Video showed militants killed by Burkinabe army, not Fulanis

Claim: A video has been shared multiple times online claiming that a group of Fulani militants were killed enroute to Nigeria by Burkinabe army.

Verdict: the claim is false. The video showed the killings of Islamist jihadists who attacked a community in Bourzanga, in the Bourzanga Department of Bam Province in northern Burkina Faso.

Full Text

A video was recently posted by various accounts on X, formerly Twitter, showing a couple of dead bodies in an arid background, the video which had a series of frames was transitioned to show guns, motorcycles, a gun truck and Armoured Personnel Carrier.

While the video has a narrator speaking in French to indicate the video was a news package by a media organization, it ended with a short interview with military officer identified as Lieutenant Colonel Didier Bamouni who is the Commandant des Operations du Theatre national, meaning Commander of the National Theatre Operations Command (COTN).

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An X user, @Nwaadaz, posted the video with a caption stating: “Burkina Faso soldiers killed scores of heavily armed Fulani bandits and terrorists crossing over to Nigeria.”

The post garnered 761,100 views with 908 comments, 4,300 retweets and 11,000 likes.

But earlier, an account with the username, @AlexIgwe15 posted with a different caption that “News flash= Burkina Faso killed scores of heavily armed bandits and terrorists crossing over to Nigeria for jihad.”

While the video was viewed by 819,000 accounts with 365 comments, 2,600 retweets and 3,900 likes, other accounts made a copy and paste post of it to go more viral.

Verification

In order to know if the video was real, a reverse image search was conducted after a screenshot was obtained from a part of the video.

The search showed that the video was first posted on an Arabic website, Tanakra media, with the name Abdala Targui on the post while accompanied with the date 2022-05-22.

While the video could not be played, another search result showed it was a website belonging to TV5 Monde, a French media platform.

The video was posted on May, 23. 2022, and had the name Guillaume Villadier alongside it.

It had the bold heading: Burkina Faso: terrorist attack repelled, followed by a short description of “The army says it has foiled an attack by jihadists against a military detachment in the north of the country. Five soldiers are said to have died. Thirty terrorists were reportedly killed.”

The video on the website, which is 76 seconds, credited RTB as the source of the clip while the caption in the video showed the location of the event was Bourzanga, Burkina Faso.

According to Wikipedia, RTB which is an initial for The Radiodiffusion Télévision du Burkina is the national broadcaster of Burkina Faso.

While the actual report could not be found, it is certain that the video emanated from Burkina Faso and the event occurred in 2022.

Like Nigeria

Facing the same fate as Nigeria, Burkina Faso has been grappling with terrorist attacks by Islamist jihadist who are affiliated to Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State terrorist group. The security situation led to two coups that toppled two different governments with the putschists pinning their actions to the inability of the governments to stop the jihadist attack.

However, in Nigeria, the farmers-herders attack has brought a new dynamic to the security situation in the country with brutal attacks blamed on Fulani pastoralists.

These attacks often result in loss of many lives with cases of kidnap-for-ransom linked to the herders.

The situation has led to ethnic profiling of the group, as such, a bout of mis and disinformation has been targeted against Fulani in the country.

Conclusion

Even though the video is true and it occurred in Burkina Faso, the corpses shown were not Fulanis but terrorist Islamist jihadist. Also, the jihadists were not on their way to Nigeria as the event is part of a wider conflict in the country which has led to killings of civilians and military personnel by the jihadists.