Brother of symbol of Aleppo’s suffering dies
Misery of Syria’s ‘other Omrans’ continues as conflict claims lives of around 50,000 children
WHEN the bombs came crashing down on the Daqneesh family home, one son emerged from the rubble almost unscathed and instantly became a global symbol.
The other son died quietly in hospital completely unknown to the world.
It emerged yesterday that Omran Daqneesh’s older brother Ali had succumbed to injuries suffered in the same air strike that propelled his sibling on to television screens across the planet.
Ali, 10, was out on the street when a Russian or Syrian regime bomb fell on his family’s building in Aleppo’s Qaterji neighbourhood on Wednesday.
While the rest of his family suffered minor injuries as their flat collapsed around them, Ali appears to have been more fully exposed to the bomb blast and died in hospital. Omran’s father, who asked to be identified only by the nickname Abu Ali, meaning “father of Ali”, received mourners at the family’s temporary home on Saturday.
Omran, three, and his three surviving siblings stayed inside the house as Abu Ali accepted condolences on the street.
News of Ali’s death was also confirmed by the Syrian Coalition, an umbrella organisation made up of different opposition groups.
Ali can now be counted among “the other Omrans”, the Syrian children who are being hurt or killed every day in their country’s brutal civil war but whose photographs do not go viral and whose names do not make it into the evening news.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimates that 142 children were killed in Aleppo in August alone. Around 50,000 children are believed to have died across the country during the last five years of fighting although exact figures are impossible to calculate.
Countless others have been injured and no one can quantify the scale of psychological trauma suffered by a generation of children who have known nothing but war.
Dr Zaher Sahloul has seen many of the Syrian war’s youngest victims and their unspeakable injuries. Yet one of the images most seared into his memory is a simple picture drawn by a sevenyear-old boy from Aleppo.
It shows Assad regime helicopters dropping barrel bombs on children below. Those that are still alive are weeping and in pain but the ones who are already dead look serene and at peace.
“Somehow he thought that the children who died are in a better place than those who are alive,” Dr Sahloul said. “This is what happens to children in Aleppo and in other places.”
One of those places is Atarib. Atarib a small town that sits halfway between Aleppo and Idlib in northern Syria and its population has swollen during the war as refugees flee from fighting in other places to its relative safety.
But the Assad regime and its Russian allies have stepped up their strikes on the countryside in recent months and Atarib has been one of their targets. The bombing became so bad that Reim Sadiq, a 16-year-old girl, sent a voice message to an uncle in Aleppo.
“Come visit us soon, before we are all killed,” she teased with teenage bravado.
Reim is still alive but her younger brother Abdullah was killed by an air strike on Tuesday as he walked past the town’s swimming pool.
The 11-year-old had diffident blue eyes and seemed to never take off his favourite yellow football shirt. He loved being told stories. “What wrong did he commit to be killed?” asked Abdullah’s uncle, Zakaria Abdulrahim.
“The war is getting bigger and it doesn’t distinguish between children and men. To the regime we are all terrorists to be killed.”
Mr Abdulrahim was unable to go to his nephew’s funeral because the roads from Aleppo out to the countryside are too dangerous to travel on.
Waseem Ajaj spent part of the last morning of his life stamping his foot in frustration.
His mother Amal was scolding him that he was already late to go help his father at the family car repair shop in Aleppo’s Ferdaws neighbourhood.
But the 11-year-old had to wait for his older brother Mohammed, who was preening in the front of the mirror. “I’m waiting for the prince to finish combing his hair!” Waseem protested.
The words were among the last he would ever say to his mother.
The brothers were a few minutes out of the house when a bomb dropped by a Russian or Syrian jet crashed down next to them. The back of Waseem’s skull was blown off, killing him instantly. Mohammed’s legs were torn apart by shrapnel and he is still in critical condition in hospital, fluttering between life and death.
Three-year-old Ahmed Muhammad Tadifi lingered in a similar state. The toddler arrived at Aleppo’s M2 hospital on Friday, which is supposed to be a day of prayer and peace.
His arm had been shattered and his head was bleeding from a cluster bomb attack on the Mashad neighbourhood. Doctors scrambled with an emergency ultrasound to try to determine the scale of his injuries but there was nothing they could do.
Several hours after his picture was first sent to a group of journalists using the Whatsapp messenger app, the doctors sent another picture of his little body. His face was grey and lifeless.
Children in the Mashad neighbourhood spent part of the rest of the day picking up scraps of the Russian-made cluster munitions that killed him. There is little else for children to do on hot summer days in a city under siege.