This video shared on Twitter, claims to show an exchange of gunfire in Chad. With the recent death of Chad’s president, misinformation is expected to circulate around it.
There is a big war going on in Chad
Next is Nigeria 🇳🇬 get ready pic.twitter.com/ifzXY4tZQ2
— Biafra mission TV (@Vican87398195) April 21, 2021
We dig to establish the legitimacy of these claims.
Background
The late president Idriss Deby succumbed to wounds sustained when he had gone to visit soldiers battling rebels. He had ruled for close to three decades.
Borders were shut in the wake of his death.
On 21st April 2021, his son, General Mahamat Idriss Deby Itno, was appointed to hold office until the next elections. This has been termed as an ‘institutional coup.’ Legal experts opine that the speaker should rightfully take over the presidency before the next general elections, in line with Chad’s constitution. The military announced the dissolution of the legislative assembly and the suspension of the constitution.
Verification
To run a reverse image search on this video, we broke it down into keyframes. The first result directed our research to this Facebook post from July 27, 2020, with the same video. In this post, the location of the video is stated as being Maysan Governorate, Al-Kahla, near the border headquarters.
Al-Kahla is a district that borders Iran (see below).
A second reverse image search led to this Arabic Youtube channel with the same video, posted on 28th July, 2020. A description of this video reads, ‘in bitter fighting last night took place between Iraqi clans in the suburbs of “Maysan” with live equipment, and no reason was given for what happened.’ It ends with these hashtags: #Missan and #Iraq.
Russia Today describes the weapons used as light and medium. According to activists, the conflict was between two Arab tribes in the Al-Kahla district, which lasted an hour.
With time, claims have been circulating around this video. This particular one, posted on 3rd March 2021 claims that this video was taken in Yemen.
Verdict
This video showing exchange of gunfire was not taken in Chad, as alleged. The claims are MISLEADING.
This story was produced by Africa Uncensored in partnership with Code for Africa with support from Deutsche Welle Akademie.
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