Child star of Syria’s wartime sitcom becomes victim of the conflict

Boy actor killed as he tried to flee Aleppo.

Syrian child actor Qusai Abtini, star of Syrian sitcom 'Umm Abdu the Aleppan'. Photo courtesy of sitcom director Bashar Sakka via AP

BEIRUT // It was an unlikely and joyful product of the Syrian war, a television sitcom that managed to prise humour out of a desperate situation, with the added twist that all the actors were children.

Umm Abdu the Aleppan was filmed on the historic cobbled streets of Old Aleppo and took a light-hearted look at life in a city ravaged by war, portraying ordinary people dealing with everythng from power cuts and water shortages to in-fighting among rebel groups to bombardments. But life imitated art in the most tragic way when the star of the show, 14-year-old Qusai Abtini was killed in a missile strike as he tried to flee from the city.

Fresh-faced and wide-eyed with a toothy smile, Qusai played the husband in a bickering couple and soon became a local celebrity. He was killed when a missile struck the car he was travelling in. When news of his death emerged, a symbolic funeral procession marched through his neighbourhood with several dozen men waving opposition flags and chanting, “Qusai has gone to heaven. Bashar [Al Assad, the Syrian leader] is the killer of my people.”

In life and death, Qusai portrayed the suffering of his fellow Aleppans through comedy. He played Abu Abdu, the domineering, patriarchal husband of the title character Umm Abdu, a clever, ambitous but slightly ditzy woman, played by a girl named Rasha. Both of the young actors displayed a natural flair for comedy.

Bashar Sakka, the director, said he cast children because “they are the witnesses to the massacres committed by Al Assad against childhood.”

Qusai was ten when the mass protests first erupted against Al Assad’s rule in March 2011. He soon became swept up in the uprising, taking part in anti-Assad demonstrations, often sitting on his older brother’s shoulders. He spoke in opposition videos, criticizing Assad’s government and describing Aleppo’s destruction. At the same time, he acted in school plays. Afraa Hashem, the director of his school, saw his talent and introduced him to Bashar Sakka.

“He was very ambitious. Once he moved from acting in plays to TV, his dreams broadened and he worked on transforming what he was living through into his performances,” she said.

“We were looking for an intelligent boy and Qusai was a very talented boy,” said Mr Sakka, who is now in exile in Turkey. “We wanted him to be free with ideas, and without fear of Bashar Al Assad’s regime and its ruthlessness.”

The show is steeped in the atmosphere of Aleppo, Syria’s bustling commercial hub before the war, and takes place in the stone alleyways of one of its old neighbourhoods, with the Arabic dialogue in the city’s distinct accent. Umm Abdu the Aleppan aired on the opposition station Halab Today in nearly 30 episodes of about 10 minutes each. Filming continued even through the almost daily bombardment. One out-take shows three girls jumping in alarm at the sound of an explostion - and then carrying on with their lines.

In one episode, the mother of a rebel fighter visits, looking to arrange a marriage between her son and Umm Abdu’s daughter. Over tea, Umm Abou tells her all her daughters are married to members of the Free Syrian Army, the comparatively secular rebel group. When she learns that the prospective groom is a “mujahid” – an Islamic militant fighter – she slyly demands a high dowry to deliberately thwart the negotiations.

In another episode, Umm Abdu decides with her girlfriends to form an all-female rebel faction. Abu Abdu teases her, saying, “You want to go to the front lines when you’re afraid of cockroaches.” Then he tells her there’s a mouse under the couch and laughs as she jumps up and screams.

Another scene has Abu Abdu going with rebels on a raid, but Umm Abdu gossips about it to all her neighbuors – and her husband comes back wounded from an ambush by government forces who learned of the planned attack. “I wonder how everyone found out?” he muses.

After the TV series, Qusai had roles in local theatre productions. Last summer, he played a rebel killed in fighting. As his mother weeps over his body, a man tells her: “Be happy for him. He wanted martyrdom and he got it.”

During recent shelling,Qusai’s home was hit and his father was wounded and left wheelchair-bound. On July 8, Qusai’s father decided to send his children out of Aleppo just before the city was besieged by the forces of the Al Assad regime.

But as the car Qusai was in made a run down the only road out of rebel-held parts of Aleppo, it was hit by a missile.

In a video of the symbolic funeral a few days later, his father in his wheelchair watches the marchers go by, holding a placard reading, “Qusai, Abu Abdu the Aleppan. You are a little hero. You scared the regime with your giant acts so they killed you.”

His brother Assad, 19, a fighter in the US-backed Free Syrian Army, said, “He was loved by everyone. He used to lead the revolutionary protests in the streets. He was their poster boy. But he was my little brother and every time I see kids in the street now it feels like my heart will stop beating.”

* Associated Press