New Image Emerges of Syrian Boy Clicked in Iconic Aleppo Photo

The image of the Syrian boy covered in dust and blood had become a symbol of the horrors of the Syrian civil war.

The image of a young Syrian boy covered in dust and blood had become a symbol of the horrors of the Syrian civil war.

Five-year-old Omran Daqneesh was pulled out of the rubble and photographed sitting in an ambulance, looking resigned in the immediate aftermath of an attack, where he reportedly lost his older brother, 10-year-old Ali. Many compared Daqneesh's photograph to that of Aylan Kurdi, a three-year-old Syrian boy whose corpse was found washed up in the shore in Turkey.

Recently, the boy appeared alongside his father in a footage posted by a Syrian reported, Kinana Allouche.

Omran's father said the family was still living in Aleppo and did not wish to leave Syria. He also said that Omran is in good health, but his name has been changed to protect him from getting kidnapped.

In the video, he also accused the Syrian rebels of intimidating his family.

President Bashar al Assad had claimed that the photograph was "forced". In an interview, he had also accused the White Helmets, which is a volunteer civil defence group, of faking the incident and circulating it.

It was not clear whether the family had been coerced into taking part in the short video posted on Facebook – the first time the boy had been seen publicly since he was wounded.

However, Valerie Szybala from the Syria Institute, an independent research organisation focused on Syria, said the family was unlikely to have been speaking freely.

“They are under government control now and this is a government that we know arrests and tortures anyone that speaks out against it... to me the situation seems to suggest this is probably coerced,” Szybala told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Rebel resistance in Aleppo ended last December after years of fighting and months of bitter siege and bombardment that culminated in a bloody retreat, as insurgents agreed to withdraw in a ceasefire.

Syria's civil war, which erupted in 2011, has killed an estimated 4,65,000 people.

(With inputs from Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's right, trafficking, property rights and climate change.)