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On 10 December 2016, Eva Bartlett — an activist and blogger who openly says she is biased in favor of the Syrian regime — was featured in a circulating YouTube video that says she is schooling a mainstream media reporter by making a series of outlandish-sounding claims, including that international media are conspiring to fabricate stories of hospital bombings and that anti-government activists are recycling victims to cast the Syrian military in a negative light. (She also refers to all factions fighting President Bashar al Assad's forces as terrorists.) Bartlett has a statement on her own web site that says she supports the current Syrian regime. (It reads: I support Syria against a 'civil' war that is funded, armed and planned by the western powers and their regional allies with a view to wiping out all resistance to imperialism in the Middle East...). In the video, Bartlett was speaking at a pro-Syrian government event on 9 December 2016 at the United Nations, where she was billed as an independent Canadian journalist. (She is also a contributor at RT, a news site funded by the Russian government.) When a Norwegian reporter from the newspaper Aftenposten questioned her statements that the Syrian people overwhelmingly back Assad and that the media has conspired to lie to the world about him, she said she knows Syrians back Assad, because the majority voted for him in the 2014 election. Voting in that election only took place in government-held territories and while Assad won 88.7 percent of the vote, the country's constitutional court reportedly put turnout at 73 percent. Bartlett also claimed that the New York Times has the same end goal as outlets such as Democracy Now!, and that goal is ousting Assad. Bartlett went on to claim that Al Quds Hospital, which was bombed in April 2016, was never actually bombed, and that victims of Assad's forces are being falsified by the group known as the White Helmets, a search-and-rescue organization in rebel territories. She said: The claim can be seen here, starting at the 3-minute mark: Another girl, also named Aya, was identified in a 27 June 2016 story posted by the United Nations Refugee Agency. A third little girl named Aya was featured in a 2013 story posted by UNICEF. All three are distinctly different children, which is clear by their appearances and descriptions. Despite Bartlett's claims, the existence of multiple children named Aya does not indicate the recycling of victims or prove that accounts of violence against Syrian civilians by their government are falsified. It attests only to the popularity of the given name Aya among Syrian families. In another statement gleaned from Russian officials, Bartlett claims that Al Quds Hospital was never bombed: The medical charity, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF, or Doctors Without Borders), which has supported Al Quds since 2012, confirmed in a 29 April 2016 statement that the hospital had, in fact, been bombed. From an MSF report on the incident: The attack killed dozens and caused an international outcry, and there is footage from the aftermath of the incident. Bartlett's comment about Al Quds can be heard just after the 18:30 minute mark: Bartlett's claim that the child victim Aya, is recycled is the same type of charge levied by conspiracy theorists at parents of children who were killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre. It is a claim also promoted by David Icke, who is best known for believing the world is controlled by Martian lizard people. Bartlett did not return our request for clarification sent via social media and an e-mail address provided on her web site.
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