Conflict in Tigray: Fact-finding Misleading Imagery Spreading Online

Hundreds of people have reportedly been killed in two weeks of clashes between the Ethiopian army and forces loyal to the political leadership in the northern Tigray region.

As the conflict escalated, we witnessed continuous attempts to spread false or misleading information about the situation and not to re-publish it.

We present here fact-checking about the credibility of some of them.

The photo does not show the Prime Minister of Ethiopia on the battlefield

In the photo, the Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, in uniform, is shown speaking on the phone in a Facebook post supporting the Ethiopian army's campaign in Tigray.

There are three photos of the prime minister, and social media users have retweeted the post more than a thousand times.

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The photo was posted under the name of Thai Dandia Eridu, spokesperson for the ruling party in the Oromia region, but he used a fake photo.

Our research on the origins of the images revealed that one of them is; The one that shows him holding a mobile phone was a general photo taken for use in stories about the US military.

We traced the origin of the image posted above, and it appeared to belong to Getty Images, the well-known media image distribution company.

The photo was taken in Ukraine in 2017, but was manipulated and altered to make the soldier look like Abiy Ahmed, after adding a beard to his face.

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We contacted Tai Dandia Arido, to inquire about the photo he posted; He told us that he did not use it, but did not explain how the photo got to this post.

Fake footage of Ethiopian plane shot down

A video clip has been widely re-circulated, showing an Ethiopian military plane being shot down and then crashing with text claiming that the image was during an attack on the Tigray region.

But this footage is not real, and is a simulation of a fighting video game, apparently taken from the logs of a game called "Arma".

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There are some signs of this, such as the unnatural appearance of the blue background, and smoke billowing from the plane before it finally broke apart and dispersed in the surrounding area.

We tracked down the original version of the fighting video game and found out that it was on a Japanese YouTube channel.

The beginning and the end have been removed from the (modified) version, which was published as In Tigray. There is a statement in Japanese stating that the video is fictional and not real.

Some of the videos, which have been reposted and shared on social media, also contain an image that shows fire in the upper left part of an aircraft in the sky, which is real but not from Ethiopia.

We have traced the origin of that image, to a report in 2016, of a Jordanian Air Force F-16 crash due to a technical malfunction.

Images fromother places

There are plenty of misleading images of the attacks or their aftermath online, in some cases from other parts of the world and pre-dating the current conflict in Ethiopia.

1- One of the Facebook pages supporting the federal government's military operation appears to have used a striking image from Uzbekistan.

The photo was taken from above of a military aircraft firing missiles, and social media users reposted it to clarify what is happening in Tigray.

But after checking the picture, we find the sign of the Uzbek Air Force with "Uz Air Force A. Pecchi".

The letters "Uz" are short for Uzbekistan, and "A. Pecchi" is the name of photographer Anthony Pecchi. The photographer shared this photo on his Facebook page in January this year.

2 - Some netizens published a misleading image to show the results of an attack by the Tigray forces on the city of "Bahr Dar" in the Amhara region, while others used it to show their attack on Asmara, the capital of neighboring Eritrea.

The image used is actually of an explosion in the Chinese port city of Tianjin in 2015 at a warehouse containing dangerous chemicals.

This news was covered by the BBC, and one of the photos used in the article is exactly the same as the one published in publications dealing with the conflict in Ethiopia.

3 - One of them posted on his Facebook page a video clip claiming to be of missile attacks carried out by the Tigray forces against the Eritrean capital, Asmara (which they claim is helping the Ethiopian government in the conflict - a claim denied by Eritrea).

There have been news reports of a recent missile attack by Tigreans on Asmara, but these photos are not of that incident.

A Facebook user posted a video that looped in a two-hour broadcast, as if the event was live.

But the video, which has been retweeted more than a thousand times, is not from Eritrea at all, and was taken from a video of an Iranian missile attack on a US army base in Iraq in January of this year.

The BBC has previously published a news article about that incident that took place in Iraq, accompanied by a video, and you can see the same pictures in that story.