BEIRUT,
Lebanon — 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 rebel-held 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 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 the video. Or the instant and inescapable question
of whether either of his parents was left alive.
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 officelike chair, showed him at a desk as if representing his country to the world.
Syrians are tweeting Omran's picture as they ask why the world is doing nothing about the killing in #Aleppo pic.twitter.com/ioXM3Tgmke— Raf Sanchez (@rafsanchez) August 18, 2016
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 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.