Hiba Ezzideen Al-Hajji is a Syrian women’s rights defender and the Executive Director of the Equity & Empowerment organisation. In July 2023, Al-Hajji and her team became the subjects of a defamation campaign. The campaign commenced with the dissemination of offensive social media content, followed by the propagation of fabricated and explicit imagery via the messaging platforms Telegram and WhatsApp. The campaign reached a new level of intensity when a mosque imam in Idlib publicly incited violence against Al-Hajji and her organisation. Despite reporting the incidents to the relevant platforms, the defamatory content remained accessible for several days, significantly endangering her safety and that of her team. 

Then after Al-Hajji published a Facebook post addressing the serious issue of abducted women and forced marriage, and the absence of accountability, on 20 April 2025, a coordinated defamation campaign was launched against her by individuals affiliated with the current authorities and anonymous online actors. The situation escalated quickly from harassment to incitement to violence, endangering Al-Hajji, her family and her staff. Her Facebook messaging was flooded with death threats, and online posts began inciting people to attack the Equity and Empowerment centre in Idlib, to burn it down, and to kill Al-Hajji.

In response to the defamation campaign and false claims, on 22 April 2025, the police shut down the centre, and the governor publicly announced on Facebook that he had asked the public prosecutor to open a case against Al-Hajji for “insulting the hijab” (headscarf), which she didn’t refer to at all in her video.