Heartbreaking video shows injured Aleppo toddler clinging to nurse for comfort
Aleppo: The United Nations is trying to get Russia and its allies to stop bombing the rebel-held Aleppo, to give civilians some respite from the constant bloodshed and fear they live in. But the airstrikes are yet to halt and Syria’s children continue to experience horrors no child must.
In a heart-breaking video that has emerged from Aleppo, a toddler, whose forehead is covered in blood and bandages is seen crying in a hospital, while a male nurse pats his back, trying to comfort him. The toddler stops crying for a second, to look at the camera and just then the nurse tries to free him, but the little boy refuses to let to and holds him again.
Read: Video: Syrian breaks down while rescuing newborn from rubble of bombed building
The boy’s cries are gut-wrenching, symbolising the pain and suffering of all the other children who are losing their childhood to a bloody war. The nurse this time holds the child closer and tries to comfort him again.
The short video was posted by the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), who wrote that the toddler had been admitted to their hospital on Friday.
'This is what #ChildrenOfSyria endure everyday. This is the agony of #Syria's children,’ SAMS wrote along with the video.
At least 96 children are among the 320 people killed in Aleppo since a cease-fire collapsed on Sept. 19, according to UNICEF, as Syrian and Russian warplanes barrage the city’s eastern opposition neighborhoods, trying to crush more than five years of resistance there. Almost a third of the 840 people wounded over the same period are children, according to the World Health Organization.
Nearly 300,000 people — including 100,000 children — are trapped in Aleppo’s rebel-held eastern districts, a pocket of resistance some eight miles long and three miles wide that civil defense workers say has been hit by 1,900 bombs in the past week. The campaign has wreaked destruction on hospitals, clinics, residential buildings, water stations and electric generators.
Parents desperately struggling to keep their families safe fear the threat of an imminent ground offensive. They hold little hope for the future, with no regular schooling and little access to nutritious food. Images of wounded and screaming children, covered in dust or being pulled out of rubble, have become a daily reality in Aleppo.
