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| - Fact Check: This heartbreaking video of orphaned children is not from ongoing Ukraine-Russia conflict
We found the video of orphaned children has nothing to do with Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine. The children in the video were from Iraq and Syria.
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India Today Fact Check
The children seen in the video are refugees from Iraq and Syria. This video has nothing to do with the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.
A heartbreaking video of two children, a girl and a boy, was shared widely on social media with hashtags related to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine crisis.
As per the subtitle in the video, both children, when asked about their family, said they lost their fathers in the war. The girl broke into tears when asked if she was getting enough food. The boy was also in tears when asked why he did not have a jacket. He said his family could not afford one anymore.
The archived versions of similar posts can be seen here, here, and here.
The India Today Anti Fake News War Room (AFWA) found the video has nothing to do with Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. The children in the video were from Iraq and Syria.
AFWA probe
We ran a reverse search of the keyframes of the video and found the video of the girl uploaded by several YouTube channels in 2017.
We also found the same clip in a four-minute-long documentary titled “Malak: The Girl Who Stumbled Out of a War Zone and Stole Our Hearts,” uploaded to the YouTube channel of an aid organisation called Preemptive Love.
According to the channel, the girl in this video, Malak, escaped from Fallujah in Iraq with her extended family during the war with ISIS. Her parents were killed in the war. The clip of Malak was shot in 2016, on the day she escaped the war zone to a camp in a desert outside Fallujah.
The documentary uploaded by Preemptive Love also showed Malak’s life several months after that day as she settled into a new home with her grandparents.
The video was also uploaded on the website of the Global Development Commons, UNICEF’s digital ideas platform to support child-focussed sustainable development goals.
Malak’s story is also available on blogs published by Preemptive Love.
The video of the boy shared along with the post is also several years old. A screengrab from the video was carried in a Daily Sabah report in February 2020. As per the report, the boy was a Syrian refugee displaced from Idlib.
A longer version of the video, where aid workers could be seen providing him with a jacket, was also tweeted by the Daily Sabah.
- Where’s your jacket?
- My father died and we can’t afford one
Tears of young boy show tragedy of Syrian refugees displaced from Idlib due to Assad regime, Russian attackshttps://t.co/qx6bPgeIWG pic.twitter.com/EobZNJNjca — DAILY SABAH (@DailySabah) February 16, 2020
The verified Twitter handle of a Turkish news site A Haber also tweeted the longer version of the video. Reportedly, Turkish Interior Minister S¼leyman Soylu asked authorities to locate the boy and provide aid after he saw the video.
It is thus evident that both the girl and the boy seen in the video have nothing to do with the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.
(With inputs from Yash Mittal in New Delhi)
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