Accounts on social media circulated a video clip whose publishers claimed it documents the moment President al-Sharaa was arrested in Iraq, accompanied by a number of Syrian terrorists.
The fact-checking team followed up on the circulating claim and split the video into still frames to run a reverse image search on them, which showed that the video is old and has no connection to the current claims. The results showed that the clip had already been published on 11/05/2022, and in fact documents the Samarra Operations Command arresting members belonging to the Islamic State group, Ahmed al-Barno and Muhannad Hussam Samsam, in the Shihabi area of the Dujail district.
Why is this claim misleading?
False context: An old video clip documenting the arrest of Islamic State group members in Iraq was republished with its context changed, to claim that it documents the moment President al-Sharaa was arrested alongside Syrian terrorists.
