The Russian Ministry of Defense on Tuesday posted images it said proved the US was aiding the Islamic State (IS) group in the Middle East, but social media users said they included a still from a video game.
The ministry’s official account said the black-and-white images were taken on Thursday last week near the Syria-Iraq border and provided “irrefutable proof that the US is providing cover to IS combat units.”
However, the monitor Conflict Intelligence Team, along with a number of social media users, were quick to compare one of the images with an identical still from the war game AC-130 Gunship Simulator: Special Ops Squadron.
Photo: AFP
Other images posted on Twitter appeared to be taken from videos released last year by the Iraqi Ministry of Defense, showing the Iraqi Air Force bombing militants near Fallujah, the monitor said.
Reporters were able to compare the images in the e-mailed ministry statement with the images of the video game on YouTube and confirm the resemblance.
The images were later deleted from the Russian ministry’s Twitter and Facebook accounts, and the ministry said several hours later that there had been a “mistake,” and published a different set of images, calling them “irrefutable proof” of US aid of IS.
“The defense ministry is looking into a civilian employee of one of the departments who attached photos to the defense ministry’s statement by mistake,” a statement was quoted by Russian agencies as saying.
The Russian military stood by its allegations, saying: “The refusal of US command to inflict strikes on ISIL [IS] convoys on Nov. 9 is an established fact recorded in the transcript of conversations.”
The US embassy in Moscow said in a statement on Twitter that “the US is not going to spend time on the nonsensical claims by the Russian Ministry of Defense accusing us of complicity with ISIS, using images from video games and old photos of military operations in another country. We need to focus on destroying our common enemy and not play games.”
Moscow has previously accused Washington of “pretending” to fight IS in Iraq, allowing militants into neighboring Syria where Russia and the US have backed opposing sides in the bloody conflict.
US military spokesman Colonel Ryan Dillon called the Russian statements a “barrage of lies,” saying they were “as accurate as their air campaign.”
“I certainly can’t verify, but I have seen a report that one of the pictures came from a video game. So again, that is pretty consistent with what we have seen come out of Russian MOD [Ministry of Defense] as being baseless, inaccurate and completely false,” he said.
Earlier this year, Russian media accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of passing off footage of the US military fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan as the efforts of Russia’s air force in Syria during a televised interview.
The Kremlin denied that Putin had shown the wrong footage to the US director Oliver Stone during one of a series of interviews.
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