Drown at sea or get bombed: Heartbreaking choice facing Syrian children
Khalid Albaih's #khartoon has gone viral. Photo: Instagram (khalidalbaih)
From human rights commissions to the Refugee Olympic Team, many have tried (and failed, to be honest) to bring attention to the absurdity of the Syrian civil war.
What came closest to a wake-up call was the devastating image of three-year-old Alan Kurdi lying face down on a Turkish beach last September. He had washed up on the shore, his fellow refugees who were escaping on sea nowhere to be found.
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| This image of Alan Kurdi created hashtags and trending topics but to no avail. Photo: AP |
The world mourned as the image dominated the news cycle. Problem is, our always-waiting-for-the-next-update, retweet-addicted minds quickly forgot Alan and moved on to the next thing.
Until when on Wednesday, a video surfaced showing a response team trying to rescue a family from an airstrike in Aleppo, Syria.
What stuck though, was the image of five-year-old Omran Daqneesh, sitting in an ambulance, bleeding profusely, covered in dust, staring into the camera unable to speak.
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| A boy, Omran Daqneesh, pulled from under the rubble, after an airstrike in Aleppo. Photo: Reuters |
According to Mahmoud Raslan, Omran was rescued with his three siblings, aged one, six, and 11, and his mother and father after an air-strike in their apartment building. The building collapsed shortly after the family was rescued.
The image of Omran just sitting there, unable to speak is heartbreaking. The kid is five, he doesn't have home, his country has been at war for five years, and no one, including his parents, knows what to do or where to take their children.
The photo and its the predicament brought a CNN anchor to tears, it dominated the news cycle and it posed a question:
What's the choice before a Syrian kid?
Stay and become Omran or try to escape and be Alan.
The Syrian conflict is now over five years old. Over 2,50,000 people have died, more than 11 million have been forced to leave their homes in a battle between Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, the rebels and the Islamic State.
The madness of the violence manifests itself in the number of war crimes committed by all sides. Murder, rape, torture and blocking access to food and health services have been constantly employed, in addition to chemical weapons which have long been banned world over.
What had begun in March of 2011 as another Arab Spring has now become one of the greatest humanitarian crises in history.