Pages on social media circulated a video whose publishers claimed it was recent and documented protesters in Idlib chanting slogans criticising the Public Security, coinciding with talk of these protests possibly spreading to other areas in Syria.
The fact-checking team traced the clip digitally by breaking it into still frames and running a reverse image search on them, alongside the time archiving of the content, and found that the clip had been published earlier on 28 June 2024. It documents a protest in the city of Binnish in the Idlib countryside against Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and in rejection of opening crossings with the regime, not a protest against the Public Security nor one linked to current events.
Why is this claim misleading?
A change of context: A clip dating to June 2024 of a protest directed against Hayat Tahrir al-Sham was recirculated and presented as a recent protest against the Public Security, to suggest that the scope of protests in Syria was widening.
