Once he saw them, he started crying, a report said. He said he had passed along three lifeless bodies when someone handed him the wounded boy. There were several other kids rescued and drawn to ambulance.
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Opposition activists said there were eight casualties overall from the air strike, among them five children. They said the USA must get rebels to break ranks with the Nusra Front, a task that may be more hard after its fighters successfully broke Aleppo’s siege earlier this month.
His words were echoed by the nurse who helped treat Omran once the injured were brought to hospital.
“It was as if he was asleep”.
“It is very painful to watch your children falling in front of your eyes”, said the father, who asked only to be identified as Abu Ali – which means father of Ali – for fear of reprisal from the Syrian government. None sustained major injuries.
“(If) we get involved in joint operations with people that are committing war crimes”, he said, “I don’t think it’s a smart bargain.
In a video published by the Aleppo Media Centre, a man is seeing picking up Omran from a chaotic scene and taking him inside the ambulance, where he is seated, unblinking and dazed.
Ali’s younger brother, Omran Daqneesh, was pictured, by journalist and photographer Mahmoud Raslam, in the back of an ambulance after being pulled from the rubble, with an expression of incomprehension on his dust and blood-caked face.
The image echoes the anguished global response to the pictures of Aylan Kurdi, the drowned Syrian boy whose body was found on a beach in Turkey and came to encapsulate the horrific toll of Syria’s almost 6-year-old civil war.
“Tomorrow is World Humanitarian Day, and in Syria what we are hearing and seeing is only fighting, offensives, counteroffensives, rockets, barrel bombs, mortars, Hellfire cannons, napalm, chlorine, snipers, airstrikes, suicide bombers”, the longtime diplomat, who came out of semi-retirement to take up the Syrian envoy post, told reporters. “Sometimes, you have to cry”.
His parents and three siblings are believed to have survived the attack.
Doctors in Aleppo call hospitals by code names to avoid any infiltration by security forces in their medical network and safeguard the ambulances used to transport the patients.
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Activists living in opposition areas rely on informants in government-controlled Latakia province to warn residents of impending airstrikes.
