Bushr Al Tawashi, missing 2-year-old Syrian boy thought dead, reunited with parents (VIDEO)
Syrian children ride in the back of a truck as they return to their village of Kfar Sijna on July 10, 2012, the day after it came under fire by Syrian government forces. The Red Cross has officially classified the Syrian conflict as a civil war, in order to hold combatants to international humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions.
When their home in Syria was bombed this summer, Machhour Al Tawashi and Arin Al Dakkar thought they had lost their two-year-old son, Bushr, for good.
But months later, in a rare moment of good news to come out of Syria, Bushr Al Tawashi has reunited with his parents and siblings Thursday in Cyprus, where they sought asylum, the Daily Mail reported.
According to the Associated Press, Bushr was accidentally left behind when the family first fled fighting in Damascus, when his parents thought an extended family member had picked him up. By the time they realized their youngest child wasn't with them, fighting was too heavy for them to be able to return to their house, and the parents assumed Bushr hadn't survived the heavy assaults.
But, it turns out, he had.
"No one knows exactly how long little Bushr Al Tawashi wandered on his own in the rubble of his family home in the Al Kaboun suburb before another fleeing family found him and handed him over to rebel fighters," the Associated Press wrote, citing information from the family's lawyer, Stella Constantinou.
The boy was then placed in a refugee camp where "incredibly, even amid all the chaos and confusion, he was recognized by friends of his parents," the Cyprus Mail said.
The interior and foreign ministries in Cyprus helped to arrange for the boy to join his parents and two brothers, ages 4 and 6, the Cyrus Mail said.
“I didn’t believe they would bring [my] baby here. But they did,” father Machhour Al Tawashi told reporters on Thursday.
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