The video was shot on Wednesday in the rebel-held al-Qaterji neighbourhood of the city.
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“I’ve taken a lot of pictures of children killed or wounded in the strikes that rain down daily”, said photographer Mahmoud Rslan, who captured the image.
Since the start of the Syrian war in March 2011, more than 18,000 civilians in Aleppo have been killed, according to the Syrian Observatory For Human Rights.
A doctor at M10 later reported eight dead, among them five children.
Omran was rescued along with his three siblings – aged 1, 6, and 11 – and his mother and father from the rubble of their partially-destroyed apartment building, according to Raslan. The building collapsed shortly afterward.
Miraculously, for 5-year-old Omran, he is not a part of that gruesome statistic.
Idlib is dominated by the same alliance of rebels and jihadists that is fighting in Aleppo, including the former Al-Nusra Front, which has renamed itself Fateh al-Sham Front after renouncing its status as Al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate. This jarring photo and video, which shows the boy sitting silently in the back of ambulance as he wipes blood away from his face, has shocked the world and may lead some to ask the hard, but important question: How many child victims have there been in Aleppo? The horror generated by the image of Omran in the orange chair echoes the anguished response to the pictures of Aylan Kurdi, the drowned Syrian boy whose body was found on a beach in Turkey and came to encapsulate horrific toll of Syria’s civil war.
Aleppo, split into rebel- and government-controlled areas, has become the focus of fighting in Syria’s five-year conflict.
The U.N. envoy, Steffan de Mistura, said there was “no sense” in holding the meeting Thursday in light of the obstacles to delivering aid.
The fighting has frustrated the U.N.’s efforts to fulfill its humanitarian mandates, and the body’s special envoy to Syria cut short a meeting of the ad hoc committee – chaired by Russian Federation and the USA – tasked with deescalating the violence so that relief can reach beleaguered civilians.
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His office later clarified that some United Nations convoys had been able to reach “hard-to-reach” or other priority areas in July but none so far during the month of August.
