What was claimed
A video shows the Syrian Arab Army firing at Hayat Tahrir al-Sham positions in Hama in Syria.
Our verdict
False. This video dates back to at least 2017 and shows scenes from a shooting range in Kentucky, US.
Clip from Kentucky shooting range misleadingly shared as scenes in Syria
A clip is circulating on social media with claims it shows recent events in Syria, but it's actually footage from a shooting range in the US.
The video was filmed in the dark and shows shots being fired into the distance, where there are flames and smoke. It was shared on X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook on 4 December with a caption claiming it shows “scenes from Hama, the Syrian Arab Army fire upon Hayat Tahrir al-Sham positions.”
Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) is a rebel group that led a surprise offensive launched in northwestern Syria on 27 November which took control of a number of cities including Hama, despite airstrikes from Syrian government forces and Russia.
The opposition forces went on to seize the capital Damascus unopposed on Sunday, 8 December, ousting the former president Bashar al-Assad, who fled to Russia where he has reportedly been granted asylum. His deposition follows a 13-year civil war in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed, and ends more than 50 years of the Assad family’s rule.
But this clip predates these events and does not relate to Syria.
It was shared on Facebook in 2017 by a US company selling firearm accessories with the caption: “Knob Creek 2017 #knobcreek @knob_creek_machineguns”, which refers to a shooting range in Kentucky.
This is not the first time the clip has been mislabelled—ABC News shared the video in its coverage of a Turkish offensive into northern Syria in October 2019. The organisation reportedly said it “regrets the error”.
We’ve seen other miscaptioned content relating to recent events in Syria, including a photo claiming to be the first picture of Bashar al-Assad and his wife in Moscow that is actually from 2023, and an image supposedly showing a man found in an underground cell at Saydnaya prison in Damascus that is in fact a screenshot from a video created with artificial intelligence.
It’s important to check that posts on social media show what they claim to before sharing them—our guides on verifying misleading images and videos provide some useful tips for doing this.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because the clip shows a shooting range in Kentucky, not recent events in Syria.