Pages and accounts across social media platforms circulated a video allegedly documenting the killing of four civilians by Turkish army fire after they approached a military base inside the city of Idlib.
Following up on the circulating claim, the fact-checking team carried out a digital analysis of the video, split it into still frames and ran a reverse image search on them, alongside a visual analysis of the landmarks of the location. It found that the video is old and unrelated to the claim: it dates back to March 2023 and documents the Turkish authorities handing over to the Syrian side the body of the young man "Abdo Khalil Sayyah", fully autopsied and bearing clear marks of torture, after he was tortured by members of the Turkish "Jandarma" while attempting to enter Turkish territory illegally from the Harem area in the northern countryside of Idlib.
Why is this claim misleading?
Out of temporal and geographic context: A video dating back to March 2023, documenting the handover of the body of a young man who died under torture while trying to cross the border, was republished in a different temporal and geographic context in order to suggest a current shooting incident that killed four civilians near a military base in the city of Idlib.
