A Facebook Account of a famous activist with more than 180,000 followers posted an image on May 08, 2022, reporting the Eritrean government to say that TPLF launched an attack via Badme and Rama at night but lost more than 13,000 of their soldiers. The post was shared as breaking news and there is a link attached that leads to the source of the news.
By the time this article was published, the post had more than 4,000 reactions and was shared more than 400 times.
However, HaqCheck looked into the image and rated it FALSE.
There had been an armed conflict between the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) and the Ethiopian government since Nov 3, 2020.
The Eritrean government had also been involved in the armed conflict on the side of the federal government of Ethiopia. There have been repeated calls from the international communities to withdraw its troops from the Tigray regional state.
According to BBC Amharic news on May 8, Tigray forces launched a heavy artillery attack on areas bordering Eritrea. There was a short-term military engagement.
The image was shared in this context with an intention of supporting the news that reported TPLF launched a war via Badme and Rama.
However, HaqCheck can realize through its inspection that the image is not of a recent incident and was taken from a publication made years ago. The image was taken in Mar 1999 from a website that used a picture in the article entitled “Remembering the Eritrea-Ethiopia Border War”.
The Eritrean-Ethiopian War took place from May 1998 to June 2000, between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Eritrea and Ethiopia spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the war, following an earlier 30-year conflict over Eritrea’s independence from Ethiopia, which had ended in 1991. Both states suffered the loss of tens of thousands of their citizens killed or wounded as a direct consequence of the conflict.
Therefore, HaqCheck confirmed that the image used to support the claim is old not representing the recent news report presented by the post, and rated it FALSE.
