The photograph of Aleppo's little boy with blood-stained face and harrowing ‘thousand-yard stare’ stands as a shocking rebuke to us all, write Tony Rennell and Peter Oborne.
London - To those who know about the traumas of war, it is ‘the thousand-yard stare’ h- that blank look from unfocused eyes that have seen too much but cannot comprehend the horror they have witnessed.
The phrase was coined in World War II to describe the haunted faces of shell-shocked soldiers coming out of battle. An artist who captured it back then asked plaintively: ‘How much can a human stand?’
And here it is again, on the face of a five-year-old boy, an innocent pulled from the rubble of the battle-ravaged Syrian city of Aleppo after an air strike by government forces, just the latest casualty in that benighted country’s blood-soaked civil war.
It has shocked the world, appalled at war being waged on children. And raises again that question from World War II - how much indeed can a human stand, especially one so small and fragile?
The little boy’s name is Omran and he lived with his family in an apartment building in the rebel-held eastern quarter of the city.
On Wednesday, as he sat at home with his mother, father, two brothers (one a baby) and 11-year-old sister - the planes came without warning.
The rebels had been winning ground, with 10,000 fighters threatening the government lines around Aleppo. The forces of the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, flew in to force them back. Their rockets and bullets hit the building, which crumbled into an empty shell with its terrified occupants still inside.
Omran - arms, legs and CatDog cartoon T-shirt covered in dust, blood streaming from his head - was pulled out by a rescue worker, carried to an ambulance and plumped down into a seat several sizes too big for him to be driven to hospital.
He sits, bemused, shocked, passive, staring into the distance, not even able to cry. Pale, barefoot and bloodied, he is like a tiny ghost against the vivid orange of the ambulance seat.
His left hand went up to his eye, as if to brush away a tiny tear. To his anguish, it came back covered in blood from the open wound in his head. He stared at the blood on his palm, then instinctively tried to rub it away on the fabric of the seat, like any child might do to get rid of a stain of chocolate on hisfingers.
For children like Omran this is a war seemingly without end - and he cannot remember what peace was like.
According to International Red Cross president, Peter Maurer, the battle for Aleppo has become one of the most devastating urban conflicts in modern times.
‘No one and nowhere is safe. Shellfire is constant, with houses, schools and hospitals all in the line of fire. The scale of the suffering is immense. People live in a state of fear. Children have been traumatised.’
Eight people died in this particular air raid, five of them children, according to the anti-government media group who circulated Omran’s picture. But he survived, and so did his family. His head bound in a large white bandage, he has been discharged from hospital.
Nothing more is known about his whereabouts as he and his family resume what passes in Aleppo for ordinary life, cowering away from the fighting as best they can, hoping simply to survive.
Omran’s face may well become the defining image of the hopelessness and the senselessness that is the Syrian civil war - just as that haunting picture last September of a dead Syrian child washed up on the beach at Bodrum in Turkey became the image of the migrant crisis.
While Omran didn’t weep, the huge international response to his picture shows that many seeing it could not hold back their owntears.
Will this make any difference? Don’t hold your breath.
Ancient Aleppo, one of the oldest and most beautiful cities in the world, is now a killing ground with ever-increasing levels of violence as rebel commanders try to break out of a government siege which has slowly been tightening its grip. More and more civilians like Omran and his family are caught in the crossfire.
The four-year battle for this strategically crucial city may be reaching its end-game.
If the Islamist rebel militias (a motley bunch which have included Al Qaeda and Islamic State) fail to break the siege, President Assad will eventually secure control of his country’s second largest city, and - with the help of his Russian allies - take a huge step towards winning the war. The Assad government forces now control the west of the city, and have cut off crucial supply lines which provided food and weapons for other rebel fighters from Turkey in the north.
Meanwhile, the east of the city is dominated by a series of rebel groups, many of them militant jihadis who enforce sharia law and make women wear burkas.
They have brought misery and terror to the citizens of Aleppo, who face brutal punishment for perceived contraventions of ISIS’s harsh laws.
Acts of terrifying brutality have been carried out by both sides - and much of the remaining population of Aleppo now faces starvation because there is no way for food to reach them in the city.
An estimated 400,000 civilians have died in the Syrian civil war, though the final figure could behigher.
Rebel forces are desperate to lift the siege of the city and claimed earlier this month to have done so, although government sources denied this. While the UN Security Council has called for humanitarian access to the civilians in Aleppo, the Syrian government has instead said that ‘humanitarian corridors’ will be created to allow civilians to leave the city.
The trouble is that no one trusts the regime to allow them to leave unhindered - on Thursday, Amnesty International claimed that those suspected of supporting the rebels could be thrown into Assad’s jails andtortured.
The civil war began in the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring in the summer of 2011, with street protests in Syria against President Assad’s dictatorial regime.
Rebel forces soon secured significant victories, and by 2013, only one-third of Syria was still in the hands of the regime. At that stage most Western analysts were certain that President Assad was doomed.
However, the Syrian president has seen his fortunes revived, largely thanks to the help of his ally in Moscow, Vladimir Putin -who is implacably opposed to Islamist jihadis, but also wants to establish a navy base on the Syrian coast to project Russian power in the Mediterranean.
Russia sent a large force of men and aircraft which have relentlessly attacked rebel positions - killing many civilians in the process - and helped Assad to make major gains in the battle for Aleppo.
Assad is a member of the Alawite sect of Shia Islam. This means he is supported by the Shia leaders of Iran - which has offered military assistance during the war. But he is bitterly opposed by states such as Saudi Arabia, whose Sunni Islam rulers have a history of enmity with Shia Muslims stretching back many centuries.
Though the extent of Saudi’s support for Isis is opaque at best, there is no doubt it shares the same extreme interpretation of Islam.
While the Assad government projects the war as a battle between its own relative religious tolerance and the forces of militant jihad, many observers see the Syrian conflict as a proxy war between the two greatest regional powers in the Middle East, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Today, the shattered streets of Aleppo bear witness to the savagery of that conflict.
Nobody can say for certain how many of Syria’s 18 million population have been killed and injured in the conflict. However, the scale of the humanitarian horror is not in doubt.
According to reports, at least ten million civilians, more than half the population, have been displaced. Many of these have fled abroad to neighbouring countries (above all Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan) and, increasingly, to Europe.
The bitter irony is that they have been caught between the brutalities of the two warring sides. Many people have fled the bombing from Syrian and Russian jets. Others have run from the incursions by Al Qaeda and Islamic State fighters.
Today, an estimated 300,000 civilians are trapped in eastern Aleppo. Their situation is desperate - and many are undoubtedly being held as human shields by rebel fighters.
Life is hard even in the government-held areas of the city where there is often no water supply or electricity.
Is there an end in sight? That is unclear. If the rebel forces can break the siege, then the battle for Aleppo could yet rage on for years as the civilian population slowly bleeds to death.
But if the regime army, with Russia’s help, can close in and crush their enemy, then President Assad will be a big step closer to victory in the wider civil war.
While America has sought a diplomatic solution, the hatreds in this conflict are surely too visceral for any peace treaty to be agreed. It is a fight to the death.
Ultimate victory for Assad will be seen as a humiliation for the West, which has been sympathetic to some of the rebel groups. It will also be seen as confirmation that Russia, in alliance with Iran, has re-established itself as a great power in the Middle East.
In the meantime it is the innocents who suffer. Little boys like Omran, whose blood-stained face and harrowing ‘thousand-yard stare’ stand as a shocking rebuke to us all.
* The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Independent Media.
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