It’s the viral video that once again put an innocent face on the relentless carnage of the Syrian war; five-year-old Omran Daqneesh dazed and confused as he was pulled from the rubble of an airstrike in Aleppo.
And the world’s heart breaks again for Omran and his family as it is confirmed his 10-year-old brother Ali died at the weekend due to injuries sustained from that same Russian bombing.
It is believed Ali was out on the street playing when the strike occurred and photo-journalist Mahmoud Raslan, who took the photo of Omran, said his older brother was injured by a collapsed wall.
Kareem Shaheen, a Middle East reporter for The Guardian broke the news on Twitter.
Syrian activist Kenan Rahmani wrote of the boy’s death on a Facebook on Saturday and poignantly said that while Omran became the “global symbol of Aleppo’s suffering” his brother “Ali is the suffering itself”.
Rahmani wrote: “Ali is the suffering itself, that which Omran tried to convey to us. Ali is the utter loss of everything. Ali is Syria as Syrians know it.
“Ali is the reality: that no story in Syria has a happy ending.”
