As part of its monitoring of misinformation about Syria, this investigation reviews the September 2026 record of the "Kashaf" platform by the numbers: 109 claims that were checked, based on the published fact-checks and the site's own classification of their outcomes, techniques and tags. The figures reveal a heavy reliance on recycled old material, and a misinformation wave that accompanied the protests over the fuel price hike.
Verification Outcomes: 88 Claims Did Not Survive Refutation
The classification of the month's claims shows that 69 of them (63%) fall under misleading news, while 16 claims (15%) were classified as false news and three mixed the accurate with the misleading, whereas verification confirmed 21 news items (19%) as true. These figures prove that about eight in ten claims did not survive verification.
Deception Techniques: False Context in the Lead
An analysis of the 88 claims that did not survive verification reveals the dominance of the false-context technique: 46 claims (52%) relied on real events and material taken out of context, most of it old or filmed elsewhere, while 18 claims (20%) took the form of entirely fabricated content and 13 (15%) the form of truncation and distortion. In addition, 41 of the 109 claims relied on a video clip, and two categories of material stood out:
- Material from outside Syria: five clips and two images traced to Palestine, Libya, India, the Netherlands and Saudi Arabia, presented as coming from Syria or as showing Syrian fighters in Yemen.
- Digital alteration: two images bearing traces of artificial-intelligence tools, an image into which an Israeli flag was inserted, and four clips to which chants, voices, insults or text effects absent from their original recordings were added.
The Fuel Protests: The Month's Most Prominent Wave
Several Syrian areas saw protests over the fuel price hike, and the "Kashaf" team detected 14 misleading or false claims linked to them, 13 of which were concentrated between 13 and 17 September and six of which relied on old clips. Their content ranged from portraying the protests as demands to topple the regime or President Ahmad al-Sharaa or to execute him, to attributing repression and killing to government forces, to fabricating a circular and a statement attributed to the Interior Ministry, which reflects the use of real protests as cover for old and fabricated material.
Impersonating Sources: 17 Falsely Attributed Claims
The "Kashaf" team detected 17 claims in which statements, decisions and reports were attributed to officials, institutions and media outlets that could not be shown to have issued any of them, in a technique that exploits public trust in the source, and that extended to forging the templates of three news channels. The targeted parties break down as follows:
- The Syrian government and its institutions: four statements, a circular, two decisions and two obituaries, attributed to the defence and interior ministries, the presidency and the governorates of Hama and Idlib.
- Media outlets: two news items attributed to "Reuters", a report attributed to "Foreign Policy" magazine, and three forged cards bearing the templates of "Syria TV", "Al-Araby TV" and "Al-Hadath".
- Foreign parties: an arrest-warrant request attributed to Swiss prosecutors, and an ultimatum attributed to Israel.
The Geographic Map: Aleppo in the Lead
Of the 109 claims, 58 were tied through their tags to a Syrian governorate or to one of its areas, and Aleppo topped this map with 10 claims, followed by Idlib and Damascus with 8 each, then Hasakah with 7. Beyond Syria's borders, "Kashaf" traced five claims between 9 and 12 September about Syrian fighters in Yemen being captured, killed or mourned; four of them rested on old material, including two clips from Libya and an image from south of Hebron, and the fifth was a fabricated obituary attributed to Idlib governorate.
The Most Frequent Names: Al-Sharaa in the Lead
President Ahmad al-Sharaa topped the list of most frequent names with 12 claims that did not hold, out of 15 tagged with his name. The investigation also detected seven claims alleging the killing, death, injury or targeting of military commanders and officials, three of which accompanied the al-Eis explosions in the southern Aleppo countryside, and most of which rested on images of other people, an old clip or forged news cards.
Taken together, these figures paint a picture of the month's misinformation, more than half of which rested on taking real events and material out of context, alongside the impersonation of official institutions and media outlets. Yet these figures measure what reached the verification desk, not the actual volume of what circulated in the digital space, and they do not record the platform on which each claim first appeared.
