SHAFAQNA

SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) — We might never know who first entered this photo into the social media currents, which sent it flying through Arabic- and English-language social networks until it landed on the BBC website's front page. Though it purportedly shows victims of Saturday's massacre in the Syrian town of Houla, sourced from the anonymous "activists" who have provided so many similar images throughout the Arab Spring, in fact it is from Iraq and nearly a decade old.

Its actual photographer, Marco Di Lauro, fumed on his Facebook page that "somebody is using my images as propaganda." The photo, he explained, was taken in Iraq in May 2003, shortly after the U.S.-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussein. According to its original caption, it shows bodies being prepared for mass burial in the town of Musayyib, where they'd been killed in the early 1990s by Saddam's forces as punishment for a failed uprising.

This is only a sample of what the media is propagating to heat-up the situation in Syria. Many of their lies have been already exposed.  — www. shafaqna.com