Video shows militants abducting Malian soldiers, not Nigerian troops

Published on June 17, 2025 at 15:27
3 min read
By Samad UTHMAN, AFP Nigeria

For months now, Nigeria and the Sahel have witnessed a resurgence of militant activities and growing insecurity. An Instagram account has published a video claiming it shows Nigerian troops being abducted by local criminals who raided their camp. However, the claim is false; the soldiers in the clip are Malians abducted by Al-Qaeda-backed Jama'at Nasr al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) fighters during an attack on their military camp in eastern Mali near the border with Burkina Faso.

“Sorosoke!!! Shocking clip of some bandits boldly loading men of the Nigerian army on bikes after raiding their camp,” reads the caption of an Instagram post circulating in Nigeria since June 7, 2025. The term “bandits” in Nigeria refers to organised criminal gangs.

Screenshot showing the false post, taken June 16, 2025

“Sorosoke” is a Yoruba expression meaning “speak up”. It became a popular slogan during Nigeria’s 2020 protests against police brutality (archived here).

Liked more than 2,000 times, the video shows men in military uniform being forced onto motorcycles by gunmen wearing turbans.

Comments below the post questioned the identity of the captured soldiers.

“This is chad army not Nigerian army (sic),” wrote one user, while another said the incident happened in “Burkina Faso, that’s where you can get those types of bikes”.

The video was published by an account called “Sorosoke Gossip” which posts lifestyle content and general news about Nigeria.

However, the video does not show Nigerian soldiers being abducted by bandits.

Clip from Mali

At the 0’54” mark in the one-minute clip, AFP Fact Check noticed a Malian military patch stitched to the sleeve of one of the abducted soldiers.

The visible part of the logo reads “FAMa”, an acronym for Forces Armees Maliennes, or the Malian army.

Comparison of the Malian armed forces logo as it appeared in an AFP photo (left) and on the sleeve of an abducted soldier in the video

Using Google Lens to conduct reverse image searches on keyframes from the video, we were led to a June 8, 2025, X post by Brant Philip, a terrorism researcher focusing on West Africa and the Middle East.

In it, he described how the Al-Qaeda-backed Jama'at Nasr al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) fighters killed scores of Malian soldiers in the Boulkessi military camp near the Burkina Faso border on June 1, 2025.

AFP had reported on the incident, saying the Malian army said it lost at least 30 soldiers but security sources and a local official said they believed the death toll to be at least 60 (archived here).

One of the videos in Philip’s posts shows 30 seconds of the clip in the false post, with the media logo of the JNIM at the top right corner (archived here).

JNIM then displays the loot and the prisoners captured, 8 days later their fate is still unknown, JNIM could keep them for a prisoner swap in the future 5/5 pic.twitter.com/KWbJeO86ly
— Brant (@brantphilip1978) June 8, 2025

Nigerian army spokesperson Onyechi Anele also told AFP Fact Check that the video in the claim “does not involve Nigerian troops”.

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