Viral image said to be of Syrian prisoner freed from underground tunnel after govt’s fall is from AI-generated video

The iVerify Pakistan team investigated this content and determined that it is false.

To reach this conclusion, iVerify Pakistan conducted a reverse image search to find the original source of the video and analysed the TikTok watermark on the clip.

Multiple posts on social media platform X since December 9, 2024, circulated an image of a man with troubling facial expressions peeking outside of a hole, claiming it showed a prisoner being freed from a prison in Syria after the Assad regime’s ouster. However, the image is from an AI-generated video.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad left office on Dec 8 and fled the country after being ousted by Syrian rebels, who ended the 50-year Assad dynasty in a lightning offensive that has raised fears of a new wave of instability in the Middle East.

Syria’s war has killed more than 500,000 people and forced half of the population to flee their homes. At the core of the system of rule that Assad inherited from his father Hafez was a brutal complex of prisons and detention centres used to eliminate dissent by jailing those suspected of stepping out of the ruling Baath party’s line.

Social media was filled with Syrians sharing images of detainees reportedly brought out from the dungeons after the government’s fall, some posting calls for help finding their missing relatives.

HOW IT STARTED

On December 10, the iVerify Pakistan team was alerted about a post on X and requested authentication for its content.

On Dec 9, a Pakistani user, known to a PTI critic, reposted an image of what looked to be a man peeking out of an underground hole with the following caption: “The oppression of Syria’s prison today: We had heard stories of the tyrannical prisons of Yazid in Syria, but now we read about the oppression of the underground prisons of the Iranian-backed Assad regime in Damascus. Over 3,000 Muslims are locked in such underground detention centres, with no accessible pathways leading to them. The German company that built these torture chambers estimated that it would take six days to reach these prisoners — by which time, most of them would already have perished. Curse upon those who support oppression.”

The post gained 17,400 views.

The original post had a similar caption and gained 2.7 million views and 5,300 reshares.

The image was widely shared by other users as can be seen here, here and here.

METHODOLOGY

A fact-check was initiated to determine the veracity of the claim due to its virality and keen public interest in recent events unfolding in Syria.

A reverse image search yielded a longer video shared by journalist Bahaa Khaleel from which the image was taken. The full video showed a man coming out of a tunnel while carrying a strange insect-looking creature in his hand.

He said the video was created through artificial intelligence and not from Saydnaya Prison, a vast detention complex on the outskirts of Damascus where many of those who survived interrogation at security headquarters were taken for long-term incarceration.

Observing the video showed a watermark of a TikTok account named “sanzaruu”.

Searching the videos uploaded on the account yielded the original five-second full video, dated Dec 4, 2024, alongside many similar AI-generated videos that showed people in tunnels with giant insects coming up behind them.

The was captioned: “No sir, I don’t like it #fyp #creepytok #crawlspace #ai”

Furthermore, the video was from Dec 4 whereas the Assad government fell on Dec 8, after which prisoners were set free. The video can therefore not be of a Syrian prisoner being freed from somewhere in Damascus.

FACT-CHECK STATUS: FALSE

The claim that an image of a man peeking out from an underground tunnel shows a detainee freed from a Syrian prison after the government’s fall is false.

The image is originally part of a five-second AI-generated video that was uploaded online well before the capture of Damascus and the fall of the Assad government.