“Smile, General.” The truth about Maxim Khalil’s speech about his opposition to the Assad regime

Pages and accounts on social media circulated a video clip of an interview with the Syrian actor Maxim Khalil, the hero of the series “Smile, General”, which is being shown during the current Ramadan season, and it was said that he talks about his role in the series and his opinion opposing the regime in Damascus.

Khalil appears in the rolling clip, known for his opposition to the head of the Syrian regime, Bashar al-Assad, and he talks about support for the protesters in Syria, according to the fact-finding service of France Press.

The accompanying comments read, “Maxim Khalil talks about his role in the series Smile, General, and why he is an opposition.”

This claim has garnered hundreds of posts and tens of thousands of interactions on social media.

The emergence of this claim comes in light of the great controversy that this series caused on the communication sites, between supporters and opponents of the Syrian regime, as the characters and events of the series were considered parallel to the personalities of the regime in Damascus and the events that took place there in the past years, despite the assertion of its curators that its events are fictional.

The fact of the rolling section

However, the circulating clip has nothing to do with the series “Smile, General,” which was written by Samer Radwan and directed by Urwa Muhammad, and it will be shown this Ramadan.

This circulating clip, according to the fact-checking service of France Press, is part of an interview by Maxim Khalil, who is currently residing outside Syria, with MBC channel within the “Al-Hakam” program, as it appears in the background of the circulating video.

It suffices to search on Google or YouTube using the words “Maxim Khalil, MBC, Al-Hakam” to find several news, articles and video clips published on the Internet years ago about this interview that took place during the year 2014, and the program’s page on Facebook at the time was published with the title Maxim Khalil: This is why I support the Syrian revolution.