revised and updated 19/08/16

At some point over the last few days a little boy and his family allegedly sustained minor cuts and bruises when their apartment building was allegedly bombed by pro-Assad forces. The Western media, which has consistently ignored the thousands of those severely injured and killed in Aleppo by “rebel” bombardment, has now found its conscience and gone crazy.

You must have seen this video, because it’s everywhere right now.

المشاهد الأولية للقصف الجوي على حي القاطرجي شرقي #حلب مساء اليوم.#AleppoAMC pic.twitter.com/NDcaWNdLvK — مركز حلب الإعلامي (@AleppoAMC) August 17, 2016

You’ll find it all over the Guardian, NBC, Independent and most other major corporate news outlets, most using the same AP source. The boy is allegedly five-year-old Omran Daqneesh. According to the AP report neither he nor the rest of his family sustained anything but superficial cuts and bruises.

Yet, in a conflict that has already claimed the lives of more than 100,000 people nationwide, the media wants us to believe this story is somehow unique and that the “horror generated” by a video of some people looking quite well but dusty and bloodstained will shock us more than the piles of corpses , “echo the anguished global response” to images of drowned Aylan Kurdi and galvanise us all into “doing something” – ie supporting a NATO intervention to save the terrorists in eastern Aleppo.

If the sight of all the major outlets who cheer on western-backed slaughter every day, running wall-to-wall op-eds and features about the tragedy of a little boy with a cut on his face, simply because it serves the empire’s agenda, doesn’t convince you of the moral and intellectual blank they’ve become then keep reading. It gets better.

AP and other outlets tell us the vid was “filmed and circulated” by a group called the “Aleppo Media Centre.” Who/what are they? Well,the Graun links to their Twitter, which is in Arabic,and which boasts over 20,000 alleged followers,including several members of the western media, and a plethora of similar short and often murky vids beside this one. We can also quite easily find their Facebook page, where we also find this:



That’s “al Nusra” as in the US-designated terrorist group. It looks as if the AMC quite approves of them doesn’t it. Even calls them “rebels” not terrorists”, and cheers on the fact they have killed Syrian service men.

We’re also a bit curious about why the AP report claim the video was made Wednesday night, when it was uploaded to Twitter at 13:52 BST Wednesday afternoon, which would equate with 15:52 in Aleppo. Is this a time-zone anomaly? But then there’s the added confusion of the Tweet itself, which seems to say pretty clearly that the vid was made on Sunday evening.



Sunday? Wednesday afternoon? Wednesday night? It would be good to clear that up. Maybe we can ask the photo-journalist and alleged eye witness, “Mahmoud Raslan”, quoted extensively by AP and almost every media outlet.

It’s this Raslan who sets the scene, provides corroboration, gives the background human interest story of handing survivors “from one balcony to another”, and of passing “three lifeless bodies” before finding our poster boy alive. So he must know for sure when it happened. But so far he seems hard to track down.

Some outlets such as the BBC describe him as a “photo journalist for Al Jazeera Mubasher”. He’s also described by the Indy and others as the “photographer behind [the] iconic image” of the little boy in the orange seat. This is slightly odd because the most widely distributed “iconic image” is just a still from the video, as the Guardian itself admits at the top of the article linked to above, and as this screen grab shows:



The Guardian even includes an interview with the alleged author of the video in its rolling coverage. The man’s name is claimed to be Mustafa al-Sarout, member of the terrorist-loving AMC.

Presumably Mahmoud Raslan was one of the other photographers there, inaccurately credited with the still from the vid. But who is he? If you search for “Mahmoud Raslan Al Jazeera Mubasher” you get nothing but hits on today’s AP story. No one has yet found any social media page or website for him, and if he was a photo-journalist prior to this event there doesn’t seem to be any record of his work or credits immediately available.

It would be good to track him down if possible wouldn’t it. Because without his confirmation the only source for this entire bizarre event currently being used as a catalyst for war is an unverified vid from an anti-government, pro-terrorist “media center”.

UPDATE 19/08/16: We now seem to have an ID for Raslan. We’re not clear if he works for Al_Jazeera, but he apparently is a friend of child-murderers.