Baladi - Newspapers
The warning sent to Abdulkarim al-Ismail’s Facebook came just moments before the warplanes would fly overhead and drop their load. He knew he had eight minutes at most to move his wife and two children down the basement.
When the thud came, it was close, closer than he had calculated. The building rattled and the windows shattered.
His neighbour down the road had not seen the message - the crucial window between life and death - and was killed in the front room of his home.
Mr Ismail, a teacher in the city of Saraqeb in the northern Syrian province of Idlib - the last-remaining rebel-held territory in the country- has for years relied on the warning system to stay alive.
The technology, developed by the start-up Hala Systems, works by detecting aircraft using remote sensors on the ground in Idlib and machine-learning algorithms, which look at the speed of an aircraft and its usual flight pattern.
It then sends alerts via messaging apps Telegram, What’sApp and Facebook to “White Helmets” civil defence workers and civilians, as well as setting off air raid sirens in the areas likely to be affected.
“The message tells you everything, from where the warplanes took off, to where they think they will hit, to how long they will be and where the danger areas are,” Mr Ismail, 38, told The Telegraph. “You can even find out if they are Russian or if they are Syrian.”
The technology has been funded in part by the British government, which says it has already helped warn more than two million people since it was launched two years ago and is estimated to have reduced casualties by up to 27 per cent in areas under heavy bombardment.
“Civilians in Syria were already providing a sort of human warning system before our technology, acting ad hoc spotting planes and radioing messages back to their communities,” said John Jaeger, chief executive of Hala, likening it to the British farmers who would phone friends in London after spotting Luftwaffe planes during the Second World War.
“What we did is just make this more dependable and more structured,” he told The Telegraph.
Several thousand people have been killed by Syrian and Russian air strikes during the seven-year war. Both countries stand accused by the United Nations of indiscriminately bombing schools, hospitals, and civil defence centres.
Source: The Telegraph.