US boy asks Obama if he can adopt refugee

The White House have released a video of this six-year-old boy, Alex, from New York, who wrote Barack Obama a very moving letter, asking him to bring a young Syrian refugee to America so that they could live with his family.


Alex, like many, was moved by the heartbreaking images of Omran Daqneesh, a five-year-old boy in Aleppo, Syria, who sat in shock in an ambulance following an airstrike covered in dust as he tried to wipe blood from his hands.

‘Dear President Obama, remember the boy who was picked up by the ambulance in Syria?’ Alex wrote in a letter published by the White House. ‘Can you please go get him and bring him to our home ... we’ll be waiting for you guys with flags flowers and balloons. We will give him a family and he will be our brother.’

He said he would teach him how to speak English, to ride a bike and added that his sister Catherine would share her toys with him.

So moved by the letter, Mr Obama quoted Alex’s words at a United Nations summit on the refugee crisis this week, where he also announced that the US would accept 110,000 refugees in 2017.

‘We should all be more like Alex,’ the President said. ‘Imagine what the world would look like if we were. Imagine the suffering we could ease and the lives we could save.’

In the emotional video, Alex explains how he and his sister will share their toys with young Omran and play with him at school.