“There are decades in which nothing happens, and there are weeks in which decades pass.” This famous quote, attributed to Lenin, is fully valid in Syria. After 13 years of bloody civil warthe dictator’s Alawite regime Bashar al-Asadinstalled in Damascus for half a century, collapsed last Sunday like a house of cards after just 10 days of military offensive by the rebels, an amalgam of opponents ranging from the Islamists of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) to the Kurds.
The power vacuum in one of the great countries of Near East opens the door to an unknown scenario, an uncertainty in which disinformation blooms Syrian civil groups such as the so-called White Helmets have called to prevent the “widespread spread of hoaxes and the rumors that circulate about the prisons and the detainees”. However, that has not prevented that in the last few hours, as is usual with any historical event, the social networks have begun to harbor all types of speculation, decontextualized content, half-truths or outright lies whose dissemination can respond to ideological issues, but also to the thirst for virality of some accounts.
Sednaya prison
One of the many speculations that have gained traction in Internet exploits the morbidity of the infamous “human slaughterhouse” in which the Al Assad regime perpetrated all kinds of atrocities against the opposition and which the rebels liberated this weekend, finding the tortured corpses of at least 15 civilians. The hoax indicates that the installation would have secret basements with more victims than expected. However, the specialized teams of the Syrian Civil Defense – as the White Helmets are known – have “exhaustively” searched the prison and have found “no evidence of the existence” of the alleged hidden cells.
In spaces like X –o Twitter– other inaccuracies are also circulating about Sednaya. This is the case of a video that shows a cell and a woman with her foot held by a metal bar. The recording, shared in Spanish by a pro-Israel account that takes the opportunity to accuse the Latin American left of “hypocrisy”, summer already Can wehas been shared almost 7,000 times. However, VerificaRTVE has detected that it is a fictitious cell recreated by the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam.
Hoaxes and doubts about Al Assad
Some users, especially in English and Polish, have shared images of a downed and burning plane claiming that Al Assad was traveling on it. However, AFP has denied this, reporting that it is an aircraft that crashed in India in early September.
The whereabouts of the Syrian tyrant has also opened the door to speculation. On Sunday, Russian state news agencies claimed that Assad and his family had been taken in for “humanitarian reasons” in Moscow. Then it began to circulate on platforms like X, TikTok o Facebook a photo of the deposed president and his wife, Asma, with his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. However, this is an image taken in AleppoSyria, in February 2023, as verified by Euronews.
Yesterday, the Kremlin He refused to publicly confirm whether he had granted political asylum to his ally. “We have nothing to say about Mr. Assad’s whereabouts at the moment,” his spokesman stressed. Dmitri Peskovwhich did suggest that Putin would have authorized it personally. Rebel sources have told CNN that the deposed president fled Damascus towards Latakia, his hometown and where Russia has an air base, although it is unknown exactly what direction he took afterwards.
In the last hours, the team fact-checking AFP has also denied old photos of the conflict that are being recycled to pass off as Russian air strikes against the rebels in Idlib. These examples of misinformation are circulating in countries like Thailand or Myanmar. The motivation behind these publications is currently a mystery.
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