Rebel fighters have captured Syria's Aleppo, Idlib and Hama in the biggest offensive against Bashar Assad's government in years. Syrian and Russian airstrikes on rebel positions have also been taking place. In the aftermath of these events, social media has seen a surge of posts, many of them spreading misleading and false content.

A photo that depicts a man hanging from a ceiling and being tortured by another man has gone viral on X. The tortured man has visible bruises and cuts all over his body. The photo is supposed to show the torture of Syrian civilians by the Assad regime.

Indeed, several human rights organizations have accused the Syrian government of torture and other abuses in the past. DW has reported on them in detail. But what about this specific picture? DW Fact check analyzed it. 

Claim:  "A photo found on the phones of one of Assad's secular thugs after capturing him, showing the torture of a Syrian civilian," says this viral post on X. This post alone has been shared more than four million times. Many other users have shared it on other social media platforms likeFacebook and Reddit, alleging it shows the torture of Syrians at the hands of Bashar Assad's regime.

DW Fact check: False 

A reverse image search shows the photo appears online in a Farsi language article which can be found here and alocal website report about an exhibition at the Ebrat Museum in Tehran, Iran. We found photos with the same setting on the museum's own website as well.

We confirmed the results by looking at other sources and information on the Ebrat Museum in the Iranian capital. The museum displays wax figures in scenes showing how political prisoners were held in horrible conditions and subjected to torture and inhumane treatment by Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi's secret police (SAVAK) during the 1970s.

Time magazine described the agency as having "virtually unlimited powers to arrest and interrogate, SAVAK has tortured and murdered thousands of the Shah's opponents " in February 1979. Mohammed Reza Shah became monarch in 1941 but declared martial law in 1949 after an attempted assassination. After that, he imprisoned political opponents and restricted criticism of the royal family in the press.

The museum's official website is active and shows many similar wax figures.  The exhibition shows various common methods of torture used by SAVAK at the time. 

We found several different photos of the same exhibition from slightly different perspectives and with minor changes over the years. 

This picture is from 2019 and can be traced back to the photo agency Picture Alliance. Here you see an Iranian woman, most likely a tourist, in the foreground.  You can see that the small table that was against the wall in the photo in the X post appears to have been moved. The board with the Farsi text hanging on the wall was not there yet. The photo was taken by Ebrahim Noroozi for AP on January 7, 2019, according to the metadata.

Picture Alliance also offers more pictures of the prison-turned-museum. The prison was turned into a museum in the early 2000s.  While it captures a dark chapter in Iran's history, it's important to point out that the current regime has also been accused of human rights abuses for years. One of the previous SAVAK prisons, Evin prison, is still being used today and has earned a notorious reputation for human rights abuses and mistreatment of prisoners. 

We also came across photos of the museum on Trip Advisor that resemble the photo posted on X. One visitor posted this photo from the wax museum taken in October 2017. In this image, there are framed pictures of the former royal family hanging on the wall. You can also see the Iranian flag before the Islamic Revolution. 

The claim posted on X about the torture of a Syrian civilian shows an image of a cell phone screen. The quality is naturally lower than that of the original image. Lower-quality images can sometimes make things appear more real. Here the wax figures could be mistaken for actual humans.

Assad's forces committed crimes against civilians

Although this particular image is misrepresented, that doesn't necessarily mean that President Bashar Assad's forces have not been committing torture in Syria.

In 2011, Assad led a brutal clampdown on Arab Spring protests calling for an end to his authoritarian rule, leading to the outbreak of the Syrian civil war.

Parties to the conflict have changed over the years, and have included groups that ran the ideological gamut from moderate rebels who sprang out of the protest movement to the extremist "Islamic State" (IS) group. 

Assad is accused of using violence, arbitrary arrest and torture against civilians. The Syrian government is known for detaining individuals including journalists, human rights activists and lawyers.  The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has also ordered President Assad to take action against torture, and a UN report even accused the Syrian regime of using chemical weapons against their own civilians.

Nicolas Hammerschlag Vicuna contributed to this report.

Edited by: Rayna Breuer, Carla Bleiker