It’s another haunting picture of a wounded child from Syria. This one has also gone viral on social media.
The video and images were posted online by a pro-opposition activist group, Talbiseh Media Center.
It shows an 8-year-old girl in a medical facility, her hair and body covered with dust. There’s blood tricking down her forehead, her nose. She looks confused and scared and keeps calling out for her father.
Off camera, a man talks to her, asking for her name.
“Aya” she replies, crying.
“Where were you when this happened?” the questioner asks.
“At home but the roof fell on us,” she replies, looking around for her father.
“Oh Daddy… Daddy, come,” she cries.
Hospital staff and volunteers try to clean her up and attend to her wounds, as she continues to sob.
Aya was pulled from under rubble along with her family members when an airstrike hit their home in Talbiseh on Monday. Talbiseh, a large town in northwestern Syria, is about 10 kilometers north of Homs. Activists there say at least two people were killed and 30 wounded in three airstrikes that targeted residential areas of their town.
Aya’s mother, father and three siblings were wounded in the strike.
Aya, the oldest among her siblings, has been reunited with her family and they are all doing OK, activists said.
The family is now looking for a place to stay because their house was destroyed by the airstrike, according to a spokesperson with the Talbiseh Media Center.
Before and after
Activists posted a poster shows two strikingly different images of Aya on Facebook.
One image shows Aya at her school in Talbiseh on Sunday, October 9, a day before the airstrike destroyed her home.
The second image shows the 8-year-old girl at the medical facility after the airstrike.
Activists wrote sarcastic comments under the Facebook post.
“Warplanes messed her beautiful hair up and colored her face red,” it said.
Several heartbreaking images from Syria have captured the world’s attention, including that of a 5-year-old boy from Aleppo, also wounded in an airstrike. About a year ago the world reacted in horror to the image of Alan Kurdi, a Syrian toddler who drowned trying to escape a war that was older than he was.
As nations work to find a way out of the conflict, there has been more bombing in Syria.
Sixteen people were killed in renewed airstrikes in rebel-held Aleppo after nearly a week of relative calm, according to activists and residents.
The city of Aleppo has become the epicenter and key battleground in Syria’s war that has now raged for more than five years.