Video from Syria shared as builders punished in Turkey.

The video is not from Turkey but shows an incident of mass massacre in Syria in 2013

More than 50,000 people died in a devastating earthquake in Turkey in February. Thousands of buildings collapsed due to strong tremors that occurred one after the other.

A video is now going viral on social media in which soldiers are openly shooting civilians. The video has been shared claiming that the government in Turkey has punished corrupt builders who used vehicle tires instead of earthquake-proofing materials such as seismic dampers in their buildings.

The video shows soldiers tying the hands and eyes of the innocents and dumping them in a ditch full of tires.

However, Fact Crescendo found the claim made along with the video to be False.

The caption shared along with the viral video states, “In Turkey, the execution of builders, who used tires under the buildings, instead of seismic dampers…”

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Fact Check- 

We started our investigation by breaking the video into small key frames and running a reverse image search for the same. The results led us to a longer version of the same video published on 27 April 2022 by the Guardian’s YouTube channel. The caption of the video states, “Tadamon massacre: hidden war crimes in Syria.”

The description states, “This is the story of a war crime by one of the Syrian regime’s most notorious enforcers, branch 227 of the country’s military intelligence service.”

The video shows a massacre, which was committed in the southern suburbs of Damascus in April 2013; groups of civilians rounded up, blindfolded, handcuffed and marched towards an execution pit unaware they are about to be shot dead. 

According to the news, 41 innocent people were openly killed by the forces of Syrian President Bashar-al-Assad in an area near the city of Damascus.

Keeping the above information in mind, we ran another keyword search that led us to DW Documentary’s YouTube channel. Posting the viral video on 22 July 2022, the description stated that the video was recently leaked in 2022 showing a mass shooting in 2013 for the first time. The disturbing scenes were filmed in the Syrian capital of Damascus. On April 16, 2013, President Assad’s security forces shot ten innocent civilians dead in under seven minutes.

It turned out that a soldier in Assad’s army who gave the video to Syrian war researchers in 2019. Then it was made public for the first time in 2022. According to theconversation.com, the man massacring the innocents was identified as Amjad Youssef, a warrant officer from the Damascus Office of Military Intelligence (Branch 227). He was filmed executing several dozens of people. You can read a press statement by USA on this incident here.

The viral video is available on the internet months before the massive earthquake hit Turkey which makes it clear that the viral video is not from Turkey showing their soldiers killing the builders for poor construction of the their building.

Conclusion- 

Fact Crescendo found the claim made along with the viral video to be False. The video does not show Turkish soldier punishing corrupt builders who used vehicle tires instead of earthquake-proofing materials such as seismic dampers in their buildings after the massive earthquake that hit Turkey in February. The video shows an incident that took place in 2013 in Syria where several innocents were massacred.