A fabricated story about CNN and a girl from Syria

An alleged evidence about CNN’s fake reporting on the war in Syria has been circulating on social networks and certain websites. This fake news is being shared over the internet since 2016.

The whole story started from an article which was published on October 22, 2016, on a website called Russian Spring (Русская Весна) which describes itself as an “operation on informing about the events in Russia, New Russia, Ukraine, Syria and the world”. The story has been taken from there and published on Russia Insider on November 1, 2016, (DISCLAIMER: photographs and footage on both links are disturbing). The article published on the Russia Insider begins with the following cynic introduction:

“This girl sure gets herself into a lot of Russian airstrikes. Luckily there are always anti-Assad activists nearby to pull her from the rubble.
This time we offer our readers an opportunity to act as film critics and assess acting talents and make-up artist’s work. Because that’s how one should examine the footage with a girl who presumably suffered from Bashar al-Assad’s army attacks.”

The article shows photographs of a girl carried in the hands of three different men. Also, there is footage which shows the fourth man digging out the girl from the rubbles. The article claims that this girl is the same “actress” engaged to stage various bombing scenes that have never taken place. After it has been published on Russia Insider, the article was then redistributed in other languages and very soon it was determined that claims which article laid out were false. This had been a subject of writings of French Libération in November 2016, and the Croatian Index in the December of the same year:

On social networks, in the last couple of days, conspiracy theorists are sharing a tweet of the same girl saved from the rubbles, carried by three different men. Conspiracy theorists assert that the same girl, a tiny Syrian girl named Aya, was in three disparate reportages since August. They tend to claim that this is proof that “CNN” and other Western media tend to exaggerate levels of suffering in Syria by making them worse than they really are. (…)

Among those who shared the same claim is Canadian Eva Bartlett, self-proclaimed “independent journalist and human rights activist”.
However, it is sufficient enough just to use Google search in order to determine what is this all about. All photos featuring Aya were taken the same day after the girl was rescued and transferred to a van.
(…)
British Channel 4 also issued a statement regarding this case. It explained that the source of photos were the White Helmets. Channel 4 also attempted to get in touch with the activist Bartlett, but she did not respond. Besides these three photographs, there have been other photos circulating on social networks, which according to conspiracy theorists also feature Aya. However, it is obvious that the only similarity between the girls on these photos and Aya is their clothing. 

Photos from articles published by Russia Insider and Russian Spring soon emerged in the “collage” that started circulating on social networks with the following headline: “When CNN uses the same girls in 3 different refugee crisis photos, showing how the girls are saved by three different men”. 

After the photo started getting shared on Facebook and Twitter, it got caught by the “radar” of the fact-checking website Snopes, who wrote about it on December 12, 2016. Snopes classified this photo as “crisis actor conspiracy theory” (as one of “genres” of conspiracy theories where different crises situations, spanning from wars to natural disasters are presented in a way to claim that they did not happen at all, but rather staged by people who were hired to act as victims of disasters or attacks).

The same photo, followed with the same claims, started to circulate on websites in our region from April 12, 2018, prior to the joint attack of USA, Great Britain and France on Assad’s positions in Syria. The attack happened soon after the news emerged about the usage of chemical weapons in an attack in Eastern Ghouta, in near proximity of Damascus, where 70 civilian victims were found dead. In this context, the photo is used to frame overall falsification of facts about the attack for which it is speculated that it did not happen at all. 

According to research done by Raskrinkavanje, the photo first appeared on a private Facebook profile with the name Doka Doka, and from there it was shared by Facebook page Branko Dragaš in the post which was up to this moment shared by almost 400 people: 

The photo was shared on this page on April 12, 2018, at 09:09 am, and in the time span of a couple of hours, it emerged on the website Intervju, featuring only one sentence of text. Websites Srbija Danas and Gerila published the photo afterwards, with the somewhat more developed story. These are headlines of all three articles:

CNN SCANDAL! The same girl has been rescued three times! (PHOTO)
Many are condemning CNN that this media machinery is behind this scandal.

The same girl got rescued by DIFFERENT PEOPLE: HOAX of the Western media against Assad and Russia
The Western media machinery pretty actively and “qualitatively” cooperate with Syrian terrorists, using the same model of fake news derived from the times of satanisation of Serbs, but only this time Assad, Syria and Russia are in the focus.
Fake news, which is waging the war against Russia for two years now, is using photos of one girl as a victim of an alleged attack of the Syrian regime on insurgents (terrorists) and “civilians”. It is always dangerous to play with child’s’ suffering and rush with untactful statements, and it is always a good idea to have a reservation that this girl might have been used by terrorist and that she is currently in a dangerous situation.
The attempt of manipulation by foreign media is apparent.
Photos were professionally done during the conflict in Aleppo, therefore they are ideal for media manipulation by which CNN, BBC, NBC and their other similar “friends” around the world.

(PHOTO) This is how CNN falsified the footage of chemical poison attack in Syria
CNN, as one of the leading American media outlets, took part in the fabrication of fake news, so we have seen horrific photos showing the repercussions of the chemical weapons attacks. Of course, photos are entirely fake since we can see the same girl who has already been rescued from the aggressor Assad for three times. 

None of these sensationalistic claims is correct. 

All three photos were taken at the same place and at the same time, after shelling that took place in Aleppo on August 27, 2019. The very fact that the girl was being captured in hands of three different men is not a result of her “act of playing the victim in three distinct events”, but a result of a rescue action where one man from the first photo pulled her out of the rubbles, from whom she was subsequently taken by the second and third man. This is a representation of standardised rescue procedure aiming to make the transfer of victims from the site of the attack to the place where medical assistance is available faster and as efficient as possible. The very moment when a person from the first photo hands the girl to the person from the third photo has been documented and published in the article of French Libération. The photo undoubtedly shows that both of these men were present at the same place and time when the girl got rescued. This implies that the whole story about three distinct events is an utter fabrication.

Apart from this photo, there is also one which shows second and third men before the same demolished building. The photo has been published on the Inquisitr which dealt with this fake news as well. 

The allegation that CNN used these photos for the sake of an illustration of “three distinct crises situations” is fake as well. CNN published two out of three photos that were used for montage (and every time in the relation to a single event), while the third photo had never emerged on the website of this media. Here is how we know it.

The photo search service Tin Eye, unlike Google Photo Search, gives an opportunity to limit the search parameters and list results only from chosen websites. Snopers used this tool to determine when and where the three photos in the collage were published. As their research had been done in the December of 2016, Raskrinkavanje repeated the procedure while limiting the results only to cnn.com domain, in order to determine in what way CNN used these photos and whether those were used for the sake of illustration of three distinct events – which is what the conspiracy theory aims to establish. 

Search for the first photo indicated that it appeared on the CNN’s website only once in the reportage about the event itself, precisely in the article: “Syria barrel bomb attack: At least 16 killed at a wake in Aleppo”, published a day after the shelling. The photo is used as a “cover image” for video coverage about the attack in Aleppo and it is visible only a couple of moments upon opening the article, right before the video goes to auto-play. Text of the article states that at least 16 people lost their lives in the attack that took place on August 27, 2016, and that two improvised “barrel bombs” were also dropped from the helicopter directly on the people who gathered on collective pray for children murdered in a previous attack of Assad’s Army. 

Search results for the second photo indicate that it has been published four times on CNN’s website but each time with the description related to the same event. The first appearance of the photo is in the article dealing with the public statement of at-the-time Presidential candidate Gary Johnson who did not know the answer on journalist’s question on how would he respond on the attack if he had been the US President. Johnson responded with a counter-question: “What is Aleppo?”, about which CNN wrote on the same day (September 8, 2016) in the article “What is Aleppo? THIS is Aleppo”. Beneath the photo was an inscription: “A Syrian man carries a wounded child in eastern Aleppo on August 27, 2016.”

After the first appearance, the photo was also found in the following articles as well:

 

• “Will ‘What is Aleppo?’ transform presidential race?”

 

The photo was followed with an inscription: “Related Article: ‘What is Aleppo? THIS is Aleppo’” (the link redirects to a previous article from September 8, 2016.)

 

• “Kerry announces US-Russia deal on Syrian ceasefire”, September 10, 2016. 

 

The photo was followed with an inscription: “A Syrian man carries a wounded child in eastern Aleppo in August.”

 

• “Syrian ceasefire appears to hold, but aid deliveries are on standby”

 

The photo was followed with an inscription: “A Syrian man carries a wounded child in eastern Aleppo last month.”

The results of a search for the third photo show that it has never been published on CNN’s website. Therefore, CNN had never used these photos neither for the illustration of the distinct events nor in coverages of chemical attacks, as one of the articles asserts.

Since all three websites used the same photo taken from social networks and utilized it to make three independent articles, each of them is getting fake news and conspiracy theory ranks. 

(Raskrinkavanje.ba)