A video said to show Syrian President Bashar al-Assad walking without escort through a joyous crowd in Damascus has been circulating online since April 25. However, this is an old video and one that actually shows the president during an orchestrated event in a secure location.
If you only have a minute
- A video said to show Syrian President Bashar al-Assad interacting with a seemingly joyous public in Damascus has been circulating online since April 25.
- Those who share this video claim that it is proof of Assad’s popularity in Syria. Some of them have even claimed he is more popular amongst his people than Western leaders including French President Emmanuel Macron.
- Turns out, this video was filmed back in 2017. By looking at its coordinates, we discovered that it was filmed in a secure location in Damascus during an official event.
The fact check, in detail
The footage that has been circulating on Twitter of late shows Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, smiling, shaking the hands of passersby and posing for pictures. At the start of the video, he is outside, before entering a building filled with stands selling a variety of products. “Syrian president Bashar Alassad casually walking around without guards,” reads one caption on the video, which has the TikTok logo.
“Don’t believe anything they tell you about Syria, it’s all lies!” reads the caption on a post featuring the video shared on April 25 by an account that regularly posts pro-Russian propaganda. It has since garnered more than 120,000 views. The posts claimed that this video was proof of the Syrian leader’s popularity. Some of the posts compared this to the dismal ratings of some Western leaders.
On May 2, this far-right account shared the Assad video alongside one showing a crowd throwing objects at Emmanuel Macron.
A number of French-language accounts that regularly share content critical of Macron also picked up this post. Here are two examples from May 2 and May 5.
A 2017 video made by Assad’s team
To find out more about the video in question, we began by looking into the TikTok handle that appears on the video.
Turns out, this account is a propaganda account that often shares videos promoting the Syrian president and videos that support the Syrian government’s perspective.
However, the video that has been circulating online isn’t recent: it was posted on this TikTok account on July 5, 2022.
But even though the TikTok account posted this video in 2022, it turns out that the actual event took place much earlier.
We used the tool InVid WeVerify (check out how by clicking here) to find previous instances of the video posted online, without the TikTok logo and caption.
An official Twitter account of the Syrian Office of the President tweeted the video in June 2017, explaining that the video shows Assad shopping at a “‘Made in Syria’ festival”. The video also appeared in a local news article, shared on June 8, 2017.
There are also other images of this event, like the ones that appear in this article by the Iranian press agency Tasnim. The article explains that the event took place at al-Jalaa Hall in the Damascus neighbourhood of Mezzeh.
A controlled visit to a secure event
Using this information, we were able to find the coordinates of the site visible in the video. If you type “صالة الجلاء” (al-Jalaa Hall in Arabic) into Google Maps, then you’ll find a result that is really in the Mezzeh neighbourhood.
Online, there are 360° images of the hall, which seems to often be used for events. These photos indeed show the location where the Assad video was filmed.
In the outside shots, the Syrian president walks under a sign for the computer engineering department at Arab International University.
Turns out, this building is located right behind al-Jalaa Hall, which means that the outside shots were filmed right by the hall, likely during the same visit.
So this video doesn’t actually show Assad wandering in the streets of Damascus. It was filmed at an official event organised by the Damascus Chamber of Industry, according to this article published in the local media.
The Syrian president, thus, isn’t in a street but in a university and sports facility that is easy to secure. As you can see from these images on Google Earth, recorded a few weeks after the event, there are only a few entrances to the hall.
Moreover, this area is located in an extremely secure area, home to a number of official buildings, embassies and the military airport. Even the headquarters of the Department of General Intelligence and the Air Force are located in this neighbourhood. The Department of General Intelligence is one of the main security services in the country, known for its brutal methods and systematic use of torture in its detention centres.
Bodyguards in civilian clothes
Thomas Pierret is a senior researcher at CNRS and a Syrian specialist. He says that this would be far from the first time that Assad met with the “public”, who turned out to be carefully selected in a secure location.
Videos of this type are always a part of his communication strategy, trying to create a narrative that he is close to his people. Before the war, for example, he regularly organised surprise visits to restaurants. During those events, the security was always reinforced with bodyguards at the entrance. And the people were screened ahead of time. On that note, you might notice that there are very few people in this video.
The captions on the posts featuring this video, however, claim that the Syrian president went out in public without bodyguards.
However, in the version of the video shared by the office of the president, you can see a man who appears twice and seems to be watching Assad intently.
The man is wearing a distinctive striped polo shirt, with a black collar, which makes it possible to spot him in the version of the video shared by this Syrian site, which includes sequences cut in the version shared by the Office of the President.
In this longer sequence, you can see that the man continues to follow Assad. While it is impossible to know for sure if he is a bodyguard, his behaviour and his habit of keeping just a few metres from the president at all times makes it likely that he is one.
In conclusion, this video doesn’t show the Syrian president interacting with the general public in the street, as claimed by a number of accounts that shared the video. It was actually filmed during an official event in a secure location where Assad was almost certainly under high protection.
This video has been circulating amidst a tense political backdrop: Syria is in the process of officially reintegrating the Arab League, after being ousted in 2011 when the Syrian government’s crackdown on a popular movement led to a devastating war. During the conflict, Assad’s regime was condemned for numerous war crimes against both combatants and civilians.
This story originally appeared on France24
