of the ointment each day, hoping it will be enough to ward off sepsis and allow Aya to live.

As the salve dries, it hardens and deep cracks run through it, like fractures in a plaster mask.

Aya needs care in a burn unit, and eventually skin grafts, said her nurse, Hassan Hassan.

But there isn’t one in rebel-held Aleppo, so Aya must try to heal in the first-floor bed of a small hospital that has four other patients, in a neighbourhood of east Aleppo that comes under government shelling almost daily.

Two softball-sized holes mark the spot where, three weeks ago, shrapnel hit the wall above the bed where Aya now lies.

She is not an accidental casualty of Syria’s civil war. Aya’s home is several miles from the front lines that divide Aleppo between the rebels and Assad’s forces, who control roughly 40 per cent of the city.

In the next hospital room, Mohammed al-Ahmed, 9, is slowly recovering from a bullet that bore through his stomach and kidney.

A government sniper shot the boy on Jan. 31 while he was playing marbles in the street with six friends in Aleppo’s al-Sakhaol district, said his father, Abdul Razzaq al-Ahmed, 42.

Mohammed’s father estimates the sniper fired from about one-and-a-half kilometres away.

He has no doubt Assad knows his troops are deliberately wounding and killing unarmed Syrians.

“He’s a criminal, a murderer,” Ahmed said. “Kids don’t know what’s going on, so they’re out in the street. This is an inhuman act.”

From the government-held territory, mainly the wealthiest areas where Assad’s staunchest supporters in Aleppo live and do business, his troops constantly shell, bomb and snipe at civilian areas across the city.

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The heavy crump of exploding bombs and shells, all day and through the night, is as common as the coo of mourning doves on the windowsill, or the defiant laughter of children playing.

The six-storey apartment building that Assad’s forces leveled in a rocket attack early Sunday afternoon was a purely civilian target. At least 30 people, several of them women and children, are now confirmed dead from that attack.

Several more are barely clinging to life, in poorly equipped hospitals where, like Aya, doctors try to do what they can with the little they have.

As a few survivors scavenged Tuesday through the massive heap of rubble, a boy gingerly climbed the ruins past a large, soggy teddy bear, next to a single child’s shoe.

Women’s cosmetics, covered in a fine film of concrete dust, were scattered on another pile of broken cinder blocks.

A battered front-loading washing machine came to rest at the bottom of a two-storey heap of broken concrete and twisted rebar.

It was littered with tattered clothes, splintered furniture and other household objects, a rubble spillway of shattered middle-class lives.

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A bitter lesson of any recent war is that the longer the fighting drags on, the longer children are out of school or watching angry men kill and wound, the less respect kids show for adults.

It’s a poison that eats away at society long after the guns fall silent. But Aleppans have reason to hope because, almost two years into Syria’s civil war, most kids here still show adults the respect they should.

As I sat at a tea stall Tuesday morning, Saad al-Thalf, a brash, skinny 16-year-old, came over from his orange stand to say hello. He was puffing mightily on a cigarette and showing off a cellphone that looked pretty new.

I was ready to get up and leave, expecting a hassle. But Saad just wanted to welcome a visitor, with his own special swagger.

I soon noticed he had a combat knife, jagged-edged and as long as my forearm, sheathed on the elastic waistband of his black sweatpants.

Saad struck me as an operator, but hardly a fighter, so I asked him why he carried such a frightening weapon.

“For protection,” he said, sounding like he thought I was dim. “And I have a pistol at home.”

Seconds later, two younger boys walked past with their father. Hearing English, the first child smiled and said smartly, with a polite, confident wave: “Welcome!”

“Welcome!” repeated his younger brother, a couple of steps behind.

And they happily hurried off, in the warm midday sun, as if life couldn’t be more normal.

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