A six-year-old American boy has written a letter to US president Barack Obama to offer a home to Omran Daqneesh, the young boy pulled from rubble in Aleppo last month whose shock and bewilderment came to symbolise the suffering of Syrian civilians.
Alex, from New York, saw the video of Omran sitting bloodied and full of dust in the back of an ambulance in pictures that went viral on social media. He wrote to Mr Obama to ask if Omran could be brought to live in his home.
Mr Obama, who read parts of the letter to world leaders at the UN special summit on refugees in New York this week, said the letter was from a child "who hasn't learned to be cynical, or suspicious, or fearful". Afterwards the White House recorded Alex reading the letter himself.
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/irishtimes/VAS7J7GFDAWH3TTDRUCYWRGXAQ.jpg)
“Dear President Obama, remember the boy who was picked up by the ambulance in Syria?” Alex wrote in the letter published by the White House.
“Can you please go get him and bring him to our home ... we’ll be waiting for you guys with flags flowers and balloons. We will give him a family and he will be our brother.”
In a Facebook post that has been shared more than 70,000 times, Mr Obama heaped praise on the New York boy. "We should all be more like Alex. Imagine what the world would look like if we were. Imagine the suffering we could ease and the lives we could save."
Omran’s parents and three siblings were also rescued in the incident. His 10-year-old brother, Ali, died from injuries suffered that day.