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Five years ago today, I took this photo of Laith Majid as he cried tears of relief after he and his family made it over the Mediterranean to Kos, Greece. Let me tell you what happened since. A reconstruction through tweets. Shot on assignment for @nytimes #refugees
I’ll start a bit earlier. As you can see on my timeline, I had been photographing refugees arriving on the Greek island of Kos for a few days on assignment for the @nytimes https://twitter.com/DanielEtterFoto/status/1293793909559025664
Before sunrise on 8/15/15, I waited on a beach and tried to spot refugee boats on the horizon. This was the first one I saw. As it got closer, I realized that it was close to sinking. The day before, I had called the coastguard on another boat in distress to no avail.
Neither was the rubber boat built for a journey like this, nor for more than a dozen people. Luckily, they made it. Locals, who were there that morning, pulled them on the beach. Certain that everyone was safe and getting the help they needed, I photographed the arrival.
A visibly shaken man left the boat. As soon as he reached safety, his emotions took over and he gathered his family around him. That is when I took the now famous photo. There was a lot of crying and hugging (involving me). By far the most emotional day of my career.
I talked to the family. Nada, Laith's wife who you can see to the right of him on the image, speaks fairly good English. I asked her, where they from. She told me from Deir ez-Zor in Syria.
The image was published two days later in the @nytimes and quickly went viral (by 2015 standards). Hundreds of thousands of people shared it over Facebook and Twitter. https://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2015/08/17/world/europe/migrants-find-an-unbridled-route-to-greece/s/20150817-MIGRANTS-slide-4IDI.html
It resonated with people empathetic to the plight of the Syrian people @maryfitzger summed it up best. https://twitter.com/MaryFitzger/status/633704828217241601
People often shared it with these powerful words by @warsan_shire
"no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
...
you have to understand,
that no one would put their children in a boat
unless the sea is safer than the land"
"no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
...
you have to understand,
that no one would put their children in a boat
unless the sea is safer than the land"
I was not only overwhelmed by the situation itself, but by the enormous reaction to it I was interviewed by @CNN, @BuzzFeed, @PatrickKingsley etc. Among the more bizarre things was a cannabis activist, who invited me to his farm in Ireland. https://twitter.com/DanielEtterFoto/status/633184726912737280
Then, something weird happened. Random people wrote me, claiming that the family was not Syrian, but in fact Iraqi. I had no way to prove or disprove that without talking to them directly. So I traveled to Germany to search for them.
Reporter @tilbiermann ran across them in Berlin and sent me his story. The initial headline (since corrected) read that they were Syrian, but the story confirmed they were actually Iraqi. I traveled to Berlin to meet them. The NYT corrected the caption.
Given the hierarchy imposed on refugees back then, their smuggler told them to pose for Syrian, which was embarrassing for me as a journalist, but totally understandable from their point of view. @joshuahersh wrote down the story for @BuzzFeedNews https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/joshuahersh/iraqi-family-whose-photograph-went-viral-describe-their-harr
I showed them around in Berlin. "Beautiful!" was the only English word Laith knew. It described everything and he used it often. They seemed happy.
As the image kept getting shared on social media, misinformation was added to their story. It often picked up on current issues. This meme gets shared every year around Christmas. It was a reaction to Canada welcoming 25,000 Syrian refugees in 2015.
Thread continues here: https://mobile.twitter.com/DanielEtterFoto/status/1294555438306988033
