Syrian Regime Propaganda at Work

Twitter user Free Syrian tweeted about the following video today, that was apparently shown on pro-Assad Syrian TV channel Addounia TV.

The gentleman in the video is an Algerian claiming to be staying in Homs, and denounces the "fake" footage of Homs being shown on Al Jazeera Arabic, filming both the television to show the Al Jazeera footage of Homs, and outside his hotel window, "proving" the Al Jazeera footage is "fake".
Unfortuantly for our dimwitted Algerian friend he makes a few key mistakes while filming the video.  One thing you should always avoid doing if you are going to pretend to be somewhere you are not is giving the viewer a chance to figure out where you actually are, such as clearly filming the lay out of streets and buildings, or filming signs with phone numbers on them that include the area code, as Bjoern H Jespersen noted on Twitter (from 4:38):

963 11 is the dialing code for Damascus.
Of course, this doesn't necessarily prove anything, there's plenty of signs across the world that have dialing codes for all sorts of places, but it does give us somewhere to look.  Having examined the street layout and position of the buildings and trees, it seems this is the location the video was filmed, marked by the green arrow:


View Larger Map

The cameraman was facing southeast, and from there you can see some key landmarks.  For example, there's a tall apartment block in the east, with a distinct pattern of windows, 2 on the left, one in the middle, and one on the right, running up the length of the building, which can be seen in the background on the video at 4:25:

On the satellite map you can also see that across the road to the east there's two small square structures on top of what could be a small building:

On the video at 4:30 you can clearly see the two structures are two canopies on top of a two story building, and you can even see the position of trees outside of the video matches what's on the map:

This is just a few examples of the wealth of evidence that proves that despite what Addounia and their Algerian friend might say this certaintly was not filmed in Homs.  A perfect example of regime propaganda.

You can contact the author on Twitter @brown_moses or by email at brownmoses@gmail.com