Syrian artist paints portrait of George Floyd on Idlib wall

On the last standing wall of a building damaged by air strikes in Idlib, a Syrian artist painted a striking mural of George Floyd, who was killed in police custody in the US on May 25.

The artist, Aziz Asmar, said on Monday he was driven to paint the mural to send a message of solidarity to all humanitarian causes in the world.

Asmar painted George Floyd's face next to the sentence "I can't breathe", which he repeated multiple times before dying.

Asmar, who worked on the painting with his colleague Anis Hamdoun, said the images of Floyd reminded him of images he had seen of Syrian children killed by a suspected chemical attack in Damascus and the city of Khan Sheykhoun in 2017.

Protests spread across the US this past week over the death of a black man, George Floyd, in police custody in Minneapolis last Monday.

Video footage showed a white police officer kneeling on the neck of Floyd, 46, for nearly nine minutes before he died. Derek Chauvin, the since-fired police officer involved in the incident, has been charged with third-degree murder.

Dozens of cities across the United States remain under curfews at a level not seen since the violence following the 1968 assassination of civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr.