A little boy has written a heart-breaking letter to Barack Obama after being moved by the plight of the young Syrian child photographed in an ambulance earlier this month.
The image of five-year-old Omran Daqneesh looking bewildered in the aftermath of an airstrike on his home in Aleppo moved people around the world.
But six-year-old Alex, from Scarsdale in New York, was determined to try to help and wrote to the US president to ask if Omran could come to stay with him.
His letter read...
Dear President Obama,
Remember the boy who was picked up by the ambulance in Syria? Can you please go get him and bring him to [my home]? Park in the driveway or on the street and we will be waiting for you guys with flags, flowers, and balloons.
We will give him a family and he will be our brother. Catherine, my little sister, will be collecting butterflies and fireflies for him. In my school, I have a friend from Syria, Omar, and I will introduce him to Omar. We can all play together. We can invite him to birthday parties and he will teach us another language. We can teach him English too, just like my friend Aoto from Japan.
Please tell him that his brother will be Alex who is a very kind boy, just like him. Since he won’t bring toys and doesn’t have toys Catherine will share her big blue stripy white bunny. And I will share my bike and I will teach him how to ride it. I will teach him additions and subtractions in math. And he [can] smell Catherine’s lip gloss penguin which is green. She doesn’t let anyone touch it.
Thank you very much! I can’t wait for you to come!
Alex
6 years old
Obama read the message out in an address to the United Nationss summit on refugees.
He said: “Those are the words of a six-year-old boy,’ Obama said after reading out the letter. ‘A young child who has not learned to be cynical or suspicious or fearful of other people because of where they come from, how they look, or how they pray.
“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.”
The move comes just days after Donald Trump Jnr posted a picture comparing Skittles to refugees, suggesting that the US should not accept anybody fleeing the war-stricken state for fear they were a terrorist.