It's been described as the image that broke the internet's heart.

When a photographer pointed his camera lens at a young girl in Syria, the child mistook it for a gun and raised her tiny hands above her head, as if to surrender.

The haunting image of the child, with fear in her eyes and her lips pursed, was tweeted last week by Nadia Abu Shaban, a photojournalist based in Gaza, and has been shared nearly 20,000 times since then.

Shaban did not take the photo herself, and did not know who had. Little was known of the image's origins or the circumstances of the child.

This led some to speculate that the image had been staged; that the child was in fact a boy; and that the photograph was taken in 2012.

But now, the BBC has tracked down the photographer, Osman Sagirli, who recounted how he had taken the image of the four-year-old girl, Hudea, at the Atmeh refugee camp in Syria in December last year.

Sagirli, who was working in Tanzania when the BBC spoke to him this week, said Hudea, her mother and two siblings had travelled about 150 kilometres from their home in Hama in Syria to the refugee camp, which is close to the border with Turkey.

"I was using a telephoto lens, and she thought it was a weapon," Sagirli told the BBC.

"I realised she was terrified after I took it, and looked at the picture, because she bit her lips and raised her hands. Normally kids run away, hide their faces or smile when they see a camera.

"You know there are displaced people in the camps. It makes more sense to see what they have suffered not through adults, but through children. It is the children who reflect the feelings with their innocence."

The photograph of Hudea was first published in January in the Turkish newspaper Türkiye, the BBC reported.

At that time it was shared widely among Turkish-speaking social media users, but it was only when Shaban tweeted the photograph that it was exposed to an English-speaking audience.