On August 17, the Aleppo Media Center (AMC) published a video of a young Syrian boy from Aleppo being rescued from rubble and placed in an ambulance. A still image from the video shows the boy covered in soot and blood as he sits with a dazed look on his face. Apparently injured in an airstrike against Aleppo-where regime and rebel forces have been battling since 2012-the image is telling of the harrowing conflict and daily violence in Aleppo. And it’s now going viral.
Many who tweeted the picture showed sympathy for the boy, and the victims of Russian and regime airstrikes in Aleppo.
This poor boy looks like my son. "The stunned, bloodied face of a child survivor sums up the horror of Aleppo" https://t.co/qyoV554XLf
— Wajahat Ali (@WajahatAli) August 18, 2016
Such airstrikes target the preponderance of rebel groups in Aleppo, although they regularly kill civilians.
Others on Twitter expressed frustration with the fact that such images continually make headlines, but the situation in Syria doesn’t improve.
I'm tired of this pattern. A viral picture of a bloodied Syrian kid generates headline news and tons of tweets, then nothing changes.
— Iyad el-Baghdadi (@iyad_elbaghdadi) August 18, 2016
The image is hardly the first related to the now five-year-long Syrian civil war to go viral. In 2015, the image of Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi drowned on the shores of Turkey similarly went viral, and became iconic of the current refugee crisis.
Al Bawaba reached out to the AMC for an update on the boy’s status, but they have yet to learn anything.
AL
