4-year-old boy rescued after 16 hours trapped in deep well in northern Syria
Ali Saleh Abdi pulled from the well just days after similar case gripped the country
Dubai: Rescue teams in northern Syria have successfully saved a four-year-old boy after he spent more than 16 hours trapped at the bottom of a deep agricultural well — an incident that has captivated the nation and comes just days after a similar rescue in central Syria, Al Khaleej Arabic daily reported.
The boy, Ali Saleh Abdi, fell into a 50-metre-deep shaft in the city of Tal Abyad, near the Turkish border, while accompanying his father on a family visit on Wednesday. This marks the second child rescue from a well in Syria within a week.
Local civil defence teams quickly arrived at the scene and lowered a camera and voice communication device into the well. This allowed rescuers to monitor Ali’s condition, speak with him, and supply him with water and small amounts of food. Reports said the child had experienced difficulty breathing during the ordeal.
An initial attempt to send another child down the well to retrieve Ali failed, prompting teams to implement a secondary plan—digging a parallel shaft to reach him from the side. After an hours-long operation, Ali was successfully rescued and transported to hospital for medical treatment.
The case follows a similar incident involving Suleiman Al Aboud, a young boy who was rescued from a four-metre-deep well in the village of Al Tuwaynah in the Hama countryside just days earlier.
These back-to-back rescues have drawn attention to the ongoing risks of unsecured wells in rural Syria and the heroic efforts of civil defence teams working under extremely challenging conditions.
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