An old fake video is going viral again: in early September, a number of English-speaking accounts shared an old clip allegedly showing "Muslim" terrorists threatening to burn down churches in France, including Paris's Notre-Dame Cathedral. The FRANCE 24 Observers team showed in late January that the clip had been entirely fabricated.
Is Notre-Dame being threatened by "Muslims in France"? On September 8, the pro-Trump account, Right Angle News Network, shared with its 260,000 followers on X what it presented as a threatening video of terrorists burning a model of Paris's Notre-Dame Cathedral.
The account claimed in a post viewed nearly three million times that "Muslims in France are threatening to burn down the Notre-Dame Cathedral" unless French authorities release Brahim Aouissaoui, the Tunisian national who killed three people in a terrorist attack on Nice's Basilica of Notre-Dame in 2020.
In the video, three hooded men dressed in black say in Arabic that if he "is not set free, God's wrath will be upon your people here in France!"
"Your churches will be burned by God's will," concludes the person in the centre of the video.
At the end of the clip, the person on the right begins burning a model of Paris's Notre-Dame Cathedral with a torch. A blue and white logo, supposedly representing an affiliation with HTS, is visible on the sleeve of each person. Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) is the Islamist group that was formerly led by Syria's interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa.
This video is not new: the FRANCE 24 Observers team had already verified this footage in January 2025.
On January 28, ultra-conservative British account "Jim Ferguson", one of the first to share the video, claimed that it was released by "militants" from HTS, which came to power in Syria in December 2024. The video is still available online and has been viewed more than 11 million times.
But many factors cast doubt on the authenticity of these threats. "No, HTS is not calling for the release of people in France and is not threatening to burn down Paris's Notre-Dame Cathedral," Wassim Nasr, a journalist at FRANCE 24 and specialist in jihadist movements, wrote at the time on X.
"Everything about this video circulating on social media is ridiculous, from the message to the Egyptian accent, the outfits, and the model," he said.
Nasr described it to our team as a "ridiculous and absurd staging". He pointed out that the video was distributed through an "anonymous channel" and that the video was not shared through the usual channels of the HTS group. He also said the group was "seeking recognition" from countries such as France.
This point was also emphasised by Broderick McDonald, an expert on jihadist groups in Syria at Oxford University, who believes that the video appears to be "100%" fake: "The people in the video seem to have tried to copy certain elements of the HTS logo, but the result is far from identical and does not resemble any of the traditional allied groups that have fought alongside HTS over the past decade," he told our team.
An Arabic-speaking journalist on our team also noted the "poor language skills" in the video, pointing out that the men did not speak with a Syrian accent.
Who is behind this operation?
The origin of the account behind the disinformation is difficult to determine with certainty. The Arabic-language account, named Hadi Alaradah, posted the video on January 26 and has since been suspended. This account had not shared any other content before releasing the footage.
However, there are a few elements that suggest a pro-Russian origin.
Among those who shared the video on X is Chay Bowes, a correspondent for the Russian channel RT. This identified conduit of Russian disinformation is part of the Foundation for Battling Injustice, as Darren Linvill, a researcher at Clemson University, pointed out on X when Bowes shared a fake video about the US presidential election.
Several Arabic-language websites also shared this disinformation in very similar articles, such as here and here. Among them is the Egyptian website Elaosboa, which had already shared at least two pieces of Russian disinformation in the summer of 2024.
This site had notably broadcast another fake threatening video, this time attributed to Hamas, a few days before the start of the Paris Olympics. The footage was also shared by identified pro-Kremlin influencers, such as Aussie Cossack.
All of these elements are reminiscent of the modus operandi of pro-Russian interference regularly observed throughout 2024.