FROM SHOCKING SYMBOL TO POLITICAL PAWN
HOW OMRAN, THE DAZED ALEPPO BOY WHO REAPPEARED THIS WEEK, BECAME A VEHICLE OF SYRIAN PROPAGANDA
For a few fleeting moments, scores of people worldwide knew the face and name of the young Syrian boy in the ambulance.
They saw the gut-wrenching scene in Aleppo last August captured in a photograph and video that quickly circulated on the Internet. In it, a rescue worker carried the boy, Omran Daqneesh, out of the rubble where his house once stood, plopping him down on an orange seat in the back of an ambulance.
With a layer of dust covering his face, arms and legs, Omran just sat there, stunned, his eyes burning into a camera.
He wiped the blood from his cheek, looked at his hand, but remained completely silent.
Omran’s look of muted shock became an international symbol of the horrors of Syria’s war, and triggered a rare level of emotion in journalists and viewers. Television news anchors fought back tears as they broadcast the video.
“We shed tears but there are no tears here,” CNN’s Kate Bolduan said in a wavering voice. “He doesn’t cry once.”
Activists and aid workers hoped the story would boost international support to help bring an end to the suffering and fighting in Syria. But as quickly as people latched on to Omran, they forgot about him. Attention moved to other viral videos, other devastating photographs.
Meanwhile, Omran’s family was stuck in a war with no end in sight, in a city recaptured by the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Soon, Omran, the symbol, became Omran the political pawn. Both sides seized on his story for their own political gain, blaming his suffering on their opponents.
And now, Omran has reappeared in interviews with broadcasters aligned with the Syrian government.
In them, Omran’s father, Mohamad Kheir Daqneesh, repeatedly accused rebel parties of using his son’s images as propaganda against the government. He gave reporters a narrative seemingly promoting Assad’s agenda, conflicting with initial accounts, and spurring questions about what really took place.
It is not clear if the father spoke freely when he made these statements. Since the family is now living under government control, there is a strong likelihood these interviews may have been “coerced,” Valerie Szybala, of the independent research group Syria Institute, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“This is a government that we know arrests and tortures anyone that speaks out against it,” Szybala added.
The interviews underscore the troubles that can emerge when a person or a family becomes an international symbol.
Initial reports suggested the airstrike that hit Omran’s house was launched by forces allied to Assad’s regime. The government recaptured control of Aleppo at the end of last year after years of fighting, a victory that “dealt the heaviest blow yet to Syria’s rebels and marked the start of an endgame for the country’s bitter war,” Washington Post reporter Louisa Loveluck reported.
Omran’s 10-year-old brother, Ali, died from wounds sustained in the same airstrike — the death marked the “devastating postscript” to Omran’s story of survival, Loveluck wrote.
Russian officials denied accusations that the airstrike on Omran’s neighbourhood was carried out by Russian aircraft. Moreover, they denied that there was an airstrike at all, pointing to damages that indicated the damage must have come from a shell or a gas cylinder.
And in October, Syria’s president disputed the details previously provided by rescue workers and medical personnel of what happened that night. In an interview with Swiss media, Assad lambasted the boy’s rescuers — volunteers known as the “White Helmets” — and made accusations that the images of the boy were altered.
“This is a forged picture and not a real one,” Assad said. “We have real pictures of children being harmed, but this one specifically is a forged one.”
In his appearances broadcast this week on Syrian, Russian, Iranian and Lebanese news networks, Omran’s smiling face was hardly recognizable. He looked like any other healthy young boy.
“I am Omran Daqneesh,” he told a Russian interviewer. “I am four years old.”
It was initially reported that Omran was five. His age was just one of the new pieces of information that disputed initial accounts of his story.
Mohamad Kheir Daqneesh, the father, said in the interviews that he did not hear an airplane before his house was struck. He claimed media outlets in Turkey, Europe and the U.S. offered to pay the family for interviews and asked him to badmouth the Syrian government, but he refused.
Members of the media allegedly “offered housing in Turkey and the United States and Britain in exchange to leave Aleppo, but I refused. I am the son of this city,” the father told Lebanon’s Al Mayadeen News.
The father told Kinana Allouche, a reporter for a progovernment Syrian broadcaster, that he had changed his son’s name and cut his hair to protect his identity.
Fares Shehabi, a member of the Syrian parliament for Aleppo, followed suit, tweeting: “Remember Omran?! His family tells the true story of an Aleppo boy abused by Western media presstitutes for political propaganda!”
Daqneesh accused “insurgents” of filming his children while the father was still in the house, helping other members of the family out of the rubble.
“They took him to the hospital just to film him,” Daqneesh alleged. “I was busy saving my family, while they seized the opportunity and filmed my family.”
It is unclear who initiated these interviews with the family, who declined to speak to the media when the story first broke. But what is clear is that the family remained in their home in Aleppo — under the control of the Assad regime — as the war continued to drag on across their country.
“This is the country we have lived in all our lives, and the children have the right to come back here,” Daqneesh said in an interview. “This is everything we know.”