The operation to rescue Rayan, 5, who fell down a 32-metre well in the town of Bab Barred, involved digging an equally deep hole alongside the narrow shaft and tunneling across about three meters to reach the boy.

The story began when the child Rayan fell into a deep well 32 meters deep, in the village of Agran in the Chefchaouen province, in northern Morocco. The Moroccan authorities used advanced tools to search for the child, such as a camera that was inserted into the well, and what it observed appears on a nearby screen. The difficulty of the rescue operation lies in the narrowness of the well, as the videos show, as a civil defense member barely got into it, relying on a rope tied with a pulley. Rescue operations did not stop at the inside of the well, as the authorities brought in a large bulldozer that began digging in the ocean, in order to reach the child and rescue through a horizontal search, not a vertical search. Previous attempts by volunteers to retrieve the child from the well failed due to his narrowness.—Taha El Hakem