Footage released by the Aleppo Media Center on August 17 appears to show a little boy and others being rescued from rubble after an airstrike.
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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.
The fighting has frustrated the UN’s efforts to fulfill its humanitarian mandate, and the world body’s special envoy to Syria on Thursday cut short a meeting of the ad hoc committee -chaired by Russian Federation and the United States- tasked with deescalating the violence so that relief can reach beleaguered civilians.
De Mistura welcomed the move and said the United Nations was counting on Moscow’s help to ensure “the adherence of the Syrian armed forces to the pause, once it comes into effect”.
“The Russian defence ministry has laid out several conditions for a weekly 48-hour pause in fighting”, said Al Jazeera’s Reza Sayah, reporting from the Gaziantep on the Turkish-Syrian border.
The child, Omran Daqneesh, is believed to be one of five children injured yesterday in a military strike.
“Omran’s case isn’t rare – we treat dozens of cases like him every day, with wounds that are typically worse”, Dr Abu al-Baraa, a pediatrician in a rebel-held eastern neighbourhood of Aleppo, told AFP.
Rescue workers and journalists arrived at Qaterji shortly after the strike and began pulling victims from the rubble.
“We were passing them from one balcony to the other”, he told the Associated Press, saying he carried three lifeless bodies before being handed the little boy.
Raslan rushed him to the ambulance, he said.
However, she said, “We already have seen large numbers of families and children who have left over the course of these five years.One thing we do know for sure.children are bearing the brunt of this crisis and one of our partners working in Aleppo has reported to us that the casualties they’re seeing – over a third of the casualties are children”. “We are afraid security forces will infiltrate our medical network and target ambulances as they transfer patients from one hospital to another”, said a doctor.
Omran’s three siblings, ages 1, 6, and 11, and his mother and father also were rescued from the building. While his family sustained minor injuries when their home collapsed he was more seriously hurt in the blast.
A neighboring building was also heavily damaged. Rescue workers worked until 5 a.m.to retrieve the last survivor from the rubble. “Her ankle was pinned beneath the rubble”, Raslan said.
The photo and accompanying video, taken and distributed by the activist group Aleppo Media Centre, show Omran being pulled from a partially destroyed building and placed in a chair inside a brightly lit ambulance after an airstrike Wednesday evening.
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He touches his forehead with his tiny hand and seems surprised to see blood on his fingers – then wipes it off on the orange chair with the timidity of a child who feels he has done something wrong.
