Video shows training drill for special forces in Indonesia, not Kenya

This article is more than one year old.
Published on October 26, 2022 at 13:27
2 min read
By James OKONG'O, AFP South Africa, AFP Indonesia

A video showing military instructors firing their rifles into a mud pit as recruits crawl their way to the other side has been shared on social media alongside a claim that it depicts troops in Kenya undergoing training. But the claim is false: the clip shows a special forces training drill in Indonesia called “dopper”.

The video was published on Facebook on October 16, 2022, and has since been shared more than 100 times.

Screenshot showing the false post, taken on October 21, 2022

“KDF TRAINING,” reads part of the post’s caption.

KDF means Kenya Defence Forces – the official name for Kenya’s army, air force, and navy.

The 30-second clip shows several soldiers in camouflage uniform emptying their rifle magazines into a muddy depression in the ground. Individuals dressed as troops slowly crawl along their stomachs through the mud while the live rounds pop on each side of them.

The rest of the post's caption, written in Swahili, translates to: “If I could have been part of this kind of training, I would have died long time ago.”

The clip was also published on TikTok with a claim that it shows Kenya’s Recce squad commandos in training.

Kenya’s Recce squad is a special forces team composed of elite officers picked from the General Service Unit (GSU) of the police.

However, the footage is unrelated to Kenya.

Indonesia forces training drill

Using the video verification tool InVID-WeVerify, AFP Fact Check ran reverse image searches on keyframes from the clip and found the same footage on YouTube channels in Indonesia, including this video uploaded by news outlet Tribun Timur on October 25, 2020.

The Indonesian caption translates to: “Take a peek at the TNI's super hard exercise, brutal and very terrible.”

TNI is the short form for “Tentara Nasional Indonesia” or Indonesia National Army in English.

According to the news outlet, the footage shows a training routine called “dopper” in which an elite unit of Indonesian soldiers crawl through a patch of mud while instructors fire live rounds on either side of them.

In the original video, which is 59 seconds longer than the clip posted on Facebook and TikTok, people can be heard speaking Indonesian.

Eight seconds in, a man can be heard saying: “This is Mr Rahman, our dopper instructor.” Then at 69 seconds, an instructor says: “You in the middle, back off...”

KDF confirmed that the video doesn’t show its troops.

“Our officers perform some form of crawl drills during training, but this video does not show Kenyan troops,” KDF told AFP Fact Check.

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