West has agenda over refugee children, says wife of Assad
In her first interview since the Syrian war began, Asma Assad said media coverage was not balanced.
The wife of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has accused the West of giving more media coverage to refugee children such as Aylan Kurdi than those killed or displaced by rebels in the conflict.
In a rare interview, Asma Assad said that all children caught up in the conflict are innocent but western media focuses on refugees to suit their "agenda".
A photograph of toddler Aylan's lifeless body washed up on a Turkish beach after he drowned trying to reach Greece sparked global outrage last year.
It prompted politicians from around the world to pledge more help for the hundreds of thousands of people escaping war in places like Syria and Iraq.
Mrs Assad also referred to the outcry over footage of five-year-old Omran Daqneesh, who was filmed dazed and injured after his house in Aleppo was bombed.
She said that both these cases were given more prominence by the West than a massacre in the Damascus village of al-Zara, where 19 people were killed by rebels including women and children.
Mrs Assad also accused the West of "dividing our children in this conflict according to political beliefs of their parents".
"Aylan was a Syrian child irrespective of what his parents believed," she said. "As was Omran and the other innocent children in the Zara village massacre. These are all children, they are all innocent children and they are all a loss for Syria."
Mrs Assad has largely remained away from international media since the start of the civil war in Syria in 2011.
But she has had a visible role in supporting the families of the wounded and dead soldiers and appears regularly in hospitals and at funerals with relatives.
She said: "Ironically, Western media organisations have chosen to solely focus on the plight of refugees and those caught up in rebel held areas whereas in fact the vast majority of the displaced are living across the rest of the country."
Syria's conflict has killed more than 300,000 people and displaced half the country's pre-war population of 23 million since March 2011, most of them inside the country.