Haunting images of children affected by war and terror

The name of Pam Thi Kim Phuc would hardly strike a chord now.

However, there is a striking similarity between her and the terror-struck frozen face of five-year-old Omran Daqneesh, which broke the world's heart and made global headlines this week. Kim is the little naked girl screaming and running on the road after a napalm bomb attack on her village in Vietnam in 1972.

The black and white picture shot by AP photographer Nick Ut adorned almost every encyclopaedia of the '70s and later, of this nine-year-old running with her cousins - with her body burning, skin peeling off her back. She managed to survive, her cousins didn't.

The picture has been brutally etched in our minds forever. Over forty summers down the line, sadly, nothing has changed in terms of the agony and pain that child victims of war must experience.

Omran is the little kid wrapped in dust and injuries - with a frozen look, he sits stunned in a chair after being rescued from the rubble, moments after his house was bombed in Syria.

Over the past decade, there have been photos of kids have rocked  the conscience of the world at alarmingly consistent intervals. They shook our senses in the wake of the fallouts that civil wars or terrorist attacks have brought upon generations.  

Celebrated photographer Steve McCurry shot Sharbat Gula, better known as the Afghan girl, whose haunting face adorned the cover of National Geographic magazine in June 1985, exactly 13 years after the Vietnam napalm bombing. This portrait of a refugee girl has an expression that has been written about in millions of words and tagged as the world's most famous photo that reflected the pains and ordeals of a refugee child based in Pakistan, trying to escape the Soviet intrusion in Afghanistan.

Back home in India - in the same year the Afghan girl gave the world a shattering glimpse into the realities of war - on a cold winter night in December 1984, though there was no war, a gas leak in Bhopal snuffed out thousands in one night. A criminal act of negligence led to these deaths and, yet again, the grim black and white picture of a dead infant with bloated, open eyes and a face buried in rubble, became a global symbol of this ghastly industrial tragedy.

The world, and especially India, realised how modern plants can bring catastrophic deaths to a whole population and from thereon cripple a few generations for life. Bhopal is still paying the price three decades later.

Almost 12 years later, again in India, on one morning of November 2008 there was a photo of a two-year-old in his nanny's arms. Moise Holtzberg, better known as "Baby Moshe" was rescued by his nanny while his parents had the longest, brutal and most painful of deaths when a handful of terrorists at Chabad House in the Mumbai terror attacks of 26/11 shot them dead.

The war on terror - as global leaders and the media brand it - has its share of grim pictures too.

Unlike Baby Moshe and Omran, three-year-old Alan Kurdi was not lucky enough to live. The image of the lifeless, little body of Alan washed up ashore on a beach in Bodrum, Turkey changed the way the world thought of the distressed plight of refugees.

Alan drowned because the overcrowded plastic boat his parents boarded to escape carried 16 people, when it could only hold only eight, and capsized in the open seas. Unable to rescue all his kids in one go, his father lost almost all of his family, and Alan's body lay swept by the waves.

The crushing end for refugees became a burning one for leaders of the western world.

The stoic pictures continue to remind us of how we are murdering generations through war and terror. Sadly, the stories remain the same.

Even the pictures remain the same over the decades. The only difference has been the change from black and white to colour pictures; pictures shifting out of encyclopaedias and making their way to handheld mobile phones, the social media and live television channels.