A photo of a young Syrian boy sitting in ambulance following an airstrike on the rebel-held sector of Aleppo went viral overnight Wednesday. The photo, showing the shoe-less, five-year-old Omran Daqneesh covered in ash and blood and vacantly staring into the cosmos, captured the attention of international audiences.
Daqneesh was injured late on Wednesday evening in Syria after a military hit the Qaterji neighborhood in Aleppo. The image was a still taken from a video released by the Aleppo Media Centre and posted on YouTube late Wednesday.
The photo shows the destruction that has hit Aleppo and exemplifies how the war, and particularly the airstrikes launched by Russian and Syrian forces, affects civilians and particularly children in Aleppo.
Omran does not cry at all in the video. “He was in extreme shock,” a spokesman for the Aleppo Media Center told CNN.
The airstrike that injured Daqneesh killed eight people, five of which were children, according to the Guardian. Daqneesh’s three siblings, aged one, six, and 11 were saved and sent to a hospital that goes by the codename M10. Doctors in Aleppo use codenames for hospitals because the Syrian regime and Russia purposefully target them as a strategy of war.
#Khartoon – Choices #OmranDaqneesh 5 pulled from under the ruins, #AylanKurdi 3 drowned in the Mediterranean #Syria pic.twitter.com/Y4XQgfKgHt
— ود البيه (@khalidalbaih) August 18, 2016
Syria is in its sixth year of a brutal civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions. Around five million Syrians are refugees and another 6.6 million are internally displaced. Syria’s biggest city, Aleppo, has experienced serious levels of destruction after repeated airstrikes. The situation may deteriorate even further as a renewal of relations between Turkey and Russia led to an agreement to unite to bomb ISIS in Syria. While Russia entered Syria under the auspices that it would be bombing ISIS, it has also coordinated attacks with the Syrian Air Force that have killed thousands of civilians. Meanwhile, despite Turkey’s agreement with the European Union to take refugees off their hands, Turkish border guards have shot at Syrians trying to flee the civil war.
The images of Daqneesh echo the more tragic but equally powerful photos that captured the drowned corpse of Aylan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian refugee who died while trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea with his family in September of last year.
After the photo of Kurdi went viral, Aya Mhanna, a clinical psychologist and group therapist based in Gaziantep, told ThinkProgress’ Laurel Raymond that the photo struck a chord with so many because it was of a child. “Here is this baby alone, not with other people, no mother, no father, no police shouting,” she said. “It touches everyone because it contradicts the usual perception of things.”
The circumstances are nearly identical for the photo of Daqneesh — the only difference is that where Daqneesh is still alive, Kurdi is dead.