A father playing with his child, more smiling than ever even if the former was mutilated in the Syrian conflict. And the second was born without legs or arms.
Munzir al-Nazzal and little Mustafa have been immortalized by the Turkish photographer Mehmet Aslan in a shot that won the "photo of the year" award at the Siena International Photo Awards 2021 and has already been around the world, also ending up in the Washington Post : "We wanted to bring attention to this" drama, Aslan said.
The family protagonist of the image is a bit of a symbol of the conflict that has dragged on in Syria since 2011, when the uprising in Daraa against the Bashar al Assad regime broke out: in 2018 Munzir with his wife Zeinab and their son Mustafa fled from Syria and now, like hundreds of thousands of other refugees, are in Turkey's southern border regions.
Mustafa is suffering from a malformation "as a result of his mother taking drugs, also affected by gas" during the furious fighting in the Idlib region. The child is only 5 years old, he would need continuous care and special electronic prostheses: "I swear, I went to every hospital, every village, but I got nothing", says Munzir's father.
"That photo has reached the world, we have been trying to make ourselves heard for years to help my son with the treatments, we would do everything to give him a better life", explains mother Zeinab.
"It is painful to once again have to comment on a photo on a tragedy that is not over, the war in Syria - underlines Andrea Iacomini, spokesman for Unicef Italy -. to the umpteenth test of intermittent indignation ”.
"The drama in the drama are children with severe disabilities, who represent the weakest part in conflicts. But in that image - observes Iacomini - there is also a hymn to life, a smile that comes out despite the pain".
(Unioneonline / D)
