In December 2024, a short video circulated on social networks, allegedly proving that some Syrians had faked injuries and posed as political prisoners from local prisons. We checked whether this conclusion is justified.
The nine-second video shows two Arab men leading a third man with a bandaged leg out of a taxi. One of the accompanying people slaps him on the back of the head, noting that he is leaning on his supposedly bad leg and holding up his healthy one. After this, the lame man changes his supporting leg. “Now it can be broadcast on TV channels as proof of the existence of secret torture chambers in Syria,” conclude some bloggers who shared the video. Many outlets have drawn parallels between this video and CNN correspondent Clarissa Ward's recent report on the release of another Syrian prisoner, which caused big doubts in authenticity.
A video with a limping man and similar captions was published by Telegram channels “Bocharik (yep, that same one)"(299,000), "Constantinople"(220,000), "Ukraine.ru"(139,000), "The goat screamed"(54,000), "Yyhu Moscow» (42,000), etc.
December 8, 2024 Syrian rebels took Damascus came under his control, and President Bashar al-Assad fled the country. On the same day, his opponents released from prisons a large number of prisoners who had been there for political reasons throughout the civil war. Stories of these people told correspondents of many foreign Media.
Wide resonance caused a story released on December 12, in which a film crew from the American television channel CNN discovers a prisoner hidden under a blanket in one of the prisons. A man calling himself Adel Gharbal from the city of Homs became the subject of news reports, but a few days later he was recognized as Salam Mohammad Salama, a Syrian intelligence officer notorious for his activities in the same city and imprisoned for extortion. This gave many Internet users a reason to call the video staged. Doubts were reinforced by the fact that CNN journalist Clarissa Ward, who filmed the story, had already been accused of simulating being under fire during the fighting in Israel in 2023, but that accusation turned out to be false.
The quality of the video distributed in the Russian-language segment of social networks is quite low, but a reverse search for one of its frames in Google leads to records with a clearer image.
The telephone number 07702540630 indicated on the taxi window is listed in profile Instagram user with username @x_hayder_r. Judging by his posts, this is the same person who, in the viral video, supports a lame man under his left shoulder and slaps him on the back of the head.
There is also a video on the @x_hayder_r page that has become viral - it was published on December 8 and received more than 1.5 million likes. At the time of writing, the video had been viewed more than 63 million times.
Judging by the profile description, @x_hayder_r is the owner of a retail outlet located not in Syria, but in Iraq, in the Bab al-Derwaza market in the Kadimiya district of Baghdad. This store is on Google Maps, and the phone number on the page corresponds to the format of the local operator Asiacell.
As the restaurant sign suggests Falafel Alhuluwh in the background, the viral video was filmed literally a couple of hundred meters from this market.
User @x_hayder_r is a fairly famous blogger on Instagram with 478,000 followers. He became popular thanks to his witty videos, in which he mainly advertises products from his store's assortment. In some of them appears and the same lame man from the viral video. However, in the original publication there is no indication that the video has anything to do with the events in Syria.
December 14, six days after the publication of this video, @x_hayder_r posted a video complaining that its content was being passed off as a product Palywood (this is what supporters of pro-Israeli views call staged photos and videos, in their opinion, designed to show the suffering of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip). The next day at similar In the post, the blogger already mentioned a discussion of the scandalous CNN story from Syria. Both times he confirmed that the videos were filmed in Baghdad's Qadimiya district. Thus, a humorous video from Iraq in the publications of first foreign and then Russian bloggers was provided with false explanations. It was passed off as staged footage, first from Palestine, and then from Syria. It was not possible to establish when exactly in the foreign language segment of social networks the video began to be associated with Syria, but in Russian with such an attribution it was distributed at least from the night of December 14, when it was published by a pro-Russian propaganda channel Breege Time ZÖZZ (about 25,000 views, 1,200 reposts), and from the caption to the publication (“Victims of the bloody Assad regime are returning from their dungeons after savage torture”) it is not clear whether the author is joking or reporting serious news.
Cover photo: screenshot
Read on topic:
- Is it true that Bashar al-Assad specifically took off his earphone so as not to listen to Zelensky’s speech at the summit?
- Is it true that the White Helmets made a staged video about rescuing a person from the rubble?
- Is it true that this CNN report about the attacks in Israel was staged?
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