Last year a photograph surfaced of a 3-year-old boy, Aylan Kurdi, in a bright red t-shirt, lying face down on a beach in Turkey and it broke a million hearts all over the world. Making us all realize that the world is a terrible place with monsters terrorising small children and turning them into pawns in the game of power. The picture generated headlines, but the world didn’t do anything about it.
Now, a 5-year-old Syrian Omran Daqneesh, rescued from the rubble of a Russian airstrike, is the latest reminder of the atrocities in Syrian cities like Aleppo.
The image of the disconcerted and weary looking boycover in his own blood, sitting in an orange chair inside an ambulance covered in dust and with blood on his face, encapsulates the horrors inflicted on the war-ravaged Syrian city. The civil war in the country is a devastating example of how lives of almost 400,000 innocent people have minimal value in this monstrous world.
It is agonising and unfortunate how haunting images of small kids have to be used to remind us of the humiliation of humanity with our own hands. Children in Syria don’t know what it means to be a child anymore. The war took away everything from them, their homes, their loved ones. Terror has become a fundamental part of their lives and the options faced by them are scarce. They are losing their childhood one tragedy at a time.
How many more Aylan Kurdi and Omran Danqeesh have to be photographed and presented all over the world in order to draw attention towards the crimes against humanity?
How many more innocent lives have to be sacrificed before the world power intervenes and ends this 5-year long war in Syria?
