There was a facebook post by a page named Waan Ofii (a page with over 39,000 followers) on 29 November 2020 claiming that a large number of well armed sudannese force are advancing to the Ethiopian border. HaqCheck has interrogated the post and confirmed it is False due to the usage of inaccurate pictures to support the claim.
Granted, there have been armed clashes around the Ethio-Sudanese border in recent periods. On 17 December 2020 the Sudanese army claimed control of the undemarcated territories that borders Ethiopia and Sudan and It was reported on different media outlets that Sudan is deploying its military and Sudanese troops are marching towards the Ethio-Sudan border. A press briefing was given on 29 December 2020 by Dina Mufti (H.E. Ambassador Spokesperson of The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ethiopia) about the recent situation over the Ethiopian – Sudanese border and the current status on both sides. He stated that starting from 9 November 2020 there were organized attacks by the Sudanese Military Forces using heavy machine guns and armoured convoy adding agricultural products of Ethiopian farmers are looted, camps are vandalized, farmers are hampered from harvesting their own farms and a number of civilians have been murdered and wounded. The two sides issued a joint communiqué agreeing to submit reports to the leadership of the two countries and decided to start the border demarcation process as soon as possible.
However a reverse image search of the picture shows that the picture, that was used in the facebook post to support the claim that the sudanees army is advancing to Ethiopian border, was first published on 06 July 2018 by a Turkish news website called Haber7.com stating that the Yemeni army controlled some areas in the north part of the country.
Granted there has been conflict between Ethiopia and Sudan military force on Ethio-sudanese border. However HaqCheck has interrogated the post and confirmed that the picture used to support the claim that Sudanese army is advancing Ethiopia is not related to the current situation in the Ethio-sudanese border, rating the post False due to the inaccuracy of the picture.
Fact Checked by: Rehobot Ayalew
Edited by: Bruck Negash Teame
The following article is part of HaqCheck, Addis Zeybe’s multilingual fact checking running in five languages (Affan Oromo, Amharic, Somali, Tigrinya and English)
