Did Panorama fake an air attack on schoolchildren in Syria?
The BBC Panorama documentary ‘Saving Syria’s Children’ was first shown on 30th September 2013. Travelling with doctors inside Syria, BBC journalists witnessed the aftermath of an August 2013 Assad regime incendiary attack on a school in Aleppo province.
Now Emily Thornberry, Shadow Foreign Secretary, has raised a complaint about the programme to the BBC on behalf of a constituent, one Robert Stuart.
Ever since it was first broadcast the BBC’s report has been under attack by supporters of the Assad regime, none more tenacious than the same Robert Stuart, who has been obsessing about this one programme for four years. His blog was hyped by Russia’s RT channel in 2015 as a ‘massive public investigation which made some extremely disturbing findings.’
At a time of widespread cynicism about the mainstream media, even the most preposterous conspiracy theory (as this is) can be amplified by dubious but effective sources—especially on social media—into something that becomes accepted as truth, simply because of its frequent repetition.
Syrian humanitarians, especially when attempting to expose the crimes of Assad, have been among the main targets of this vicious war on the facts. Robert Stuart’s attack is not just on the BBC—it is also yet another heartless smear on humanitarians, this time on doctors doing an impossibly dangerous job in a conflict zone.
The making of the programme
The programme followed two British-based doctors from the relief charity Hand in Hand for Syria on a 2013 trip to a series of field hospitals, showing the effects of the war on children.
During filming at one field hospital, casualties arrived from a nearby school playground, hit by an incendiary bomb from Assad’s air force, inflicting napalm-like injuries from which about ten children died. The film showed the bombing’s horrific effects, in the hospital and afterwards in visits to the playground and the hospital in Turkey where children were brought for specialist treatment.
The field hospital scenes showed a chaotic and harrowing situation, with ill-equipped doctors trying to give aid to badly burned victims, and arrange for their transfer to specialist burns units. The two visiting doctors provided a running narrative on the scenes being filmed in the treatment room, while treating patients.
Robert Stuart’s accusations
In a lengthy correspondence with the BBC, Robert Stuart accused the reporters and doctors of fabricating the injuries, referring to the ability of seriously injured patients to walk, the calm demeanour of others, and their apparent ability to speak and breathe. One child patient, he suggested, was wearing prosthetic hands, some showed fresh skin under their apparent burns, and some eyebrows remained un-singed.
Robert Stuart also claimed there was also some duplication of ‘actors’ shown in different places in and out of the hospital. One scene he described as obviously staged, claiming patients started moaning on cue. One witness was, according to Mr Stuart, clearly reading from a script when he addressed the United Nations in faltering English.
Such a lack of empathy in parading images of suffering while telling an audience they are all ‘faked’ seems extraordinary. But similar tactics have been used by other Assadist propagandists, for example by Mother Agnes Mariam when trying to undermine video evidence of the August 2013 chemical massacre in Ghouta, and by Vanessa Beeley in attacking news reports of the bombing of a children’s hospital in Aleppo in 2016.
This method illustrates the desperate lengths to which Assadist propagandists will go to undermine the truth about war crimes. Sadly, it has had an effect in some quarters—if not to convince then to confuse and weaken support for effective action to protect civilians.
Refuting Stuart’s claims
When the BBC understood that Mr Stuart was charging the production team not with being duped but with active collaboration in deception, it employed an independent investigator and, as consultant, a plastic surgeon from ‘a leading London hospital’ who had trained under a surgeon treating napalm burns in Vietnam.
The investigator, a reporter experienced in reporting conflicts though not for the BBC, was satisfied having seen the rushes that they were ‘consistent with filming an unfolding event rather than directing events.’
The rushes showed that the witness addressing the United Nations did so in response to a question: ‘What do you want to say to the world?’ The witness was clearly distressed, and was not reading from a script.
There were several hours of filming in the hospital, so inevitably there was editing. Also, there was one audio edit in the BBC News clip (though not the documentary) where ‘napalm-type weapon’ was substituted for ‘chemical weapon’ in order to avoid misleading the audience. Editing and montage is common in documentaries and is acceptable unless it misleads. In this case, editing did not mislead the audience.
The medical consultant was ‘wholly convinced the footage was genuine.’ He provides a definitive refutation of Stuart’s claims of fabrication.
The child accused of wearing prosthetic hands had ‘severe burns where skin detaches from dermis and slides off as it dies.’ The skin patten on the boy’s back (described by Mr Stuart as make up with skin underneath) is of ‘skin that had been cooked through by the intense heat.’ This is consistent with napalm-type burns. ‘The deeper the burn the less it tended to hurt because the nerves had all died.’
With serious burns such as these ‘victims can die within 24 hours but still function in the early stages.’ Many of the victims did die on the way to hospital in Turkey or after arrival.
The investigator sought independent corroboration: She interviewed Paul Adrian Raymond, an independent journalist who met and interviewed the father of one of the identified victims, returning his child’s body home from Turkey.
She also spoke to Human Rights Watch, who were able to confirm that they had identified the weapon as an incendiary bomb with napalm like effects—there was a pattern of similar attacks in northern Syria at the time.
One would have thought that was the end of the matter, with independent evidence from reputable sources. But it was not enough for Mr Stuart—to this day he continues his campaign against the BBC, most recently with the help of Emily Thornberry. Mr Stuart continues to attack the doctors with complaints to the GMC, and their organisation Hand in Hand for Syria with a complaint to the Charity Commission.
None of his complaints have been upheld. Indeed an RT programme based on his ‘research’ has been sanctioned by Ofcom. See Ofcom’s report on RT, September 2015.
So the answer to the opening question is no—there is no evidence that Panorama faked footage of an incendiary bomb and its horrific aftermath in 2013. It is a preposterous and baseless charge. What Robert Stuart presents—along with some of his fellow conspiracy theorists—is nothing more than a false counter-narrative, designed to throw a cloak of doubt over the crimes of the Syrian regime.
Clara Connolly is a human rights lawyer and activist.