The Boy in the Ambulance

Silent and in shock, a child rescued after a reported airstrike becomes the face of Aleppo

TIME | 17 August 2016

Hitting the play button begins a scene that has played out in Syria thousands of times over the past five years. It’s dark and men are frantically yelling. A young child in shorts is passed between the arms of his rescuers from a building. He’s caked in dust. The left side of his face is smeared with blood.

He doesn’t make a sound.

The man on the ground, in a yellow vest, holds him tight as he walks away. The boy wraps his right arm around the man’s shoulder as he’s whisked into a waiting ambulance. He looks back outside as he’s placed on an orange seat, alone, next to orange cabinets and an orange first aid kit.

He doesn’t make a sound.

The man who carried him in bends down to get a walkie talkie and then leaves. Another man with a camera focuses on the boy. He’s wearing shorts and a t-shirt with a cartoon character. His hands are placed calmly on his thighs. His right eye is wide open, the other eye less so. He looks to the doors of the ambulance, toward the voices. He blinks and looks away.

In a moment of pure horror, the boy lifts his left hand to his face, runs his fingers through his hair and then back down the side of his face before dropping it down. He looks at the palm of his hand and, unsure what to do, turns it over and wipes it on the seat. He feels the seat from front to back, front to back.

He doesn’t make a sound.

That was just the first 37 seconds of footage shared on Aug. 17 by the Aleppo Media Center, reportedly showing the immediate aftermath of an apparent airstrike in a neighborhood of the northern city of Aleppo, which for years has been a battleground between government and rebel forces. The footage and a picture of the boy were shared widely online in the hours that followed. A name and age of the boy began to circulate. Suspicions about the perpetrator did, too. A lot of details were unclear.

His silence instantly resonates with those who watch the footage. His daze is enough to reduce a viewer to tears. The realizations begin to set in that he should be crying. That he should be surrounded by someone he knows. That he is a survivor, saved by brave first-responders. That he should be anywhere else than in the back of an ambulance by himself.

The video comes just days after more than a dozen doctors who remain in the rebel-held side of Aleppo wrote a letter to President Obama, asking for aid for the civilians who are trapped. “We do not need tears or sympathy or even prayers,” the letter reads. “We need your action.”

After focusing on the boy, the footage then shows a girl wearing pink who had been placed in the ambulance. Another boy is carried in to join them. Later, a bloodied man in a white tank top is helped from the building, with blood all over his face. He is lead into the ambulance before the doors close. In the video’s final moments, a body is removed from the rubble on an orange stretcher as men shout Allahu Akhbar. It’s not clear whether that person was dead or alive.

Devastating pictures and footage from Syria are common now. Bloodied children are pulled out from underneath a sea of rubble. Men and women are hurried from the scene. Ambulances arrive empty and leave full. Bodies pile up. The next day brings the same thing.

But this is unique. It’s that he is alive. It’s that he is, to a point, aware. It’s his face. It cannot be unseen.