Iran has created and spread false stories meant to stir discord, according to U.S. military and civilian officials. One recent fabrication, they said, is that Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani was on a peace mission when U.S. forces killed him in an airstrike. Another is that an American four-star general was killed in Africa.
On Tuesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo denied Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif’s claim that Qassem Soleimani was in Baghdad on a diplomatic visit when U.S. forces killed him on Friday.
“Zarif is a propagandist of the first order,” Pompeo said during a press conference. He referred to the foreign minister’s claim as “fundamentally false” and a piece of “Iranian propaganda.”
On Sunday, in another attempted deception, Iranian social media accounts claimed that the head of U.S. Africa Command, Gen. Stephen Townsend, was felled in an al Shabab raid that killed an American soldier and two contractors in Kenya. Townsend himself assured the public he was alive and well. “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” he wrote in a statement. Nevertheless, the reports continued to circulate.
“The Fars Agency was one originator of the message and several unverified accounts reposted,” AFRICOM spokeswoman Samantha Reho told the Washington Examiner. “The news was picked up in Iran with other isolated claims on Twitter also claiming Gen. Townsend’s death, the majority being Iran-related. However, this is unequivocally false as indicated by his statement made via Twitter.”
The fake claim, Townsend wrote in a statement, is “yet another example of the lies, propaganda and fake news” coming from “malign actors” such as al Shabab, Iran, and its proxies.
[Read more: Endless array of targets: The terrifying possibilities for an Iranian cyberattack]
Statement by U.S. Army Gen. Stephen Townsend, commander, U.S. Africa Command, in response to false claims posted on several unverified social media accounts – some with links to Iran – regarding his alleged death during yesterday’s attack by al-Shabaab in Manda Bay, Kenya: pic.twitter.com/SweZOY1YKz
— US AFRICOM (@USAfricaCommand) January 6, 2020
Iran has engaged in widespread misinformation campaigns for several years. In August 2018, Twitter suspended more than 2,000 “malicious accounts” originating from Iran. In January 2019, Facebook purged several pages, groups, and accounts that “engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior on Facebook and Instagram” which originated from Iran.
In October, Facebook once again removed dozens of Iranian Facebook accounts, pages, and Instagram accounts targeting the U.S., Latin American, and “French speaking audiences in North Africa” with misinformation, according to a Facebook blog post. In one example, a page titled “Israel deceits and lies” claimed the U.S. was the “biggest sponsor of terrorism on earth.”
In May, researchers at the University of Toronto revealed the existence of an Iranian propaganda campaign dubbed Endless Mayfly — a network of fake websites and social media accounts “used to spread false and divisive information primarily targeting Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Israel.”
These misinformation activities are not limited to Iran and are “definitely in al Shabab’s arsenal,” according to Reho.
“Of interest, al Shabab’s press release claimed 17 U.S. casualties,” she said. “We’re increasingly seeing al Shabab and malign actors employ false narratives to win support and gain influence with various audiences.”
Al Shabab consistently overstates casualty numbers from attacks in an apparent effort to gather support. For example, al Shabab leader Ahmed Omar Abu Ubeyda claimed in a nearly hourlong video that his forces killed more than 120 U.S. forces in a September attack on Baledogle Air Field in Somalia.
“The truth is, on the morning of Sept. 30, a squad of al Shabab extremists attempted to gain access to the base, 15 al Shabab fighters were killed by the Somali and U.S. forces guarding the installation, losing their lives as well as their weapons and equipment,” Navy Lt. Christina Gibson, AFRICOM’s East Africa media chief, told the Washington Examiner.
While al Shabab’s claims are exaggerated at best, AFRICOM noted that their desire to strike the U.S. is real.
“They have an intent to strike the U.S. homeland — that part of the video is very true,” AFRICOM spokesman Maj. Karl West told the Washington Examiner. “Their desire to attack the homeland is real and a concern.”
