Infant who lost an eye becomes a symbol of Syria’s suffering
Campaign calls for help as food and aid supplies dry up and war intensifies in besieged Damascus suburb
KARIM’S right eye is bright and flickers with curiosity about the world around him. But his left eye is scarred and seared shut.
He is three months old and will never see out of it again, after being injured in two separate government attacks on his besieged suburb near Damascus. The Syrian infant was first wounded by a shred of shrapnel from a bomb dropped by Bashar al-assad’s forces in late October as they laid siege to eastern Ghouta, a rebel-held area.
Karim’s mother, Fadiya, was killed by the same bomb as she shopped with her child in what was once the neighbourhood fruit market; now made up of mainly empty stalls in a suburb home to 400,000 civilians.
Ten days later, after the baby was discharged from a makeshift hospital, shrapnel tore through the roof of his house, crushing his skull.
In recent days, Karim has become a symbol of eastern Ghouta’s suffering after activists launched a campaign in support of the infant.
Thousands of people have taken pictures of themselves with one hand covering their left eye and posted them under hashtags such as #Solidarity Withkarim and #Babykarim.
Matthew Rycroft, the British ambassador to the UN, yesterday joined the campaign, and said: “When we sit around the #UNSC & warn that inaction will mean more people are going to die. More schools bombed. More children scarred. This is what we mean.
“We must see an end to the bombardment and siege of eastern Ghouta.”
The suburb has been under attack since 2013, despite being a designated “deconfliction zone” where rebels and the regime agreed to reduce fighting.
Conditions have reached a “critical point” in recent months as Assad regime forces step up the campaign to crush one of the last remaining opposition areas near Damascus.
Abdelmueen, an ambulance driver, was one of the first on the scene after the bomb fell that hit Karim. “I tried to help Karim. His mother was dead and his face was covered with blood and ash,” he said.
“His mother was martyred by one of Assad’s rockets,” said Abu Muhammad, Karim’s father. “Karim was wounded in his head and eyes. The bone in his head was broken.”
Doctors warned Abu Muhammad that the baby remained perilously thin and needed to gain weight if he was going to recover. But food in the area is in desperately short supply. A kilo of tea costs £150, while a kilo of sugar goes for £37. Individual pieces of bread, the staple of the Syrian diet, cost 50p.
The UN says around one in eight children in the area is malnourished, and that the Assad government has refused to allow it to transfer nearly 500 people requiring medical evacuation to hospitals minutes away.
“Infants – some of them just one or two months old – will die if evacuation permits are not granted immediately,” Mark Lowcock, UN humanitarian chief, told the Security Council.
He said 16 people waiting for permission to leave had died, including a 45-day-old infant, a nine-year old girl and a quadriplegic.
The International Committee of the Red Cross meanwhile said it was alarmed by intensifying fighting in eastern Ghouta. Insurgents there launch mortar and rocket attacks on the capital, while the government has carried out waves of air strikes.
“The humanitarian situation in eastern Ghouta has reached a critical point,” said Robert Mardini, the Middle East director for the Red Cross. “Ordinary people are once again trapped in a situation where life slowly becomes impossible and where goods and aid are severely limited.
“Some families can afford to eat only one meal a day, an especially sad situation for people with children. As a result, most people have been relying entirely on aid from humanitarian organisations,” he added.
Since their mother’s death on Sept 23, it has largely fallen to Karim’s four sisters – the eldest is aged eight – and one brother to care for him.
The family has been subsisting mainly on bread and a few olives. Like most of the people in East Ghouta they have no electricity and are able to only occasionally power items using neighbour’s generators.
“A lot of people don’t find anything to eat,” said Fayez, a doctor, who asked that his surname not be published. His own wife was killed at the beginning of the siege in 2013.
“If shelling against civilians doesn’t stop, there are going to be a hundred or a thousand like Karim,” said Moayed alhalafi, a member of the Syrian Civil Defence, the volunteer first-responders known as White Helmets.
‘If shelling against civilians doesn’t stop, there are going to be a hundred or a thousand like Karim’