Burmese posts share old video with false claim it shows 'Myanmar military helicopter shot down by rebels'
- Published on August 28, 2024 at 10:00
- 4 min read
- By AFP Thailand
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"An attack helicopter of the military council was recently shot down with an anti-aircraft machine gun in Hpakant, Kachin," read the Burmese-language caption of a Facebook video shared on August 16, 2024.
The video -- which has been watched more than 94,000 times -- appears to show a helicopter plummeting to the ground after a mid-air explosion.
The "military council" referenced in the caption is the military junta that ousted Myanmar's democratically elected government in a coup in 2021, plunging the country into civil war (archived link).
Three years on, anti-coup "People's Defence Forces" have enlisted tens of thousands of young recruits and are taking the fight to the junta across swathes of the country.
The video circulated after local media reported the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), an ethnic rebel group, had seized two military bases in Hpakant in northern Kachin state in August (archived links here and here).
The same clip was also shared elsewhere on Facebook here and here alongside similar claims.
But the video does not show a military helicopter in Myanmar and, as of August 27, there have been no official reports of a military helicopter in Myanmar being shot down in Hpakant.
'Turkish military helicopter'
A reverse image search using keyframes on Google from the clip led to a longer version of the video published by the Washington Post newspaper on May 15, 2016 (archived link).
The video used in the false posts appears to be a zoomed in and mirrored version of the longer clip.
The Washington Post video is titled, "Video appears to show Kurdish militants shooting down Turkish military helicopter".
"Media affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a leftist militant group battling the Turkish state, posted a video purporting to show a fighter downing a Cobra attack helicopter with a man-portable air-defense system — or MANPADS — in the mountains of southeastern Turkey on Friday morning," read the video's description.
The video was credited to Gerilla TV, which is associated with the PKK and whose logo can also be seen on the top-left corner of the video.
Below is a screenshot comparison of the video in the false posts (left) and the video published by the Washington Post (right):
AFP reported that two military pilots were killed when their Cobra helicopter went down during fighting in an area close to the Iraqi border (archived link).
At the time, the pro-PKK Firat news site claimed that the helicopter had been downed by PKK fighters and the army initially blamed it on a technical issue before saying it may have been shot down.
Further investigation found the archived link of what appears to be the original footage published in an article on May 15, 2016 by the English-language Ekurd Daily, which reports about Iraq's northern Kurdish autonomous region (archived link).
It said that PKK released footage of the Cobra helicopter being shot down by Kurdish guerillas on May 13, 2016.
Below is a screenshot comparison between the archived version of the video thumbnail on Wayback Machine (left) and the Washington Post video (right):
The video's Turkish-language title says: "Revolutionary Operation - Cukurca border line on May 13, 2016."
Myanmar fact-checking group BeWise Verify also debunked the claim on August 21, 2024 (archived link).
AFP has previously factchecked other misinformation related to clashes involving the military and rebels in Myanmar here, here and here.
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