Video does not show Nigerian soldiers in Niger, but rather in Sierra Leone years ago

This article is more than one year old.
Published on August 11, 2023 at 14:46
2 min read
By Fikayo OWOEYE, AFP Nigeria

A video clip has been shared online with claims that it shows Nigerian soldiers in Niger, implying that they were sent to restore the country’s elected president Mohamed Bazoum to power after he was deposed in a military coup. However, this is false: the footage in question is more than two decades old and was not filmed in Niger. It was filmed in Sierra Leone in 1998, where Nigerian soldiers were sent to help fight rebels.

“Nigerian army at Niger,” reads a TikTok post published on July 27, 2023 – the day after the coup – and which has since gathered over 5,700 shares.

It includes a one-minute video showing men in uniform carrying out a military operation.

A screenshot showing the false post, taken on August 10, 2023

The claim has also appeared on Facebook here and here.

Not everyone commenting on the TikTok post believed the video was filmed in Niger, with some suggesting it was from Cameroon.

A screenshot showing comments on the false post, taken on August 10, 2023

On July 26, 2023, members of Niger’s presidential guard staged a coup and ousted Bazoum, the country’s democratically elected president.

The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), chaired by Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu, gave the troops who seized power in Niger a seven-day ultimatum to reinstate Bazoum or face the potential use of force, but coup leaders defied the warning. The deadline passed on August 6, 2023 with no action taken.

Meanwhile, leaders of ECOWAS met on August 10 and ordered the activation of a “standby force” for possible use against the Niger’s coup generals (archived here). The bloc did not provide more details on the force to be deployed or the timeline for actions against the coup leaders.

But the claim that the clip shows Nigerian soldiers already in Niger is false.

Footage from 1998

Using the InVID-WeVerify video verification tool, AFP Fact Check found the original footage on the YouTube channel of the Associated Press news agency (archived here).

While the video was uploaded to YouTube eight years ago, the footage itself is much older.

The caption explains that this archival footage was filmed in February 1998 in Sierra Leone and shows a Nigerian-led intervention force in Goderich, a district of the capital Freetown.

At the time, Sierra Leone was in the midst of a long-running civil war (archived here).

The Nigerian-led West African intervention force ECOMOG (the Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group) had been deployed to the area to drive out rebels.

AFP Fact Check has debunked multiple false claims about the recent coup in Niger (see here, here and here).

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