How Omran Daqneesh, 5, became a symbol of Aleppo’s suffering
In the images, he sits alone, a small boy coated with gray dust and encrusted blood. His little feet barely extend beyond his seat. He stares, bewildered, shocked and, above all, weary, as if channeling the mood of Syria.
The boy, identified by medical workers as Omran Daqneesh, 5, was pulled from a damaged building after a Syrian government or Russian airstrike in the northern city of Aleppo. He was one of 12 children under the age of 15 treated on Wednesday, not a particularly unusual figure, at one of the hospitals in the city’s rebelheld eastern section, according to doctors there.
But some images strike a particular nerve, for reasons both obvious and unknowable, jarring even a public numbed to disaster. Omran’s is one.
Within minutes of being posted by witnesses and journalists, a photograph and a video of Omran began rocketing around the world on social media. Unwittingly, Omran - like Alan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler who drowned last September and whose lifeless body washed up on a Turkish beach - is bringing new attention to the thousands upon thousands of children killed and injured during five years of war and the inability or unwillingness of global powers to stop the carnage.
Maybe it was his haircut, long and floppy up top; or his rumpled T-shirt showing the Nickelodeon cartoon character CatDog; or his tentative, confused movements in a widely circulated video - gestures familiar to anyone who has loved a child. Or the instant and inescapable question of whether a parent was left alive to give him a hug.
In any event, by Thursday morning, Omran’s image had been broadcast and published around the world, and Syrians were sharing mock-ups of his photograph in memes that both cried for help and darkly mocked the futile repetitiveness of such pleas.
One, riffing on Omran’s office like chair, showed him at a desk as if representing his country to the world.
Another pasted him like a silent accusation between President Obama and his Russian counterpart, President Vladimir V. Putin.
The drafting of Omran as an emblem of despair is not new; images of dead and injured children from Syria are shared daily on social media, many of them indescribably more harrowing. Pieces of children’s bodies being pulled from rubble are photographed with appalling regularity in a war of indiscriminate attacks, most often from government airstrikes and shelling but also from rebel mortars.
But while the mind revolts against looking too long at those pictures, and many news media shun them as too gruesome, it may be the relatively familiar look of Omran’s distress that allows a broader public to relate to it.
In the case of Alan, the Syrian toddler who washed up on a beach last year, after his family tried to reach Europe on a smuggler’s boat, the child was dead. But his body was intact, lying in the sand as if sleeping, and dressed neatly with evident parental love for his big journey.
Omran, as he is carried from a damaged building in the dark, could be Everychild. He looks around in confusion, his chubby forearm draped trustingly across the reflective stripe on his rescuer’s back, before he is plopped into the chair at the back of ambulance, lit blindingly white.
He settles into a thousandyard stare, apparently too stunned to cry. Then he puts a hand to his bloody brow, looks at his palm in surprise, and tries to wipe it on the chair. Then he glances around, as if trying to understand where he is.
Omran’s picture and video were apparently taken by a member of the Aleppo Media Center, a longstanding group of antigovernment activists and citizen journalists who document the conflict. They were also shared with journalists by doctors from the hospital where he was treated, which is supported by the Syrian American Medical Society.
The video shows two more small children brought to the ambulance, and then two adults, one person on a stretcher, one man covered in dust and agitated but able to walk.
They were taken to a hospital already swamped with casualties. Omran was treated for a head wound; doctors said they found no brain damage. His face was cleaned up and his head bandaged, as another photograph showed.
In the chaos, the hospital workers, who communicated via online messages, could not immediately say which of his adult relatives were alive and whether they were with him.
That is not unusual, medical workers say, in a city where some dead and injured children cannot even be identified because they are brought in alone. Bombings bring so many patients at once that doctors treat them on the floor, and hospitals and medical workers have been systematically targeted in the war.
Cases like Omran’s are a daily sight in eastern Aleppo, several doctors said, but he was lucky in that he made it to a hospital that was still open.
On Thursday morning, journalists from around the world were clamoring in an online chat group for more information about Omran and his family. But the doctors had moved on.
They were handling yet another influx from a bombing in the morning, later posting new images. A boy lay on the floor, his legs missing. A woman in black put her hand to her mouth in anguish.
Another boy lay on a gurney, soaked in blood, as a clinician worked on him. A few minutes later came another text message: The boy had died. His name was Ibrahim Hadiri, and there was a new photograph of his face, eyes closed. It is not likely to go viral.