It was a shockingly simple image that captured the world’s attention this week and propelled the desperation of the Syrian refugee crisis into our collective psyche.
A small boy lay face down in the sand, as though he was sleeping. But he was not sleeping. He was drowned.
In a second photo, a police officer carried the child’s body, his feet dangling, up the beach. What parent who has carried their own sleeping child did not feel a stab of recognition and imagine for a few seconds their own worst nightmares?
That image brought the Syrian crisis home in a personal, emotional way that repeated United Nations reports could not.
For a moment, the world was a witness, in the way it was decades earlier when the photo of a naked girl fleeing a napalm attack in Vietnam was seared into our consciousness.
Of course, the humanitarian crisis in Syria is not new. For years, a desperate population has been attempting to flee the country’s civil war.
Reports of atrocities in that country on the part of all combatants have been horrific. Children have been imprisoned, tortured, killed and gassed.
That families would take a desperate gamble in trying to flee is a sad and unsurprising result.
So far, the response of the West to those people caught in the crossfire has been entirely inadequate.
There is no simple answer for what to do about the wider, complex war that spawned this horror.
But we hope a more immediate response will be for nations like ours to open their arms a little wider.
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