Accounts and pages on social media circulated an image they said showed an Iraqi officer who posted a shot of the moment of capturing President Ahmed al-Sharaa in Iraq in 2005 wearing a wedding dress, coinciding with talk of Syrian threats against Iraq.
Kashaf subjected the image to a digital verification that included a reverse image search with Google Lens, tracing its spread across open sources, and reviewing its first-publication context, and found that it had been posted earlier on the X platform on 21 June 2017 with a description indicating it belonged to a counter-terrorism force pursuing members of "ISIS" in the Ras al-Kur area, where a wounded member of the group was found. Visual analysis also showed indicators of digital editing in the recently circulated version, namely changing the clothing of the person shown and adding a dress that was not present in the original.
Why is this claim misleading?
Digitally edited content: An old image from a 2017 security operation in Iraq was edited by adding elements absent from the original, then recirculated in a context linked to President Ahmed al-Sharaa, altering its true meaning.
