An investigation of a CNN news report found all was not as it seemed.
Rumours and lies
We talk to Ahmad Primo of Verify Syria, an organisation dedicated to fact-checking stories from Syria.
4 MAY 2025
Verify Syria was established nine years ago, in February 2016, Ahmad Primo tells us. “As a journalist who started working in the media years before the Syrian revolution, I saw firsthand how misinformation shaped public opinion.” His aim with Verify Syria was to create an independent platform committed to the truth, and free from all biases.
Ahmad found that both the Assad regime and ISIS regarded truth as a dangerous enemy. “I was arrested by the Syrian regime three times between 2011 and 2012, and I was kidnapped by ISIS in 2013, because of my journalism and my commitment to conveying the truth about what was happening.”
Like so many others, he was forced into exile. “I’ve been living in Norway for over two years,” he says. “Norway ranks at the top of the global press freedom index, while Syria is at the very bottom.”
Misinformation and disinformation were used by all sides during the revolution and war, Ahmad says, “either to tarnish their opponents’ image or to polish their own,” and this contributed to turning a revolution for freedom into a war that fuelled sectarian hatred, “portraying Sunni Muslims as ISIS militants, Kurds as PKK terrorists, Shias as Iranian agents, and Christians as traitors loyal to Western interests over Syrian ones.”
So, how have things changed since the fall of the Assad regime, we ask? “The targets and the intended audience have shifted, or rather expanded,” Ahmad tells us. And the tools used have also evolved. “Since the fall of the Assad regime, we’ve monitored various misinformation campaigns, each with its tools and target audiences.”
There are campaigns undermining social cohesion by inciting hatred between sects, campaigns depicting Syria as a crime-ridden war zone, and ones trying to rehabilitate the regime’s image. There are even campaigns aimed at discrediting well-documented facts about detention centres, Ahmad says.
Verify Syria can’t tackle all of this alone. “However, we’ve succeeded in cultivating critical skepticism among our audience,” Ahmad believes. “The first step in combating misinformation is learning to question information.”
Polarisation worsened over the long years of war. “This is understandable,” Ahamad says, “but we work hard to overcome it by proving our independence and debunking false narratives from all sides.”
Sowing division
Many of the incidents of false information exposed by Verify Syria are cases where old events are misrepresented on social media as being recent, such as a video circulated in December which claimed to show one of the victorious rebels smashing a statue of the Virgin Mary. In fact the video was from 2013, and the incident had been condemned at the time by leaders of the opposition who had identified the perpetrator as an ISIS member.
Sometimes these falsehoods use images unconnected with Syria, such as a social media post claiming to show a poster honouring Saddam Hussein being erected in Syria following the fall of the regime. In fact the image was of an event in Tunisia in 2007.
In another case, a video that was claimed to be of a beheading in Syria instead was revealed to be over a year old and from Mexico, showing gang violence there.
A photo of the church showing its doorway and windows bricked-up was posted on Facebook and Twitter, and other websites.
A local priest contacted by Verify Syria denied that the closure was due to threats. He said that the church had been closed at the request of its owner, Nabeul Al-Abdullah. The church was not part of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Hama, he said, and other churches in Al-Suqayliba that were part of the Archdiocese had remained open. This was confirmed by the Facebook pages of Al-Suqayliba Parish Council and Al-Suqayliba Church News, which posted photographs of congregations celebrating mass in two churches in the town.
Nabeul Al-Abdullah had been a local Assad regime shabiha leader, and he was accused of war crimes, Verify Syria reported. In 2020, it was reported that Nabeul Al-Abdullah’s church-building project was being supported by the Russian State Duma. In 2022, he was sanctioned by the UK for recruiting mercenaries to fight for Russia in its invasion of Ukraine.
Nabeul Al-Abdullah with a Russian officer in 2020
On December 8th, the same day Assad fled, Nabeul Al-Abdullah had posted a photo on Facebook showing himself sitting in the Cathedral of the Resurrection of Christ in Moscow. This ornate building, completed in 2020 as the main temple of Russia’s military, is dedicated to the memory of the victory of 1945, and to “the military feats of the Russian people in all wars.”
Mainstream misinformation
Problems of misinformation aren’t limited only to social media, and so Verify Syria also scrutinises mainstream media stories. In December, one particular CNN video report drew a lot of attention.
The original headline on CNN’s website was, “‘My God there is light’: CNN witnesses moment Syrian prisoner is freed from Assad’s forced detention,” with the text going on to say, “While searching a secretive prison in the belly of the Assad regime’s legacy of torture for American journalist Austin Tice, CNN’s Clarissa Ward made a startling discovery when a rebel fighter uncovered a hidden prisoner still unaware of Assad’s ouster.”
Verify Syria observed that the man appeared clean and physically healthy, with no visible injuries or signs of torture,“an incongruous portrayal of someone allegedly held in solitary confinement in the dark for ninety days.”
By investigating locally, Verify Syria discovered that the man’s name was not Adel Gharbal as claimed in the CNN report, but Salama Mohammad Salama, known as Abu Hamza, a first lieutenant in the Assad regime’s Air Force Intelligence.
Abu Hamza had managed several regime security checkpoints in the city of Homs, and he was allegedly involved in theft and extortion, Verify Syria found. His recent incarceration had lasted less than a month, locals said, and it was due to a dispute with a higher-ranking officer over sharing his profits from extortion.
CNN subsequently amended its report.
Another fact-check of international media looked at a claim made by Alastair Campbell, who co-hosts the podcast The Rest is Politics with Rory Stewart. They both had travelled to Damascus in early February to interview interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa. While discussing that interview on their podcast, Alastair Campbell claimed that when al-Sharaa returned to Syria from Iraq in 2011, amongst those accompanying him had been Asaad al-Shaibani, now Syria’s foreign minister. This was untrue, Verify Syria found—Asaad al-Shaibani had not been in Iraq with al-Sharaa.
Horror and exploitation
On March 6th began the worst period of violence in Syria since the fall of the Assad regime. First, non-state armed groups linked to the Assad regime carried out coordinated attacks targeting the security and military forces of the transitional government in the governorates of Latakia, Tartus, and Hama. Government forces then began security operations in response.
What happened next, according to an interim report by the Syrian Network for Human Rights, was that local military factions and foreign Islamist groups affiliated with the Ministry of Defence, “though without any actual organizational integration,” joined in, as did armed civilian groups. Large-scale atrocities followed, “most of which had a retaliatory and sectarian nature,” targeting Alawites in particular, with summary executions and mass killings, attacks targeting civilians, including medical, media, and humanitarian personnel, and attacks on property, all leading to the forced displacement of hundreds of residents.
Even as the killing was at its height, deliberate disinformation was being spread on social media, with several false reports of individual deaths. When some of these reports were debunked, the effect was to create unwarranted doubt about the very real murders of civilians that were taking place.
At the time of writing, SNHR has confirmed the deaths of at least 1,217 people, either civilians or disarmed prisoners, who were illegally killed by government-aligned forces in the period from March 6th to March 10th. These include 51 children, 63 women, and 32 medical personnel.
SNHR has counted a further 445 people killed by armed groups linked to the Assad regime, of whom 231 were civilians and 214 were members of the new government’s General Security Forces.
SNHR has not published a count of members of armed groups linked to the Assad regime who were killed in combat, as those deaths are not considered violations of the law.
The government is carrying out its own investigation. On March 9th, interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa appointed a fact-finding committee to investigate, initially giving it thirty days to report, and later extending this deadline by three months.
In its interim report, SNHR called for enhancing the effectiveness and transparency of the government’s investigation by including independent human rights organisations, and by engaging members of the Alawite community and representatives from the affected areas.
SNHR also recommended expanding the geographic scope of the investigation beyond the coastal region of Latakia and Tartus, as the governorates of Hama and Homs also saw violations targeting civilians.
For their part, Verify Syria tackled what they described as “staggering levels” of manipulation in Syria’s online space. “Fake news, miscontextualized content, and outright disinformation have spread like wildfire,” they wrote.
False reports, using manipulated YouTube videos, claimed that Ahmed al-Sharaa had been assassinated.
A widely shared video claiming to show barrel bombs impacting civilian homes was in reality of Israeli airstrikes on Qusaya, Lebanon, in December, but another video filmed inside a helicopter showing bombs being dropped over the coast appeared to be genuine, and was geolocated near the city of Jableh in the Latakia countryside.
A viral video which claimed to show an “Alawite family being shot by HTS and Turkish mercenaries” was actually of Israeli forces attacking a family in Aitaroun, Lebanon, in January.
Another video claiming to show crimes in Syria’s coastal region actually came from India. It was filmed in Kastbhanjan Balaji Dham temple, known for exorcism rituals.
A video falsely claimed that a Christian priest named Yohanna Boutros had been executed by Syrian forces. The Greek Orthodox Archdiocese denied such a person existed.
A Verify Syria team member debunked rumors of a mass killing inside a church in Baniyas. However, he confirmed that Jihad Bishara, the father of the church’s priest, had been killed. Disinformation falsely claiming that Christians were being targeted was amplified by Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, and others. The sectarian attacks targeted Alawites, not Christians.
In all of this, the voices of genuine victims risked being lost. The website Syria Untold, together with Lebanese news site Daraj Media, published a harrowing series of personal testimonies gathered by Syrian writer Rosa Yassin Hassan. Six articles have been published in Arabic and English.
The cost of independence
To maintain independence as a nonprofit, Verify Syria relies on grants from international media support organisations, but getting funding has become harder. “Funding cuts, like the Trump administration’s suspension of USAID support, have significantly impacted us,” Ahmad admits. “To cope, we’ve started training and integrating volunteers into our team.”
International aid is also crucial for other Syrian independent news media. “Without it, independent journalism would collapse, leaving the field open to biased, agenda-driven media funded by political actors,” Ahmad believes. “We struggle to compete with state-funded media giants, like those backed by Qatar and Saudi Arabia.”
Sanctions make life harder, also for journalists. “Many organisations that support independent media avoid Syria due to sanctions and legal complexities,” Ahmad says. “This pushes donors to fund projects in non-sanctioned countries like Lebanon, Sudan, or Turkey, while Syria—where the need is greatest—is left behind.”
Verify Syria is part of a collective fight by Syrian independent media against misinformation, Ahmad says. “We constantly coordinate and collaborate.” And some things are better now. “Since December 8th, we haven’t received any reports of journalists being arrested or detained in Syria. Despite the high level of critical journalism, there seem to be no red lines or restrictions—everyone is writing, filming, and reporting freely. This is a promising development, and I hope it continues.”
He now wants to see Syria climb up the press freedom index, and for Syrian journalism to be strong enough to prevent any regime, current or future, from establishing a new dictatorship. “This is a long road, but I’m confident,” Ahmad says.
Notes
— Examples of Verify Syria fact checks
Fact Check: The Virgin Mary statue destruction video is from 2013, not recent, 21 December 2024
https://verify-sy.com/en/details/10572/Fact-Check:-The-Virgin-Mary-Statue-Destruction-Video-is-from-2013,-Not-Recent
What is the truth about the closure of the Hagia Sophia Church in Al-Suqayliba? (in Arabic) 10 January 2025
https://verify-sy.com/ar/details/10600/
Updated: Did CNN fabricate the story of “freeing a Syrian detainee from a secret prison”? 15 December 2024
https://verify-sy.com/en/details/10562/
Did Al-Shaybani enter Syria with Al-Sharaa? 11 February 2025
https://verify-sy.com/en/details/10649/
— SNHR reporting on the killings of March 6th onwards
Preliminary report by the Syrian Network for Human Rights, 11 March 2025
https://snhr.org/blog/2025/03/11/803-individuals-extrajudicially-killed-between-march-6-10-2025/
SNHR updated toll of extrajudicial killings between March 6-10 2025, updated 16 April 2025
https://news.snhr.org/2025/04/16/daily-update-toll-of-extrajudicial-killings-that-took-place-in-the-wake-of-the-events-in-the-syrian-coastal-region-between-march-6-and-march-10-2025/
— Testimonies of Survivors of the Coast Massacre, Rosa Yassin Hassan for Syria Untold
1. To whom will I say good morning from now on?
https://syriauntold.com/2025/03/20/to-whom-will-i-say-good-morning-from-now-on/
2. About Mila, who was killed but did not die, and Mira, who was not killed but did die
https://syriauntold.com/2025/03/26/about-mila-who-was-killed-but-did-not-die-and-mira-who-was-not-killed-but-did-die/
3. How will I recover from their eyes?
https://syriauntold.com/2025/04/02/how-will-i-recover-from-their-eyes/
4. Observations by a relief volunteer
https://syriauntold.com/2025/04/12/testimonies-of-survivors-of-the-coast-massacre-4-observations-by-a-relief-volunteer/
5. I will delete all messages as soon as they are sent
https://syriauntold.com/2025/04/18/testimonies-of-survivors-of-the-coast-massacre-5-i-will-delete-all-messages-as-soon-as-they-are-sent/
6. Mothers searching for their children’s bodies
https://syriauntold.com/2025/04/24/testimonies-of-survivors-of-the-coast-massacre-6-mothers-searching-for-their-childrens-bodies/
