By Liz Sly for The Washington Post

He looks as though he is asleep — perhaps taking a nap before running off to play with his friends. But he’s not asleep. He’s dead. He died because of a war the world can’t or won’t solve and immigration policies that say: We don’t care.

The photograph of the drowned little Syrian boy who washed up on a Turkish beach (the image is not included in this post but is available here) has gone viral on social media, turning him into a symbol of the suffering of Syrians and their desperate scramble to escape.

He had a name, Aylan Kurdi; he was 3; and he came from the Syrian-Kurdish town of Kobane.

On Wednesday, I shared that picture on Twitter without thinking very hard about it. I saw it on a Turkish news site and was profoundly overcome. Instantly I received a huge response, mostly from people who said they, too, were deeply moved by the image.