Dutch military drill video falsely linked to Syria arrest claim
A video recently spread on the social media platform Facebook claims that Turkey had detained an Israeli agent in an operation in Syria. However, Dismislab’s fact-check found that the video is footage of a Dutch air force exercise in Rotterdam, Netherlands; not from Syria.
On September 5, a 14-second video was posted from a Facebook page named “Light News BD” (lightnewsbd.com). The video shows two helicopters flying in the sky, with several soldiers rappelling from one of them. The word “Syria” was overlaid on the video as the location, and the caption read, “Turkey has detained an Israeli agent by conducting an operation in Syria!” (verbatim).
As of the writing of this report, the video had received nearly 2,900 reactions, been shared 171 times, and been viewed more than 62,000 times.
The video was spread with the same claim from several other Facebook pages as well (1, 2).
To verify the claim, Dismislab conducted a reverse image search on keyframes of the video. This found an exact match with a video posted on August 30 from two Instagram accounts, sjoerdphoto and 11engr.spec.task. The caption of that post stated that it was the second part of an exercise conducted in Rotterdam involving two Chinook and two Cougar helicopters. In the exercise, soldiers rappelled down from the Chinook by rope, after which the helicopter departed, while soldiers from the Cougar landed on the roof of a building and entered from above. The post listed the scene’s location as IJsselmonde, Zuid-Holland (South Holland), Netherlands.
An earlier video post from the same two accounts (the first part) stated that around 6:30 am on August 27, the Dutch air force conducted a hostage-rescue exercise involving seven helicopters around an old nursing home in Rotterdam, in which four transport helicopters lowered soldiers onto the building by rope while three Apache attack helicopters monitored the surrounding area. Neither post’s caption mentioned Syria, Israel, or Turkey.
For further confirmation, a reverse image search was conducted on a video frame showing a building in the second part of the exercise. The search found that the scene was from Groene Tuin in Rotterdam-IJsselmonde.
In further verification, Dismislab compared the footage against Google Street View imagery of Groene Tuin in Rotterdam. Three specific points of match were found. First, a large billboard structure mounted on a roadside pole: a portion of this metal structure atop the pole is visible in the frame of the viral video, and Street View shows a signboard of the same shape on the same pole. Second, a streetlight is installed on the median in the middle of the road, with a small yellow-and-white signboard a short distance away; the spacing and position between the two match in both the video and the Street View image. c, whose color, height, and balcony arrangement, though blurry in the video, match exactly with the same building seen from the same angle in Street View.
In other words, the video circulated with the claim that an Israeli agent was detained in an operation in Syria is, in fact, footage of a military exercise conducted by the Dutch air force in the city of Rotterdam, Netherlands.
