FALSE: This isn’t the image of Ethiopian Air Force jet bombarding multiple places held by Tigray forces
This Facebook post with an image claiming to show an Ethiopian Air Force jet bombarding multiple places held by Tigray forces north of the country is FALSE.
The 13 September 2022 post, in Afaan Oromo, reads in part: “The heroic Ethiopian Air Force has bombarded seven different important places of the Junta.”
According to the post, the bombarded places were “Dimits Woyane (DW) Television located in Mekelle city; Tekuleshe Seway Mariam where leaders and militants of the Junta were in a meeting; Dedebit and Abala in Afar region as leaders of the Junta were in a meeting”.
Other Facebook users shared the post here and here on the same date. A picture of an aircraft is accompanying the post.
Tekuleshe is in north Wollo in Amhara regional state, while Dedebit is a lowland place in northwestern Tigray region.
Al Jazeera reported that 10 people were killed in a drone attack in Tigray’s capital — Mekelle — on 13 September 2022.
Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) spokesperson Getachew Reda tweeted, as seen here and here, that the alleged attacks were carried out by the Ethiopian government forces in Mekelle but he didn’t mention any drone attack outside the region’s capital.
Dimitsi Woyane, a TPLF- affiliated broadcast media, also shared images on social media on 13 September 2022 claiming to show the broadcast’s damaged studio during the drone attack.
However, the claim image is not related to the Ethiopian Air Force bombarding the Tigray region.
Google reverse image search results established that the image is of an Algerian fighter jet in 2014.
The image was first shared by Top War, an online resource about the military on 8 September 2022. The photo is captioned “Su-30MKI (A) fighters of the Algerian Air Force”.
PesaCheck has investigated an image shared on Facebook claiming to show Ethiopian Air Force bombarding multiple places in Tigray region and finds it to be FALSE
This post is part of an ongoing series of PesaCheck fact-checks examining content marked as potential misinformation on Facebook and other social media platforms.
By partnering with Facebook and similar social media platforms, third-party fact-checking organizations like PesaCheck are helping to sort fact from fiction. We do this by giving the public deeper insight and context to posts they see in their social media feeds.
Have you spotted what you think is fake news or false information on Facebook? Here’s how you can report. And, here’s more information on PesaCheck’s methodology for fact-checking questionable content.
This fact-check was written by a PesaCheck fact-checker based in Ethiopia (name withheld for security reasons) and edited by PesaCheck senior copy editor Cédrick Irakoze and acting chief copy editor Francis Mwaniki. The article was approved for publication by PesaCheck’s managing editor Doreen Wainainah.
PesaCheck is East Africa’s first public finance fact-checking initiative. It was co-founded by Catherine Gicheru and Justin Arenstein, and is being incubated by the continent’s largest civic technology and data journalism accelerator: Code for Africa. It seeks to help the public separate fact from fiction in public pronouncements about the numbers that shape our world, with a special emphasis on pronouncements about public finances that shape government’s delivery of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) public services, such as healthcare, rural development and access to water / sanitation. PesaCheck also tests the accuracy of media reportage. To find out more about the project, visit pesacheck.org.
PesaCheck is an initiative of Code for Africa, through its innovateAFRICA fund, with support from Deutsche Welle Akademie, in partnership with a coalition of local African media and other civic watchdog organizations.