Fact-checking: Tajikistan spread fake information using a photo of a mosque in Syria

Citizens of Tajikistan spread the photo of the burnt mosque through social media and wrote that it was destroyed by Kyrgyzstan.

In order to verify the authenticity of the information, we fact check the open sources and found that it is the Umayyad Mosque in the city of Aleppo, Syria. According to Russian press,  in 2013, the terrorist group “Jabhat-an-Nusra” attacked the Souq-al-Madina region of Aleppo. The Syrian Army encircled the terrorists and blocked them in the Mosque. The surrounded terrorists exploded the mosque n order to break out of the siege.  As a result, the southern wall of the mosque collapsed along with the minaret.

In 2017, the head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, transferred 14 million dollars from the fund named after Akmat Kadyrov to repair the mosque. The group that works on mosque restorations said that the restoration process takes about eight years.

In 636, when the Arabs conquered the city of Damascus and established the Umayyad Caliphate, there was a church built by Byzantine Christians on the site of the mentioned mosque. In 705, Al-Walid I Abdul-Malik, who became the caliph of the Umayyads, bought land near the church in 706 and started building the mosque. Construction work was completed in 715.

The Umayyad Mosque is included in the UNESCO World Heritage List as one of the oldest buildings in the world.