(Trigger Warning: Due to the violent nature of the incident, the description of it might be triggering for some users. Discretion advised.)
A brutal video showing a mass grave is being shared on social media claiming that the clip shows people being shot dead and thrown in a pit of dead bodies because they refused to observe fast during Ramzan in Syria.
However, the video dates back to 2013 and shows numerous people getting executed. The incident took place during the Syrian Civil War, where 97,000 people were killed in the year 2013 alone.
CLAIM
One of the captions of the viral claim says, "This is in Islamic Nation Syria..where those who have been shot dead are the Kafirs who didn't observe the fast during the Ramzan festival. A mass grave has been dugged and all those who didn't fast were blindfolded and shot dead and burrows in the mass grave.(sic)"
(Note: Due to the graphic nature of the video we have refrained from using any archived links.)
The Quint also received the same video on its WhatsApp tipline.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
We divided the video into multiple keyframes using the InVID WeVerify Google Chrome extension and ran a reverse image search on them on Google Images.
We came across an article published by The Guardian, which was published on 27 April 2022.
The article carried the viral video and a few screenshots from the video, and it stated that the footage dates back to 16 April 2013.
The article titled 'Massacre in Tadamon: how two academics hunted down a Syrian war criminal' stated that the footage accessed by them showed a war crime committed in a Damascus suburb, named Tadamon, in 2013.
The report added that at least 41 civilians were killed and dumped in the mass grave at Tadamon, which was a battlefront in 2013 during the conflict between the forces loyal to the Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad, and rebels.
One more report by New Lines Magazine, was found which was published on 27 April 2022. It also talked about the massacre of 2013.
The US Department of State also took note of the video.
In 2013, the month of Ramzan was marked between 9 July to 7 August, which dismisses the claims of people getting killed for not fasting during Ramzan as the video was shot in April 2013.
Clearly, an old video from Syria, shot in 2013, was shared with a false claim of people being murdered because they refused to keep fast during Ramzan.
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