Case studies
Real cases, each checked against its own sources. The first ones you can act on this week. The later ones are warnings. They are here because knowing how this goes wrong is worth as much as knowing how it goes right.
Iraq
An Iraqi MP's face was put on a dancer's body, a fact-check proved it, and the video stayed up
SMEX documented a deepfake aimed at a sitting Iraqi MP during the October 2025 election campaign. The verification worked and changed nothing, which is the part to plan around.
Iraq
An Iraqi court gave six years for AI-fabricated blackmail images, under a penal code written before the internet
Shafaq News reported an al-Rusafa conviction in October 2025 and named the articles it rested on. The charge that worked was an ordinary threat charge, which changes what anyone supporting a woman in this situation should be collecting.
Global
A global mapping of AI in transitional justice names Colombia 25 times and Iraq none
We counted the words in Impunity Watch's November 2025 mapping report. Iraq, Yazidi and Kurdish appear zero times in 141,651 characters, and being precise about what that does and does not prove is the whole point.
Syria
SJAC made OCR providers swappable while keeping human correction visible
Bayanat 4 separates document preservation, machine extraction and human review, and shows why those counts should never be merged.
Iraq
A Sorani Kurdish name-tagging dataset is now openly licensed, and its labels were made by matching a word list rather than by hand
654,404 labelled tokens from four Kurdish newsrooms, released under CC BY. What it gives anyone building or buying Kurdish-language tools, and the four limits its own authors write down.
Global
The tested models gave weaker refugee-information answers in Sorani than in English
A multilingual evaluation shows why legal and protection information needs fluent expert review in the language used by the person seeking help.
Qatar
A Qatari court barred confidential material from public AI tools
After fabricated authorities appeared in a case, one court issued a practical rule for verification and protected information.