Accounts and pages on social media circulated a video clip, with its publishers claiming it documents a farmer from the city of Raqqa burning his crop in protest at the low price set for wheat.
Kashaf’s team traced the circulating clip and broke it down into still frames using reverse-image search tools across open sources. The results showed the video is old — previously published on 26 June 2020 — and that it shows farmers in the Kurdistan Region protesting the government’s failure to take delivery of their wheat harvest at the time, not a farmer in Syria’s Raqqa.
Why is the story misleading?
False time and place context: an old video from 2020, filmed in the Kurdistan Region, was circulated with the false claim that it documents a recent incident in the city of Raqqa.
