FALSE: This image does not show an Ethiopian army drone shot down by TPLF at Chew Ber
The images have been online since August 2019, before the Tigray conflict began in November 2020.
An image being used to show an Ethiopian military drone gunned-down by the Tigray Forces at Chew Ber is FALSE.
“ Breaking: Today TDF shot down an Ethiopian drone at chew ber town.” reads the post in Amharic.
Chew ber is a village in Ethiopia.
Northern Ethiopia has been under armed conflicts since November 2020. The battle pits the national army and the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which at some point rebranded to Tigray Defence Forces (TDF).
On 10 January 2022, the United States President Joe Biden spoke with his Ethiopian counterpart, Abiy Ahmed, about a possible window for peace in the long-running war in the country.
Despite the ongoing conflict, reverse image search shows that the photo in the claim has been online in contexts unrelated to Ethiopia.
The Amerika Pilot Akademisi news website published the image on 9 August 2019 in an article, “U.S. MQ-1C Gray Eagle Aircraft Reportedly Crashed in Iraq” and other articles bearing a similar timeline as seen here and here.
PesaCheck has looked into a Facebook post claiming to show a drone belonging to the Ethiopian army gunned-down by Tigray Forces at Chew Ber 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 chief copy editor Rose Lukalo. The article was approved for publication by PesaCheck acting 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.
