AMMAN, Jordan _ Sooty and dazed, dust-covered and bloodied, the little boy doesn't cry; not even a whimper escapes him. He just stares straight ahead, his small face blank with shock.
Video and still pictures of a wounded Syrian child sitting in an ambulance in Aleppo after being rescued from the rubble of his family home have rocketed across social media, drawing comparisons to the indelible image nearly a year ago of a Syrian toddler's tiny drowned corpse washed up on a Turkish beach.
As then, the little boy's back story took time to emerge, with some details still unclear. On Thursday, a day after the images were posted on YouTube by activists in Aleppo and widely shared online, news reports identified him as 5-year-old Omran Daqneesh.
Shocking scenes of suffering are documented daily and hourly in Syria, but it was not hard to see why this one captured worldwide attention. In the images, the barefoot boy is clad in shorts and a cartoon-emblazoned T-shirt � just like any kindergartner anywhere on a hot summer's evening, lending an incongruous touch of familiarity amid the chaotic scene, down to his slightly pigeon-toed pose.
In the video clip, the boy is first seen being handed off from one rescuer to another as first responders rushed Tuesday night to the darkened scene of an apparent airstrike in the opposition-held part of the divided city. As the camera watches, a rescuer in a yellow vest places him inside an ambulance, setting him carefully upright in an orange chair before hurrying off to help more wounded.
In the video, he looks even smaller in the adult-sized seat, little legs sticking straight out in front of him. Silently, he reaches up to touch his mop of tousled hair and his wounded face, then seems puzzled what to do with his hand, which comes away covered with ash and blood. Uncertainly, he wipes it on the chair.
Omran's three siblings, ranging in age from 1 to 11, were rescued from the rubble, along with his parents, the Associated Press reported. It quoted photojournalist Mahmoud Raslan, who captured the images, as saying that none of them were seriously injured, but that their apartment building collapsed soon after they were extracted from the ruins by first responders.
Even amid the ravages of Syria's five-year conflict, the plight of Aleppo stands out. In recent weeks, fighting has raged between government forces and rebels, each of which control parts of the city. Trapped civilians are enduring hunger, power cutoffs and airstrikes by Russian-backed government forces, and medical care is harder and harder to come by; in the city's opposition-held areas, at least two dozen medical facilities have been hit, according to U.N. investigators.
And as elsewhere in Syria, Aleppo's children often bear the brunt of the fighting, deprived of schooling, malnourished, dying of preventable diseases, vulnerable to the constant drumbeat of violence. To many online commenters, Omran became a symbol of this children's war: the boy in the ambulance.
"No words," said a Twitter user calling herself Armi Millare. "Heartbreaking," many others said simply.
