After launching an offensive in late November, Syrian opposition forces have declared Syria liberated from the rule of President Bashar al-Assad. Assad and his family fled the capital city of Damascus and have been granted asylum in Russia.

The Assad family had been in power in Syria since the 1971 Presidency of Hafez al-Assad, with his son, Bashar al-Assad, succeeding him in 2000 after the death of Bashar’s older brother (and heir-apparent) in 1994. Originally a doctor, Bashar trained to be an ophthalmologist in London. As a result, in the wake of his removal from power, some users are claiming that he will “return to ophthalmology” in Russia instead.

The claim post, which has garnered over 2.2 million views, is by an X account called AF Post that self-describes as a providing “news and alerts from around the world.” The X account links to a platform that contains both editorial pieces and a “news feed” which simply links back to the X account.
This seemingly creates a closed circuit – some of the headlines listed in the news feed do not appear to be from any actual articles, nor is any further content appended below the claim post. Despite being presented as a news update, they are merely posted on the AF Post X account and linked in the website “news feed,” resulting in a loop of, essentially, nothing.

A thorough search of news from the past few days has revealed no article with the same (or even vaguely similar) headlines – apart from one. An article posted on satirical platform the Onion on 10 December is titled “Assad returns to ophthalmology at Moscow LensCrafters.”
Even at a glance, the Onion article appears clearly satirical (with even the cover image being a poorly photoshopped parody image). However, it is the only other mention online of Assad returning to Ophthalmology. It is unclear if the AF Post headline was inspired by the Onion post, fabricated independently by a human, or even scraped from the internet by bots.  However, it is clear that the claim post is unsubstantiated and based on actual information.

The most recent (and only) update at the time of writing is that Assad and his family fled to Russia and were granted asylum in Moscow for “humanitarian reasons.” No further indication about Assad’s future has been given either by Russia or Assad himself – whose last public appearance was on 1 December in Damascus.
Therefore, the widely viewed claim post appears to be entirely fabricated. We give it a rating of false.

Despite how easily this claim can be fact-checked, the large amount of views garnered by the post is worrying. Even more significant is that a sizable number of responses seemed to take the post at face value. We noticed other Assad-related posts had comments referencing his return to Ophthalmology as though it were a confirmed fact.

The nature of the source, AF Post, with its blue checkmark and linked news platform can be hugely misleading to the casual social media user. Producing headlines without sources or even an article (in some cases) amidst other posts with legitimate news adds to the confusion and reaches many eyes – spreading misinformation along the way.