The video shared by ABC News purporting to show Turkish forces bombarding Syrian Kurds — actually footage of a night machine gun demonstration at Knob Creek Gun Range in Kentucky — was shared on Twitter by a Turkish politician days earlier.
İbrahim Melih Gökçek, a Turkish politician in President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s governing Justice and Development Party, shared the video on Oct. 9 in a viral tweet to his more than 4 million followers with a caption in Turkish that celebrated bombs being dropped on the Kurdish People’s Protection Units, known as the YPG. “How much of the ammunition the U.S. had given to the YPG, would you say, was destroyed in one go?” the tweet said.
Turkey analyst Ilhan Tanir pointed out the tweet by Gökçek, who was mayor of the Turkish capital Ankara from 1994 to 2017, on Monday.
ABD’NİN YPG’YE VERDİĞİ MÜHİMMATIN BİR SEFERDE NE KADAR’I İMHA EDİLMİŞTİR DERSİNİZ?? pic.twitter.com/spDFTtS3qi
— İbrahim Melih Gökçek (@06melihgokcek) October 9, 2019
ABC News ran multiple segments incorrectly claiming that the “footage obtained by ABC News” showed Turkish attacks against the Kurds in a Syrian border town, though in truth it was footage from a biannual pyrotechnic event at a West Point, Kentucky, gun range in 2016 or 2017.
Aykan Erdemir, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former member of the Turkish Parliament, confirmed the translation with the Washington Examiner. “That is indeed the source of this piece of misinformation,” Erdemir said. “Melih Gökçek, the former mayor of Ankara, is notorious for being a social media troll, as well as for running disinformation campaigns.” He added, “He was infamous for spending more time trolling on social media than governing Turkey’s capital city as mayor.”
ABC said Monday, “We’ve taken down video that aired on ‘World News Tonight’ Sunday and ‘Good Morning America’ this morning that appeared to be from the Syrian border immediately after questions were raised about its accuracy.” It did not explain how they found the false footage and did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s questions about Gökçek’s tweet.
In 2017, a profile in the Economist dubbed Gökçek “Turkey’s leading conspiracy theorist,” citing an incident in which he gave foreign journalists a presentation on the country’s failed coup and claimed that “Western powers had been involved in the bloodbath, that the Obama administration had created Islamic State, and that American and Israeli seismic vessels were deliberately setting off earthquakes near Turkey’s Aegean coast.”
President Trump’s controversial decision last week to pull U.S. special forces out of northeast Syria was followed by a Turkish invasion of the northern part of the country and the movement of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces north, and there have been reports of war crimes carried out by Turkish-backed forces. Democrats and Republicans have criticized Trump for abandoning the America’s Kurdish allies. Trump threatened sanctions against high-ranking Turkish government officials on Monday and called for a ceasefire.
