Kashaf traced Syrian, Iraqi and Lebanese pages and accounts, alongside accounts publishing Kurdish-language content, which despite their different orientations and backgrounds shared a single disinformation tactic: exploiting the Syrian archive, recycling old footage and attaching fabricated contexts to it so that it appears to document recent events and confrontations in Syria. This investigation identifies the parties and accounts that recirculated this material.
Multiple Platforms and a Single Method
Kashaf monitored simultaneous activity by Syrian, Iraqi and Lebanese pages and accounts, and the tracking extended to accounts that publish Kurdish-language content and engage with Syrian affairs. Although these accounts have different orientations, they handled Syrian developments and events in a similar way, converging on republishing old material under current headlines, which makes the shared method, rather than the identity of the publisher, the way into understanding this phenomenon.
An Old Archive Under New Headlines
Earlier footage was republished as if it documented recent protests and clashes in Syria, and the same scenes were repeatedly presented under different headlines tying them to current events. Kashaf monitored the same pattern on the accounts "Al-Hajj Ali", "Taht al-Mijhar", "X News" and "Majd al-Ahmad", which circulated closely similar clips, some of them captioned "The people want the fall of al-Jolani", in a direct use of old material within the current protest discourse.
Accounts Close to al-Hijri
Posts by pages close to al-Hijri included old clips and images alongside material related to ongoing developments. This activity appeared on the pages "Amr Ezzi", "Bashan Lahza bi-Lahza" and "Al-Suwayda ANS", including a post by "Bashan Lahza bi-Lahza" that described a clip as showing gunfire on protesters in Idlib. In other cases, the content was accompanied by erroneous news and claims, as in posts by the page "Lahn al-Bazalt".
Rumours Crossing into Kurdish
The circulation was not limited to Arabic pages: it extended to accounts that publish Kurdish-language content and engage with Syrian affairs, as posts by many pages featured old Syrian events presented as recent ones, while in other cases the footage was attached to contexts and claims that do not match its origin. These pages include "Afrin Kurdistan", "Lamma Kurdiya", "Rojava News" and "Sarkhabun Roj Ava", which reflects the rumours moving from the Arabic to the Kurdish space on social media.
A Regional Echo in Lebanon and Iraq
The narrative did not stop at the borders of Syrian pages: it also appeared on Lebanese pages that presented the Damascus protests within a discourse demanding the removal of Ahmed al-Sharaa from power, and recast footage of the fuel protests as evidence of a crackdown on protesters. Iraqi pages, too, presented Syrian scenes under headlines suggesting clashes and protests against the government, among them the Babel satellite channel, which ran clips under titles such as "Violent clashes between al-Jolani's forces and protesters in rural Aleppo" and "Hunger revolution in Syria", portraying events as a comprehensive popular uprising against the government.
Similarity and the Limits of Inference
The similarity of the content and the timing of its publication across different accounts raises questions about how it spread, but this similarity alone does not prove the existence of an organised network or a single party running it, while ignoring it would obscure an important part of how narratives spread between different accounts. In sum, misleading content does not need a new scene, only a new context that reinterprets an old one, and the cases Kashaf traced show that a single scene can move between different parties as its headline, narrative and audience change, which is why verification does not stop at the origin of an image or video but traces its path, who reused it and why.
