At the end of September 2025, a photo of a man holding severed human heads in his hands went viral. It is said to be Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, photographed several years ago. We have verified the accuracy of such publications.
Many of the posts are collages of photographs of the terrorist holding severed heads and recent photographs of al-Sharaa taken while he was meeting with world leaders and attending international events. The comments under the photo are mainly aimed at discrediting not so much the Syrian president himself, but other politicians: some accuse him of communicating with such a person Donald Trump, other - Vladimir Zelensky, third - UN leadership, which allowed him to speak at the General Assembly. In the Russian-language segment of the Internet, pictures were most actively distributed in Facebook, X And Telegram.
Most of the contemporary photographs of al-Sharaa in collages were taken on UN General Assembly, which took place from September 22 to 26 in New York. There, the new Syrian president held a series of bilateral meetings and also made a speech, becoming the first Syrian leader in almost 60 years to speak from the podium of the United Nations. In this speech Al-Sharaa stated: “Syria is regaining its rightful place among the countries of the world.”
Personality Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, who until then had long been known as Abu Muhammad al-Julani, is very controversial. In 2003, during the US invasion of Iraq, he joined the terrorist organization Al-Qaeda, three years later he was arrested, spent several years in an American prison, and in 2011 he was released and returned to Syria. There he led the Jabhat al-Nusra movement, which opposed the regime of then President Bashar al-Assad and was soon also recognized as terrorist in the United States, Great Britain, France, Russia and other countries, as well as in the UN. In 2016, this group announced the severance of cooperation with al-Qaeda and soon merged with other forces into the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham movement (it was also recognized as terrorist in some countries). In 2024, Assad was overthrown, and al-Sharaa led the country, declaring that he was going to replace the dictatorship of his predecessor with a fair state with a prosperous economy.
Given the biography of the current Syrian leader, it is not surprising that many Internet users believed that he was holding the severed heads in the viral photo. However, “Verified” did not find publications in authoritative sources that appeared before September 2025 and which claim that al-Sharaa is depicted in the photo. Using a reverse Google image search, you can find much earlier appearances of this frame - e.g. article, published on the CNN website in August 2014. However, it is not about al-Sharaa, or, as he was better known then, al-Julani, but about the Australian Mohamed Elomar, who then fought in the Middle East as part of the Islamic State.
It was not possible to reliably determine where the viral collages first appeared, but many Russian-speaking users, judging by the watermark used in their posts, took it from user X with the username @osintupdates. On September 27, it appeared on his page image, consisting of a photo of al-Sharaa at the UN General Assembly and a photo of a man holding severed heads. Under the collage was the comment: “The UN is trash.” The post received 6 million views and more than 140,000 likes, so @osintupdates at least contributed to the spread of photos with misleading explanations.
It is noteworthy that some users who saw that tweet tried to verify the information by asking the Grok chatbot whether the two photos really showed the same person. Grok replied: “Yes, this is the same person: Ahmed al-Sharaa, aka Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, leader of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and the current interim president of Syria. In the top photo he is at the UN in 2025; the bottom one is a photograph taken early in his jihadist career. Both photographs are real." It's already not the first time, when chatbots, designed, among other things, to help users check information, “lie”, as they are misled by a large number of viral false publications on the Internet.
Thus, the man in the viral photo holding severed human heads is not the current Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, but Islamic State militant Mohamed Elomar.
Cover photo: social networks
- "Myth Detector". Ahmed al-Sharaa or the Australian terrorist - who is shown in the circulated photo?
- Time. Why Ahmed al-Sharaa's U.N. Debut Matters
- Is it true that the Syrian media blurred out Annalena Berbock in the photo from the meeting in Damascus?
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