The UN’s deputy secretary-general said that the whole world has failed the Syrian people, expressing hope that Omran’s story and image would get to people’s ‘hearts and brains.’ Jan Eliasson was responding to questions about the heartbreaking photos of Omran, a five-year-old child from Aleppo who was rescued from under the rubble of his home that was destroyed in an airstrike on Thursday.
The shocking photos and a video of Omran Daqneesh soon went viral on social media around the world as they showed the dazed small child sitting silently at the back of an ambulance with his face and clothes covered with blood and dust.
“I think this is an illustration of the huge tragedy that the Syrian people are going through. We talk about this often as this being a nightmare. This is worse than a nightmare because you wake up from a nightmare. But in Syria they wake up to constant nightmares,” said Jan Eliasson, speaking on CNN’s Amanpour on Thursday.
Eliasson called Syria one of the most frustrating conflicts in the world. “This is like an infected wound in world politics,” he said. “We’ve got to end this war.”
Member of the Syrian Coalition’s political committee Osama Taljou on Friday said that the case of Omran is not unique as many Syrian children face the same fate on a daily basis as a result of revenge attacks by the Assad regime and its allies on the Syrian people.
Taljou called upon the United Nations to hold Assad accountable for killing over 400,000 Syrians and displacing over 13 million more. He stressed that the Syrian people will never give up the struggle for freedom and dignity, rejecting all attempts to reproduce the Assad regime. (Source: Syrian Coalition + CNN)
