Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Bana Alabed told Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan "I love you" 
 
 Bana Alabed - the seven-year-old Syrian who tweeted about life inside rebel-held east Aleppo - has met Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. 
 
 Bana and her little brother have been pictured sitting on Mr Erdogan's knee in the presidential complex in Ankara. 
 
 President Erdogan sent a special representative to Syria to collect Bana and her family after they fled east Aleppo, the BBC has been told. 
 
 Bana's plight came to light after she joined Twitter in September. 
 
 The account captured everything from the death of her friends to her attempts to live a normal life. 
 
 Along the way, she has picked up more than 325,000 followers, including JK Rowling, who sent her an electronic copy of Harry Potter to read. 
 
 On Wednesday, Bana tweeted a picture of herself and Mr Erdogan, writing she was "very happy" to meet the president, while in a short video she is heard saying: "Thank-you for supporting the children of Aleppo, and helping us to get out from war." 
 
 Image copyright Twitter 
 
 Bana's mother, Fatemah, who runs the Twitter account, decided to start it to show "how much kids are suffering from bombs and everything". 
 
 In recent weeks, the appeals for help - from both Bana and her mother - have become more frequent, as forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad began to close in around the rebel-held districts, which were being bombed from above by Syrian and Russian planes. 
 
 After government forces surrounded the city, the family escaped under an evacuation programme. 
 
 Image copyright AFP Image caption Bana and her family, including two brothers, escaped eastern Aleppo on Sunday 
 
 But they did not stay long in Syria. Within hours of Bana, her mother, father and two little brothers arriving in the rebel-held countryside to the west of Aleppo, they had been flown by helicopter to Turkey. 
 
 Some had questioned whether the Twitter account was a publicity stunt and claimed Bana actually lived in Turkey already. 
 
 However, an investigation by citizen journalism site Bellingcat deduced she was tweeting from inside rebel-held Aleppo. 
 
 It is unclear whether the family are to stay in Turkey, where they would join almost 2.8 million Syrian refugees already living in the country. 

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 President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey has embraced — quite literally — a 7-year-old Syrian girl from Aleppo, famous for her Twitter messages describing life in a war zone. 
 
 Mr. Erdogan’s verified Twitter account posted photographs on Wednesday of the president posing with the girl, Bana al-Abed, her family and the president’s wife at the presidential complex in Ankara. The photographs were posted with messages in Turkish and English, including, “Turkey will always stand with the people of Syria.” 
 
 Mr. Erdogan’s embrace of Bana was a high-profile triumph for a little girl who had become an icon representing Syrian children living through the nightmare of siege and bombardment, profiled by news organizations and followed by thousands on social media. 
 
 Bana posted on Twitter that she and her family were evacuated from eastern Aleppo this week along with thousands of Syrians who had been trapped in the shrinking rebel-held area of the city. A Turkish government official said on Wednesday that Mr. Erdogan sent a special representative to Syria to meet Bana’s family and have them airlifted out of the country to Turkey. 
 
 Bana, a little girl with a missing front tooth, became a global sensation over the past few months for messages and videos posted to her Twitter account, @AlabedBana. The account, managed by her mother, Fatemah, described the horrors of war in intimate detail. In some of the messages, Bana was smiling and reading. In others, she posted photographs of a bombed-out building that she said used to be “my reading place.” 
 
 Video 
 
 This month, The New York Times wrote about Bana, the global attention she has attracted and how the Twitter account has also raised questions of veracity and authenticity in an era of internet hoaxes and fabrications. 
 
 Some experts on news media ethics said that, despite the appeal of such a heartbreaking narrative — and with a young girl at its center, no less — news outlets had to approach the account with skepticism, and that some had fallen short. “It’s always a question of whether a 7-year-old is being used as a propaganda tool, and if so, by whom,” said Jane E. Kirtley, a professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota. “Sometimes we fall in love with a concept and basically ignore things that would undermine that concept, and ignore things that should be red flags.” She added, “For me, my antenna always goes up when the story is this compelling.” 
 
 Mr. Erdogan has railed against social media platforms like Twitter in the past, particularly when they were used by protesters in Turkey to spread messages of dissent or share leaked documents. He has called Twitter “the worst menace to society” and has blocked the platform for brief periods. 
 
 At other times, Mr. Erdogan has used Twitter and other online platforms to spread his own messages. During the failed coup attempt in Turkey in July, Mr. Erdogan used the FaceTime app on his cellphone to communicate with and direct his followers. 
 
 On Wednesday, after Mr. Erdogan met with Bana at the presidential complex and shared photographs of him hugging the child, she sent her own Twitter message: “Very happy to meet with Mr Erdogan. - Bana #Aleppo” 

 Story highlights Bana Alabed meets with Turkish President 
 
 Alabed had tweeted Turkish leaders for help 
 
 Hatay, Turkey (CNN) Bana Alabed, the 7-year-old Syrian girl who brought the plight of Aleppo's victims to the world, wrote the latest chapter in her extraordinary story by meeting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara. 
 
 The meeting at the presidential palace in the capital was captured on camera and appears to show Bana thanking Erdogan in English, saying: "Thank you for supporting the children of Aleppo and help us to get out from war. I love you." 
 
 Bana took to Twitter during the siege of eastern Aleppo to share her experiences, which were written by her mother, Fatemah, an English teacher. 
 
 She has nearly 360,000 followers on the social network and tweeted after the meeting of how happy she was to meet with the President.
– From the war-torn ruins of eastern Aleppo to the presidential palace in Turkey. CNN reports 7-year-old Bana Alabed—whose Twitter account has gained more than 350,000 followers since September—posed for photos and video with Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday in Ankara. "Thank you for supporting the children of Aleppo and help us to get out from war," Bana says in English in a video posted to a Turkish cabinet chief's Twitter account. "I love you." Meanwhile, Erdogan's Twitter account posted photos of the meeting with the caption, "Turkey will always stand with the people of Syria," according to the New York Times. Bana's Twitter account was started by her mother Fatemah to show "how much kids are suffering," the BBC reports. Tweets showed Bana attempting to live a normal life amid chaos and violence of the siege of the Syrian city. The girl also befriended JK Rowling on Twitter and received digital copies of the Harry Potter series. The Alabed family home was destroyed during bombing Nov. 27 and the family went into hiding before escaping Aleppo on Dec. 19. Erdogan, who had previously tweeted words of encouragement to Bana, quickly sent a helicopter to pick her family up and bring them to Turkey. Experts have warned that Bana may be being used for propaganda, and some skeptics have even suggested she's been in Turkey the entire time.