Investigating Media Manipulation in Syria

Peace be upon you.

Today's investigation is about how influential people use the media and social

media to polish their image.

Reputation Management, or managing one's reputation in Arabic, requires a public relations plan

and putting together a team.

A team that studies what people are saying about you, the accusations against you,

who's with you and who's against you, and how you can present yourself differently,

while denying all the accusations against you.

Imagine a public relations plan for a well-known Syrian figure falls into your hands, and you start

looking into the person behind it, only to suddenly find yourselves facing an

international espionage case.

Let me tell you how the story began. On June 12,

2026, Syria 360 published an article titled

"Journalist Exposes a Heavily Funded Campaign to Polish Mohammed

Hamsho's Image."

The article quoted journalist Mohammed Al-Fattal, saying that after the fall of the Assad regime, someone contacted

him and offered him a job opportunity.

The job was to manage a public relations campaign for businessman Mohammed Hamsho.

According to Al-Fattal, a specialized team had a work plan prepared

in full to reintroduce Hamsho to Syrian public opinion.

Since the media is our game, we decided to investigate the matter,

and discovered that this job opportunity had been offered to three people other than Al-Fattal.

We contacted all of them, and they gave us two important details.

One: the person who contacted them to hire them for Mohammad

Hamsho's campaign

was named Oweis.

Two: he was speaking in a Palestinian dialect.

We obtained the file Oweis had been sending, three PDF pages with a very

simple title, "The Public Relations Plan."

We opened the file and began reading. Gathering negative information and rumors

circulating about Mohammad Hamsho, identifying their sources and analyzing them.

Dividing the public into supporters, neutrals, and opponents.

Building a positive image as a philanthropist and supporter of national goals.

Then we came to one of the most important sentences in the document.

Emphasizing that Mohammad Hamsho supports the revolution from behind the scenes for

strategic reasons.

Highlight his charitable work. Assign a team to monitor rumors and respond

to them quickly and effectively. Leverage influential figures

to defend him.

Of course, we won't mention the influential figures because we all know them

well. The document was a detailed plan to rehabilitate

Mohammad Hamsho's

image after Assad's fall.

And that raised a question.

Who is this Owais who speaks Palestinian and was forming a team to work on Hamsho's

public relations plan?

We started with the file itself.

Any PDF file contains information hidden from the average user called metadata,

or descriptive data in Arabic. We analyzed the file's metadata and discovered the

following.

The program used was Microsoft Word.

The recorded creation date was December 21,

2024, just 13 days after the fall of the Assad regime.

فقط.

The author's name was written in English: Palestine Forever.

It means Palestine Forever, but it's misspelled. There was another important detail we found

It was in the file's metadata, the time zone: UTC+3.

This detail helped us narrow our search to countries using this time zone when the file was issued:

Syria, Jordan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia.

We turned the world upside down looking for Owais.

We left no stone unturned. Hospital, police, prison,

media, even obituary records. We searched for his name in Arabic and its

various English spellings, as well as published information on people who had lived between Syria,

Jordan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. We found nothing.

How can someone working in public relations have no trace on the internet?

After long weeks of searching,

a source contacted us and told us to look for Owais in Turkey.

We searched the Turkish press and found the name Owais Al-Awawdeh.

There's something strange about Owais Al-Awawdeh, because he has another name in Turkey.

Faisal Kerimoglu. According to Turkish reports, Owais was born

in Jordan, of Palestinian origin, and holds Turkish citizenship.

That's when we began tracing his life back. From 2006 to 2010, Owais was

He was in Syria and supposedly worked in the marble trade.

In 2012, he moved to Lebanon and met someone who used the name Ali Ahmed

Yassin.

Ali Ahmed Yassin posed as a businessman working with a company based in

Austria, but open sources revealed that he was a spy who

worked with several intelligence agencies.

During the same period, Owais was in contact with a Turkish businessman named Mohammed

Budak Derya, who also worked in marble.

On March 31, 2013, Owais traveled from Lebanon to Turkey,

and the next day, he met Mohammed Budak Derya.

The two began working together in the marble trade, and their business expanded across the Middle

East and Europe.

During his work in the marble trade, Owais Al-Awawdeh proposed the idea

of trading in and shipping drone parts to Mohammed Budak

Derya. The plan involved obtaining drone parts from Hong

Kong to sell them to a Tunisian engineer named Mohammed

Zouari.

If you haven't heard the name before, Zouari was a Tunisian aeronautical engineer specializing

in developing drones,

and he oversaw the Qassam Brigades' drone system.

On December 15, 2016, Mohamed Zouari

was assassinated in a shooting inside his car in front of his home

in the Tunisian city of Sfax.

Tunisian authorities announced that preliminary investigations indicated the possible involvement of a

security agency in the operation.

In 2018, Owais visited Lebanon three times to buy phone top-up cards

and internet devices, and he sent their numbers

to outside parties.

In 2023, Owais returned to Lebanon and bought 14

SIM cards and ten modems at the direction of someone

named Michael.

On August 17, 2024, Owais traveled to

France, then crossed by land into Belgium with

Michael, where he underwent a lie detector test

inside a hotel,

but we did not learn which entity subjected him to this test.

Four months later, we return to Syria and to the file from which we began the entire investigation.

December 21, 2024. A PDF file

titled "Public Relations Plan."

A plan to polish Mohammad Hamsho's image before the Syrian public, which is being worked on by

Owais Al-Awada.

So where is Owais today?

On February 6, 2026, Turkish intelligence and counterterrorism police

in Istanbul announce a security operation called Monitum.

They detain two people.

Mohammad Budak Derya

and Faisal Karimoglu.

Faisal Karimoglu, whose real name, according to Turkish reports, is Owais

Al-Awada.

Why were Mohammad Budak Derya and Owais Al-Awada detained? What was the charge?

Spying for the Mossad.

Owais Al-Awada, the man who drafted the public relations plan and formed

a team to rehabilitate and polish Mohammad Hamsho's image, 13 days

after the fall of the Assad regime, was arrested in Istanbul on charges of spying for

the Mossad. We reiterate, Owais Al-Awada, the man who drafted

the public relations plan and formed a team to rehabilitate and polish Mohammad

Hamsho's image 13 days after the fall of the Assad regime, was arrested

in Istanbul on charges of spying for the Mossad.

This was our investigation for today. Peace be upon you and God's mercy

and His blessings.