Juliet Buna
Around Late January, a video went viral on social media platforms and blogs. The video was accompanied with the claim that Burkina Faso soldiers have killed scores of heavily armed Fulani bandits and terrorists crossing over into Nigeria.
The video, posted by a user on X, garnered over seven hundred thousand views, triggering discussions and reactions.
An X user who uses the handle @Nwaadaz posted a one-minute video on her account, showing corpses, motorcycles, and ammunition with the caption, “Burkina Faso soldiers killed scores of heavily armed Fulani bandits and terrorists crossing over to Nigeria.”
The post has garnered about 763,000 views, over 4,400 reposts, over 900 comments and 680 bookmarks since it was posted on January 30th 2024.
A user who goes by the name Osaghae Godfrey (@Stephen18354570) on his profile said in the comments that, “This is what our soldiers are supposed to be doing but corruption everywhere”
In the comments, another user identifying himself as DY (@ideniyor) also wrote in the comment, “…bandits and terrorists crossing over to Nigeria’ We don’t share a border with Burkina Faso. If you say crossing over to Benin or Niger( or even Ghana, Togo or Ivory Coast), I won’t question it. Maybe their final destination is Nigeria but the tag is very suspicious.”
The viral video comes at a time when Nigeria is battling kidnapping for ransom amidst other security, brutal murder of kidnap victims and extrajudicial killings.
VERIFICATION
The researcher watched the video multiple times and discovered that, at about 0:43 seconds into the video, an interview surfaced with a caption of the interviewee written in French “Lieutenant-colonel Yves Didier Bamouni: Commandement de operations du Theatre National”. This translates to ‘Operations Commander of the National Theatre Operations Command.’
Armed with the name Lieutenant-colonel Yves Didier Bamouni, identified as the Operations commander of the National Theatre Operations Command, the researcher did an advanced keyword search on Google which revealed that the name had last appeared in news publications in 2022.
Further scrutiny of the video uncovered a logo on the microphone used while interviewing Bamouni with the inscription, “RTB Television.” A Google search of the inscription showed that RTB television is the short form for ‘Radiodiffusion Télévision du Burkina.’
The researcher found that RTB had a YouTube channel and went ahead to comb through the videos posted on the channel. After a long search, the original video of the attack was discovered on YouTube with the title, “Attaque de Bourzanga: le bilan en image,” translated as Bourzanga attack: the results in pictures. The video was published in May 2022 and had a duration of 2:30 minutes compared to the recirculated 1-minute version.
The translated content of the original video disclosed that it documented a counter-terrorism operation in which Burkina Faso soldiers repelled an attack, resulting in the death of 45 terrorists. The Operations commander of the National Theatre, Bamouni who was interviewed in the same clip commended the soldiers for their bravery.
The reporter’s commentary which was translated into English from French states that, “At dawn, the terrorists crossed swords due to the determination of the soldiers, after the failure to take the camp and the heavy losses suffered. There was a stampede, 45 terrorists were killed, according to the army’s report.”
“The spoils of war–a large batch of rolling stock, an armoured vehicle, armed pick-ups and around forty motorcycles. Faced with the firepower opposed to them, the terrorists get rid of everything, even their combat weapon. Several Kalashnikovs, collective weapons and ammunition were abandoned after the feat.”
The interviewee who happens to be the then operations commander of the National Theater during the interview said, “This morning at 5:30 a.m., our men showed courage and patriotism to react fiercely and determinedly to this terrorist attack. This made it possible to repel them brilliantly and above all to be able to inflict heavy losses on them and to be able to recover a lot of logistics that they had had to abandon during their rout. So it’s really a message of congratulations, of encouragement.”
The 2 minutes and 30 seconds news coverage of the attack ended with a slideshow of the dead bodies with running commentaries that: “Everything was well-coordinated, the support of the air force helped to pulverize a column of terrorists in their escape too.”
CONCLUSION
The video falsely portrayed an old incident from May 2022 as a recent operation, hence, the claim that Burkina Faso soldiers intercepted terrorists crossing into Nigeria is MISLEADING.
