This photo of a little boy rescued from an airstrike shows the horrors of war-torn Syria
A haunting video released by a Syrian activist group shows a young boy from Aleppo, stunned and bloodied, sitting in an ambulance after being pulled from the rubble of what is thought to have been a Russian-backed airstrike.
Though it wasn't immediately clear when the video, posted by the Aleppo Media Center, was taken, it serves as a prescient reminder of the persistent violence in Syrian cities, and of the growing number of civilian casualties due to airstrikes.
A doctor in Aleppo confirmed to NBC News that the boy depicted in the video is 5-year-old Omran Daqneesh, and said that he sustained head wounds but no brain injuries.
Three of the little boy's siblings, ages 1, 6, and 11, were also rescued, according to NBC, along with both of his parents. The family's apartment building, all but destroyed by the aerial bombing, collapsed shortly after they were pulled from it.
"We sent the younger children immediately to the ambulance, but the 11-year-old girl waited for her mother to be rescued. Her ankle was pinned beneath the rubble," Mahmoud Raslan, the photojournalist who took the photo, told NBC.
In Western media, the image of one of Syria's youngest victims spurred comparison to the pictures taken of Alan Kurdi, a Syrian toddler whose body was found on a Turkish beach after the small boat he was traveling in to Greece with his family capsized.
Dead bodies and human rights violations have been mounting in Syria since the country broke out into civil war in 2011. According to the BBC, the number of dead in the country as a result of the conflict currently surpasses 250,000.
On Aug. 8, CNN's Senior International Correspondent Clarissa Ward spoke out against the atrocities in Aleppo at a United Nations Security Council meeting. During her stirring remarks, she said that despite covering conflict for 12 years, she had "never experienced anything like Syria" when she was there in 2012.
"The only thing I could think of was — and again I find myself using the same language that we've heard from the doctors — this is actually hell," Ward said of being in Syria in 2012. "This is what hell feels like and there is no way it can get any worse than this. But it did. It got a lot worse. Much worse."
