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Image Of Bloodied Syrian Boy Rescued From Aleppo Airstrike A Heartbreaking Reminder Of War’s Cost

By Lawrence Arboleda
Published on: 23:38 PST, Aug 17, 2016

The image of a wounded Syrian boy who survived an airstrike in the Syrian city of Aleppo went its rounds on the web Wednesday, serving as a powerful reminder to us all about the high cost of war, the Telegraph reports.

In a video that has gone viral, the five-year-old Omran Daqneesh is seen covered with dust from head to foot after he was pulled out from the rubble of a military airstrike and put in an orange chair in the back of an ambulance. Clearly dazed and disoriented by the attack, Little Omran is seen staring into the distance. Before long, after noticing that he was covered in dirt and blood, Omran wiped at his face as he waited for the medics to treat him.

Omran was wounded in the airstrike on a Wednesday evening along with four other children, two young men, and a woman, according to a doctor who requested not to be identified.

Daqneesh was later taken into the M10 hospital, a site blasted by airstrikes many times before.

There, physicians treated the boy’s head injury and washed off the dust and blood covering his eyes and hair. Omran was released later that night, according to Telegraph.

Physicians at M10 hospital said that around 12 children under the age of 15 have been treated on that same day.

Images of little Daqneesh have since gone viral on social media yesterday as Aleppo remains caught in an intensifying war between its government-held western district and its rebel-held eastern district.

“This picture of a wounded Syrian boy captures just a fragment of the horrors of Aleppo,” wrote Raf Sanchez in his Telegraph piece.

“Can’t get the image of this poor little boy out of my head. It’s too sad for words. ” tweeted BBC News correspondent Anne-Marie Tomchak.

The Syrian conflict has been going on for years, killing over 250,000 people and displacing millions. Those numbers continue to rise.

The city of Aleppo has been under bombardment for many years, but the attacks have recently intensified since rebels started staging an attack in an attempt to besiege the city.

The Syrian city has recently caught international attention as the number of civilians caught in the crossfire between the two warring factions continues to rise. Living conditions have started to deteriorate as well. Earlier this month, the flow of water, which serves millions of residents in the city, was cut off after a rebel attack disabled a main power plant on Tuesday.

Louisa Loveluck and Hugh Naylor of The Washington Post sheds even more light on the humanitarian crisis in Aleppo.

“The western districts held by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have not experienced the severe deprivations of areas in the east controlled by rebel forces. But after an array of rebels and extremists linked to al-Qaeda broke the brutal government siege of opposition neighborhoods last week, the rebels escalated the assault to besiege the government side. That has disrupted supplies of food and medicine to an area where more than a million people live, potentially testing loyalties of residents to the embattled Syrian leader.

“Prices are getting expensive, and businessmen are choosing not to sell what they have because they want to profit later when prices get even higher,” said Hisham, a resident of a loyalist district in the city’s west end who asked that his last name not be published because of concerns for his safety. Because of Tuesday’s disruptions, he added, his neighborhood now depends on water that is trucked in.”

Earlier this week, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned that a “humanitarian catastrophe” would befall Aleppo if Russia and the United States refuse to call a ceasefire in the city.

“In Aleppo we risk seeing a humanitarian catastrophe unprecedented in the over five years of bloodshed and suffering in the Syrian conflict,” Ban told the U.N. Security Council.

[Image via Aleppo Media Center via AP]

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