Does a real video show a mother and child cowering from the shadows of two soldiers and their rifles? No, that's not true: The day after it was originally posted without an AI label, the original poster edited the description to add, in Arabic: "AI generated video." The scene includes visual anomalies that make it plain it is not a real image: shadows of the soldiers are cast long, from an afternoon or evening angle, while the woman casts no same-direction shadow, and shadows in crevices in the trench wall next to her are straight-down, noon shadows.
The video appeared in an October 28, 2025 Instagram post (archived here) on the khoubaib.bz account. The Instagram translation of the post's Arabic text was:
Fascists are being destroyed in silence.. 💔
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshot of video posted at www.instagram.com/p/DQWcpBHDRDu/.)
Also in Arabic were the following hashtags: "#السودان #الفاشر #دارفور), which Google Translate translated as "#Sudan #AlFashir #Darfur", an apparent reference to the mass killings reported by the Associated Press (archived here) in Sudan on October 28, 2025.
Lead Stories reached out on October 29, 2025 by email and direct message to the operator of the khoubaib.bz account to ask if the video was real or an AI creation. Later the same day, the post was edited to add, in Arabic, "AI generated video."
The image demonstrates how real-world logic is sometimes missing from AI-generated or manipulatively edited images. In this case, the sun shadows contradict one another, as though the sun were simultaneously straight overhead and also setting or rising near the earth's horizon behind the out-of-frame soldiers.
Consistent with the other findings about this image, the account operator appears to be an AI user. The khoubaib.bz account bio includes this description:
Khoubaib Ben Ziou
Digital creator
🎞 Digital Video Producer @aljazeera.net
🎬 Creative AI Specialist
📽 Videographer & Drone Pilot
