The report issued by the medical center near Faraj Allah Camp in the northern countryside of Idlib, in which the child resides with her father, indicated that the cause of death was asphyxiation while eating, but activists and people working in the medical field accused her father of being behind her death.
A source from the camp told North Press that the girl’s father, Essam Abdelqader Othman, is an operative in Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, formerly al-Nusra, before that it was called something else
...al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, from which sprang the Islamic State...(HTS, formerly al-Nusra
...formally Jabhat an-Nusrah li-Ahli al-Sham (Support Front for the People of the Levant), also known as al-Qaeda in the Levant. They aim to establish a pan-Arab caliphate. Not the same one as the Islamic State, though .. ...
Front), and Nahla stayed with him after her mother’s divorce during which she was tied to an iron chain for five months.
The source added that her father used to treat her badly, and the source attributed the silence of camp residents over shackling the child to fear of reprisals from her father.
The story of the girl raised a shock among Syrian activists and journalists, as they expressed, on social media, their shock at the "details of the brutal life" imposed by her father in the past months.
Activists published photos of the child playing in the camp with iron chains tied around one of her hands, as she was standing near a car inside the camp.
The source pointed out that the police force of the Interim Government arrested the girl’s father pending investigation, and the police also summoned residents of the camp to record their testimonies.
The source said that the child was healthy and intelligent, and does not suffer from any mental illness or conditions such as autism.
The source explained that Nahla was suffering from phobias due to inhumane treatment by her father, pointing out that there was no confirmed information about whether the stepmother treated the child in a bad way.
Nahla was suffering from bad treatment by her father, to the extent that she bathed only once a month, according to the same source.
According to the source, the girl’s father hails from the town of Kafr Sijnah in the southern countryside of Idlib, and his ex-wife (Umm Nahla) had fled to
...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire...
due to his mistreatment of her.
The regions of northwestern Syria have previously witnessed incidents of violence against children, in April, the police in Jinderes district in the countryside of Afrin, north of Aleppo, found a girl of about two years old with bruises on her head, and arrested her mother and her husband, who confessed to the crime.