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We are living in such a sad world.... The horrors of the civil war in Syria are captured in this poignant photo of a frightened 4-year-old girl raising her hands in surrender — thinking that the long-lens camera pointed at her is a gun. Turkish photographer Osman Sagirli snapped the picture of little Adi Hudea in December at the Atmen refugee camp on Syria’s border with Turkey. Gaza-based photojournalist Nadia Abu Shaban last week tweeted the heart-rending picture of Adi — her eyes conveying a mixture of sadness and fear as she pursed her lips tightly. “Thought he has a weapon not a camera so she gave up!” Abu Shaban wrote. The posting has been retweeted 18,000 times, eliciting an emotional outpouring across the globe. “I’m actually weeping seeing this. We’ve made this planet a horrible place, haven’t we?” tweeted user @cosmetopia. Adi has been living with her traumatized mom and three siblings at the camp since 2012, when her dad died in the Hama province massacre that claimed about 200 lives. At first, some Twitter users believed the lost-innocence photo may have been staged. But a user on the Imgur photo-sharing site traced it back to the Turkiye newspaper, where it was published in January, the BBCreported. The photographer insisted it was authentic. “I was using a telephoto lens, and she thought it was a weapon,” Sagirli told the BBC. He explained that normally, a child who is unaccustomed to having a photo taken will either “run away, hide their faces or smile when they see a camera.” It wasn’t until after he examined the picture, said Sagirli, that he realized his subject was terrified because she had seen so many weapons in her young life that the cameras became a weapon in her mind. The UN has called Syria’s five-year civil war the “world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe,” with an estimated 220,000 killed and more than 12 million in need of aid. About 5.6 million are children.